The principle of individuality in the philosophy of Thomas Hill Green

Preface

In this monograph no attempt will be made to deal with Green's ethical or political theories, the purpose being rather to examine and define the deeper lying metaphysical principles of which his ethical and political philosophy is but the expression. Such an aim is in keeping with the spirit of Green's philosophy, for he himself tells us that a metaphysic of morals is "the proper foundation, though not the whole, of every system of Ethics" {Prolegomena to Ethics, sec. 2.) It is common enough to deny that there is any vital connection between ethics and metaphysics, and this opinion was probably just as common when Green wrote as it is today, as the Introduction to the Prolegomena clearly shows. With the arguments again which may be brought in support of either side of this question the present study is not concerned; for however such a controversy may eventuate in the abstract, we are not at liberty when we discuss Green's ethics to neglect his own view of the matter. For if" he believed, as he most certainly did, that his ethics was intimately and organically bound up with his metaphysics, we would be greatly increasing our chances of failure to understand his ethics by a refusal to study his metaphysics. A lack of deep appreciation of the metaphysics has, I believe, vitiated a great deal of the criticism of the later, and perhaps more dogmatic parts of Green's system. Taking the position that he did, he had a right to assume that his reader would become familiar with his metaphysics and, in case of a disagreement, that the discussion would embrace a consideration of metaphysical principles rather than confine itself to a disputation about rules of morality from the uncritical or factual standpoint of ordinary life. It is, therefore, of the greatest importance for the understanding of Green's philosophy that we first become acquainted with the principles of his metaphysics.

Green's social theory, which includes the application of his philosophy to moral, political, educational, or religious situa-

iii

IV PREFACE.

tions, reveals throughout a philosophic or speculative motive. He was not one of those who seem content to live from hand to mouth in philosophy, lost in the flux of experience as it comes; but he was above all anxious to 'see life steadily and to see it whole.' A fragment was never to him a mere piece of something or other to be accepted unreflectingly, but it was a challenge which set his mind to reconstruct the concrete whole of which it is a part, and it led him ultimately to a view of the whole universe. It is this motive in his philosophy with which we are here concerned. What did he do toward exhibiting the unity and variety of experience? (This is, of course, to be distinguished from the question sometimes asked, Is there any unity in experience? If there is to be any immediate datum of consciousness the unity is unquestionably as immediate as the variety.) In a word, the question is not, Is the world one or many? But, How is the world one and many? This question is as old as the history of philosophy and has been uniformly looked upon as a question of a fundamental kind. "If I find any man," says Socrates, "who is able to see unity and plurality in nature, him I follow and walk in his steps as if he were a God" (Phaedrus, 266.) The purpose of the following discussion, therefore, is to set forth Green's metaphysic of the one and the many, as given in his treatment of the individual, introducing only as much illustrative material and application as is necessary to hold fast the central idea.

The individual may be defined at once as the concrete embodiment of particularity and universality, that is to say, the individual is both one and many. We shall follow Green's attempt to explain the category of individuality and to apply it successively to the object, the subject, and finally, to the universe as a whole, conceived as a subject-object complex. As a basis for such a study it seemed wise to begin with an examination of the problem and method of Green's metaphysics in order to' dispel a misunderstanding regarding his position on these points which has, I think, stood in the way of a correct interpretation of his entire system of philosophy.

I am grateful to Professor J. E. Creighton and to other mem-

PREFACE. V

bers of the faculty of the Sage School of Philosophy for criticism

and guidance in the preparation of this monograph, and to my

proof.

Northampton, Mass., August 3, 1914.

Chapter I. The Problem And Method Of Green's Metaphysics

"About Locke, as about every other philosopher, the essential questions are, What was his problem, and what was his method?" 1 Thus, at the beginning of his introduction to Hume, Green expressed his idea of the true way to study a system of philosophy. Three years later he wrote: "When we understand what the questions exactly were that a philosopher put to himself, and how he came to put them as he did, we are more than half-way towards understanding the answer." 2 In undertaking a serious examination of a fundamental conception of Green's philosophy we can do no better than to follow the spirit expressed in the above words, for if these statements are true regarding any philosophy they are peculiarly true of Green's. He was a pioneer in England of the form of thought commonly known as German Idealism. He broke away from the common-sense method of English Empiricism and substituted for it a logical criticism almost if not quite as subtle and as unusual as that of Hegel himself. His thought was a reaction against the dominant empiricism of his day and especially against the loose and hasty application of biological theory to metaphysical and ethical questions. Although his treatment of evolution shows that he grasped the real significance as well as the limita-

1 Works of Thomas Hill Green, edited by R. L. Nettleship. Longmans, Green, and Co., 1885. Vol. I, p. 5, (Hereafter referred to merely by volume and page.) The essay in which the quotation occurs was first published in 1874 as an introduction to Hume's Treatise of Human Nature in an edition of Hume's Works edited by T. H. Green and T. H. Grose.

I tions of Darwin's results, we must remember that he wrote in reply to evolutionary theory without the help of the great body of literature to which the modern writer can appeal. 1 The theory, moreover, was then in its crudest form and not so free from careless generalizations as it is today. Green's language seems to be at times unsympathetic or even hostile toward the evolutionary method and results partly because we forget the distinction between early and more recent forms of evolutionary theory ; but largely because the reader does not understand what the questions exactly were that Green "put to himself and how he came to put them as he did." It is, therefore, fitting to begin with an examination of his problem and his method. 2

The form as well as the content of Green's question resembles that of Kant, 'How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?' Green declares that the primary question of metaphysics is, 'How is knowledge possible?' In explanation he adds: "It is not to be confused with a question upon which metaphysicians are sometimes supposed to waste their time — ' Is knowledge possible?' . . . Metaphysic is no such superfluous labor. . . . It is simply the consideration of what is implied in the fact of our knowing or coming to know a world, or, conversely, in the fact of there being a world for us to know." z He believes, moreover, that this is the universal problem of metaphysics, common not only to the German Idealists, but to Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. He complains that the English philosophers of his day, unlike Kant, had been unable to read the "movement of speculation, which issued in Hume's Treatise" 4 with an understanding mind; so that, instead of "putting the metaphysical problem in its true and distinctive form," they had lost it outright and were even congratulating themselves on being "wise enough to drop metaphysics betimes and occupy themselves with psychology." 5

1 He recognized in evolutionary theory a "valuable formulation of our knowledge of animal life," but he also saw clearly that it was not fitted for "the explanation of knowledge." I, 385.

2 Cf. Edward Caird, " Idealism and the Theory of Knowledge," Queen's Quarterly, XII, 105.

6 Ibid. What he understood by psychology and why he rejected the psychological method will appear as we proceed.

In an age which was flooded with 'scientific facts' from all sides and in which the sciences seemed to be vying with each other in gathering data, Green did not hope to discover any new fact. Science was everywhere asking, 'What are the facts?'; he was asking, ' What is a fact? ' For the rational statement of his problem it was by no means necessary that the deliverances of physics, or biology, or psychology should be true, but merely that they should claim to be true. His interest, like Kant's, was to discover the rational basis of science or knowledge ; and toward the understanding of this problem the specific results of any particular science could contribute but little. The matter of first importance for Green was not to prove or disprove this or that scientific law, but to show that scientific law is possible only on certain assumptions regarding the nature of reality in general. In keeping with this he seldom or never questions the results of science as such. 1 He was wise enough to accept its results as infinitely better than any a priori guesswork of philosophers and theologians. 2 Science, however, is totally distinct from phi- * losophy, in this: it "takes for granted just what metaphysic, as a theory of knowledge, seeks to explain." 3 The question at issue between metaphysic and a science should not be looked upon as one "between two coordinate sciences, as if a theory of the human body were claiming also to be a theory of the human soul, and the theory of the soul were resisting the aggression. The question is, whether the conceptions which all the departmental sciences alike presuppose shall have an account given of them or no." 4

In opposition to the tendencies of his own day to treat psychology as a universal science which could answer all questions, Green lays great emphasis on the distinction between metaphysics and psychology. The problem of all critical philosophy is to search out the foundations of knowledge, whereas psy-

(^To be sure he protested against advancing the results of science in answer to metaphysical or ethical questions.

8 1, 164. Green always treats psychology as one of the sciences and consequently refers to it along with others in the quotation. Cf. I, 373.

chology deals with the facts of individual psychic experience. Psychology can hardly be said to raise general questions of I validity and much less to answer them. The psychologist treats mind as his field of investigation in much the same way as the botanist deals with plants. Both seek facts which may be observed and tabulated, without being in the least concerned to know what the existence of facts implies regarding the nature of the whole of reality. 1 Green did not question the facts of psychology (which he understood to be concerned with the phenomena of the mental life) any more than he questioned the facts of biology; for his was a further question concerning the presuppositions of any science which deals with facts. He does not, for instance, suppose that the teaching of "our best psychologists" that the knowledge we possess "results from the production of feeling in us by the external world" is false. 2 It is especially noteworthy that he does not attempt to show that knowledge has had a miraculous birth or to dispute its relation to the animal organism and the physical order. The following quotation will make clear his position on this point: "If the alternative really lay between experience and ready-made unaccountable intuition as sources of knowledge; if the point in dispute were whether theories about nature should be tested merely by logical consistency or experimentally verified — whether subjective beliefs should be put in the place of objective facts, or brought into correspondence with them — the experientialists would be entitled to all the self-confidence which they show. That the question does not so stand, they can scarcely be expected to admit till their opponents constrain them to it; and in England hitherto, whether from want of penetration or under the influence of a theological arriere pensee, their opponents have virtually put the antithesis in the form which yields the experi-

1 See Green's distinction between Kant's problem and that of psychology, I, 384. The literature on the meaning of Kant's problem is far too extensive and well known to require citations here, but it may be worth while to refer to two characteristic illustrations of it. Andrew Seth, "Philosophy as Criticism of Categories," found in the volume, Essays in Philosophical Criticism, edited by Andrew Seth and R. B. Haldane (1883); Edw. Caird, The Critical Philosophy of Kant, Vol. I, Chapter 1.

entialists such an easy triumph. Both sides are in fact beating the air till they meet upon the question, What constitutes the experience which it is agreed is to us the sole conveyance of knowledge? What do we mean by a fact? In what lies the objectivity of the objective world?" 1

In spite of the care which Green has taken to distinguish his question from that of the sciences in general and from that of the science of psychology in particular there has been a singular confusion regarding the nature of his problem. The real question, What are the implications of the possibility of knowledge? is taken to mean, What are the psychological facts of my individual consciousness? 2 As a consequence of this misapprehension of his problem some of Green's critics persist in an attempt to convict him of wrong conclusions regarding the latter question, although we have no evidence that he undertook or cared to answer it. It is quite surprising to find a recent writer begin his criticism by classing Green as one of the "modern psychologists." 3 Nor is this mistake confined, as might be supposed, to those who reject Green's general conclusions. Mr. W. H. Fairbrother, a sympathetic and enthusiastic interpreter of Green's philosophy, has fallen into the same strange misrepresentation of its problem and method. He declares that the "two primary questions" of Green's metaphysics are, "What are the facts of my own individual consciousness?" and, "What is the simplest explanation I can give of the origin of these facts? " 4 It would be difficult to formulate two questions less representative of the spirit and purpose of Green, since he is neither directly interested in the facts of his own individual consciousness nor in the origin of those facts.

"The basis of practice," writes one of Green's critics, "can hardly be disclosed by a study of cognition. Still less can this be looked for when knowledge is interpreted with neglect of its

2 Considering the number of times that this distinction of questions has been made since the publication of the Critique of Pure Reason it ought to be uncalled for now in a discussion of critical idealism. That it is not uncalled for cannot better be illustrated than by these criticisms of Green.

8 G. S. Fullerton, Psychological Review, Vol. IV, p. 8.

* The Philosophy of Thomas Hill Green (1896), p. 14.

dynamic and purposive implications." 1 Would the author of the Prolegomena to Ethics recognize his metaphysics when described as "a study of cognition?" This phrase taken by itself, would suggest that Green is supposed to be trying to found ethics on a psychological introspection of his own mind rather than upon a critical examination of the logical implications of knowledge. But the last sentence of the quotation quite clearly indicates the fundamental misinterpretation of Green's question upon which Mr. Stmt's criticism proceeds. In this, as in the general context, the critic seems tacitly to identify a study of cognition with an analysis of knowledge. And this becomes still more apparent when we read : "The idols that beset Green's philosophy are, . . . Intellectualism and Subjectivism." 2 Now the charge of intellectualism, although it is not directly concerned in the present discussion, is particularly inappropriate to Green's philosophy. A careful examination of the Prolegomena to Ethics will show that no writer in modern times has had a firmer grasp of the "dynamic and purposive implications of knowledge" than has Green. The charge of subjectivism, however, more clearly illustrates the almost total misapprehension of Green's problem and method. Mr. Sturt seems to believe that Green was trying to spin the world out of his own abstract subjective experience; but Green has actually forestalled this charge by his clear distinction between the psychological subject, with which he is not directly concerned, and the subject of knowledge, with which he is concerned. "It is important not to confuse the relation of subject and object," he writes, "with the relation of matter to the psychical organism. It is a common delusion that one sort of phenomena are 'subjective,' another 'objective.' In truth, 'mental phenomena' are just as objective as any, phenomena of matter just as subjective as any. If mind and matter = two orders of phenomena, they do not = subject and object, for subject and object are correlative factors of everything as known." 3 Here as elsewhere he insists that he is not concerned with the individual processes of knowing, but with "what

is implied in the fact of our knowing," or in the "fact of there being a world for us to know." Not only did he protest emphatically against substituting subjective whims and fancies for objective facts, as will later appear in the discussion of consciousness, but he approached the whole problem of philosophy with a particularly strong aversion for a subjective method. Subjectivism, in whatever form it appeared, brought forth his determined opposition, but it was the subjectivism of the traditional method of English philosophy upon which his attack was most persistent and effective.

Other writers who do not explicitly label Green as a psychologist, nevertheless, treat him as such. 1 The radical distinction which he makes between the problem of metaphysics and that of psychology seems to be forgotten. If the distinction is unwarranted the critic should devote himself to the task of showing that there are no intelligible questions beyond those which psychology raises; if it is warranted it should be maintained. The distinction in question may or may not be permanently valid. It is at least permanently significant in an account of Green's philosophy. The psychology of his day claimed to be one of the natural sciences and to have adopted the problems and methods of natural science. Green was willing that psychology should be accepted at its own estimate and persistently treated it in that light. As one of the natural sciences he believed that it could properly raise and answer questions of analysis, origin, or other relation. The question which Green raised, on the other hand, is consistently called metaphysical and is sharply and emphatically differentiated from scientific problems in general and from psychological problems in particular. Effective criticism of Green's philosophy must be metaphysical and must at least discuss his statement of the problem of metaphysics. Since the only problem he tries to answer is a metaphysical one it is manifestly unfair and unconvincing to treat him explicitly or implicitly as a psychologist.

1 Cf. G. F. Stout's attempt to refute a phase of Green's metaphysics by introspective analysis, in Mind, N. S. IX, p. iff.; A. J. Balfour, Mind, IX, 86 ff.; A. E. Taylor, The Problem of Conduct, p. 71 ff. The content of these objections is not necessarily introduced here. I merely refer to them as fair examples of attempts to criticize Green from the psychological viewpoint.

Green fully believed that the problem he had chosen was one common to all modern philosophy. In particular, he had satisfied himself that English empiricism had been groping after a statement of the same problem ; but he was equally certain that his method differed completely from that of his fellow countrymen. The method which he attributed to them was the psychological, by which he meant essentially what psychologists mean today by introspection. That the workings of the mind could be made an object of knowledge Green did not question. Psychology, he writes, has "a region where it is truly independent of metaphysical questions, . . . but this region . . . has definite limits." 1 On the other hand, the question confronting the metaphysician, and which the psychologists cannot evade, "concerns the object of knowledge, and must be answered before the subjective process can be investigated." 2 The question, "What are the conditions implied in the existence of such an object?" demands an answer as a "necessary prolegomenon to all valid psychology." 3

In the Introduction to Hume's Treatise of Human Nature the author takes great pains to point out the fallacy involved in attempting to solve a metaphysical problem by looking within one's 'own breast.' Locke's plan of looking within his own mind to see "how it wrought," however valuable for certain purposes, is quite inadequate as a method of metaphysics. 4 Indeed, the whole of the Introduction might be looked upon as an attempt to show that Hume's scepticism was the necessary outcome of adopting this method of 'looking within.' 5 The weakness inherent in British empiricism was due, according to Green, not to the fact that it had asked the wrong questions, but that it had taken a hopeless method of answering them. There is, indeed, no contention more often advanced throughout his writings than that it is absolutely futile to try to answer an ultimate metaphysical question by appeal to particular facts. This general proposition applies as well in the case of psychical

1 1, 375-

2 1, 377. Marginal note.

6 1, 6.

facts as in the case of physical facts. No enumeration of the subjective facts of consciousness can explain the consciousness of facts, any more than an enumeration of objective facts can explain or unify the world. It is no answer to the question, How is experience of facts possible? to point out the facts of experience. We inquire into the implications of the existence of fact and are presented with an alphabetical catalogue of facts. We ask for bread and receive a stone.

The method which Green proposed to use was critical rather than empirical. That is, it was essentially the method of Kant; although Green objected to the use of the term 'transcendental,' 1 probably because of the danger of being misunderstood. Kant's use of the term had justly laid him open to severe criticism. There is something in this terminology which smacks of the 'extra-experiential,' and it was precisely this error which Green was seeking to avoid. His object was to discover an immanent principle of organization within experience, not a world of 'things by themselves' beyond it. Kant sought the a priori conditions of experience ; Green the logical implications of experience. The difference in terminology, however, should not blind us to the similarity of the two methods. Both philosophers are really interested in getting beyond the mere immediacy of a given experience to what Kant would call a 'synthetic judgment.' How shall we have any significant judgment unless we can, in some sense, get beyond a mere 'given'? This question came to both Kant and Green with great force; but on the other hand, it is now safe to say that neither Kant nor Green was really hunting for that chimera — a super-experiential reality. 2 Green was well aware that Kant's world of ' things by themselves' was an impossible and absurd abstraction, but he believed that such a world was not the necessary result of the Kantian method. The world of bare things was a mere aberration due to the formal way in which Kant conceived the mind, not the

* H. Sidgwick, Mind, N. S.. X, 18 f.

1 Unless we understand experience in its narrowest psychological significance. Cf. "Mr. Lewes' Account of Experience," Green's Works, I, 442 ff. The "only valid idealism " is defined in this essay as " that idealism which trusts, not to a guess about what is beyond experience, but to analysis of what is within it." Ibid., 449.

essential outcome of the critical method. Indeed, so far is this from being the true outcome, that it is to the critical method alone that we must look for the correction of the fallacy involved. Kant, as Green thought, had discovered the only possible basis from which the real futility of a search for a world beyond possible experience could be shown. Green, therefore, accepted Kant's attempt to analyze experience or knowledge as a final statement of the method of philosophy; but it was this very method which led him to abandon 'things-in-themselves,' together with Kant's formal schema of the categories and faculties. Before we can proceed to Green's analysis, however, we must seek an answer to the question, What did he mean by the experience which he proposes to examine?

It is doubtful whether any philosopher ever imagined himself to be dealing with anything else but experience, yet the word is subject to most extravagant and ambiguous use. 1 The issue became especially clouded when the British philosophers took the word as a shiboleth of true philosophy and as mark of distinction from continental thought, which was falsely supposed to be dealing with some other world. But as Green says, "It is not those, we know, who cry Lord, Lord! the loudest, that enter into the kingdom of heaven, nor does the strongest assertion of our dependence on experience imply a true insight into its nature." 2 Any experience which is to yield knowledge "must not be merely an experience in the sense in which, for instance, a plant might be said to experience a succession of atmospheric or chemical changes, or in which we ourselves pass through a definite physical experience during sleep or in respect of the numberless events which affect us but of which we are not aware. Such an experience may no doubt gradually alter to any extent the mode in which the physical organism reacts upon the stimulus. It may be the condition of its becoming organic to intellectual processes, but between it and experience of the kind which is to yield a knowledge of nature there is a chasm which no one, except by confusion of speech, has attempted to fill. Or to speak more precisely, between the two senses of experience there

1 Cf. R. B. C. Johnson, Princeton Studies, Vol. I, No. 3, p. 10.

PROBLEM AND METHOD OF GREEN'S METAPHYSICS. II

is all the difference that exists between change and consciousness of change. Experience of the latter kind must be experience of matters of fact recognized as such. . . . For this reason an intelligent experience, or experience as the source of knowledge, can neither be constituted by events of which it is the experience, nor be a product of them." 1 Passages of this kind, which are not uncommon in Green's writings, help to throw light on the question, How is experience possible? He means significant experience, that is, "matters of fact recognized as such." The experience, therefore, of which Green is seeking a rational account, is conscious or intelligent experience; but conscious experience is experience of an object by a subject. Such an experience, not constituted by feelings (psychical events) but by judgments, 2 and therefore, necessarily involving subject and object, is the kind of experience in which "the object has no real existence apart from the subject any more than the subject apart from the object." 3

While this definition of experience in terms of the subject-object complex does not distinguish Green from other idealistic philosophers, his method of analyzing the complex is more peculiarly his own. Although he believes that a careful examination of either one of these two distinguishable but inseparable factors within experience would necessarily involve and reveal the nature of the other, he prefers to begin by a study of the object. "A theory of consciousness, to be worth anything," he says, "must rest on an examination of objects." 4 This point is of the utmost importance and is a distinguishing characteristic of Green's idealism. In a suggestive review of John Caird's Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, which Green wrote a little less than two years before his death, he states his objection to Hegelianism in unambiguous language. Admitting that Hegel's conclusion is "the last word of philosophy," 5 he still feels much dissatisfied with the method which Hegel used in

1 Prolegomena to Ethics, sections 15, 16.

obtaining it. He has an " uneasy sense that it is little likely to carry conviction." "When we think out the problem left by previous inquirers," he continues, "we find ourselves led to it [i. e., Hegel's doctrine] by an intellectual necessity; but on reflection we become aware that we are Hegelian, so to speak, with only a fraction of our thoughts — on the Sundays of speculation, not on the weekdays of ordinary thought." 1 He concludes that Hegel's results need to be "put in a form which will command some general acceptance," for "we suspect that all along Hegel's method has stood in the way of an acceptance of his conclusion, because he, at any rate, seemed to arrive at his conclusion as to the spirituality of the world, not by interrogating the world, but by interrogating his own thoughts" 2