MODERN PHILOSOPHER—GREEN OF BALLIOL.

Last night, at the Y. M C A. Hall, Pitt-street, Professor Anderson lectured, under the auspices of the Sydney University Union,...

-I wish to speak this evening of the life and work—not of a great man of action, whose deeds remain to praise him, nor of a great master of speech, whoso words still have power over our hearts—but of a philosophic teacher who lived plainly in a quiet corner of the world—if Oxford may, without offence, be called a corner—and who, in outward things, sought to be no more than a good citizen.... Thomas Hill Green, fellow and Tutor of Balliol College, and afterwards Whyte's Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Oxford, was born in the year 1836, two years after the emancipation of the slaves, two years before the formation of the Anti-Corn Law League. He died eight years ago, in 1882, the year of the fall of Gambetta and the death of Lord Beaconsfield. In his youth he seems to have been deeply interested in the work of social and political reform with the fervour of spirit of a young Radical not too careful in his choice of words, he says, " Fools talk at Oxford of its (the formation of a rifle corps) being desirable, in order that the gentry may keep down the chartists in the possible contingency of a rising. I should like to learn the use of the arm, that I might be able to desert to the people, if it came to such a pass ." He spoke at the Oxford Union in defence of the Italian Mazzini, and was one of the few in England who did their best to stem the tide of mistaken sympathy with the Southern States during the American civil war. To those who cast the blame of the war upon Republican institutions he replied, " It is not a Republic that is answerable for this war, but a slave-holding, slave-breeding, and slave burning oligarchy, on whom the curse of God and humanity rests." These are strong words, and not such as we are accustomed to hear from the lips of philosophers. But we cannot understand Green—either the man or the philosopher—unless we note the fact that first to last the main interests of his life were to be found in the regions of ethics and politics. The questions which troubled his soul were never questions of "mere speculation, " and although I have called him a modern philosopher, I might also have taken as the title of this lecture the words " A Practical Philosopher," for philosophy was to him no intellectual gymnastic merely, exercises in the " art of bewildering oneself methodically," which a mistaken criticism has identified with metaphysics, the queen of all sciences and the crown of all knowledge. There is no doubt that much of Green's early work was incompletely thought out and imperfectly expressed, but there is what Carlyle has called the "completeness of a limited mind," which finds no difficulties because it asks no questions—the completeness and self-satisfaction which are the cause of so much that is conventional in our life, insular in our thought, and parochial in our politics. Green, like every philosopher, aimed at system, at reaching a universal point of view from which he could look on things—to quote Spinoza's noble phrase, " sub specie æternitatis." But the width of the horizon never made him forget the importance of what lay nearest to him, and it is in this union of thoroughness of detail and largeness of view that we are to find the secret of his intellectual strength and independence. At school and college he was one of those clever boys who conceal their cleverness under a veil of seeming indolence and stupidity, and who make their teachers' lives a burden by refusing to submit to the routine of educational drill. He was always " a plant groaning." said one of his friends, "not a brick being moulded " " We used to say of him," writes Mr. Boyce, the author of the " American Commonwealth," " that you never talked to him without carrying away something to remember and ponder over. On everything he said or wrote there was stamped the impress of a forcible individuality, a mind that thought for itself, and whole thoughts had the rugged strength of an original character wherein grimness was mingled with humour, and practical shrewdness with a love of abstract speculation. His independence appeared even in the way he pursued his studies with abilities of the highest order, he cared comparatively little for the distinctions which the University offers, choosing rather to follow out his own line of reading in the way he judged most permanently useful, than to devote himself to the pursuit of honours and prizes." One other personal characteristic has been noticed by the author of " Robert Elsmere "—his large-hearted sympathy. It was a sympathy which showed itself as often in silence as in speech, and which, made him, as it made the late Dr. Pusey (although perhaps to a different class of men) a kind of father confessor or spiritual guide to those whom the difficulties of a time of transition had brought into mental or moral straits. It is in Green's minor writings on art, religion, and politics that we find the strongest evidence of his sympathy, where it takes the form of what for want of a better phrase we may call "intellectual detachment," a delicate appreciation of the motives of men whose thoughts and ways were far different from his, a keen insight into the nature of those social and spiritual problems which take new forms in every age, and which each age has to solve in its own way and for its own salvation. The English writers who had perhaps most influence on Green's thought were Wordsworth, Carlyle, and Maurice. The development of English philosophy from Bacon and Locke down to Mill and Spencer has been a more or less one-sided development, proceeding along narrow lines, and ending in a system which neglects if it does not altogether ignore the ideal elements in human thought and experience. It was therefore a healthy and happy instinct which led Green to find spiritual sustenance in the writings of those poets and imaginative prose writers who have held the mirror up to nature. A German critic has called Shakespeare the " philosopher of the moral order of the world," and in the writings of Wordsworth and Carlyle we have ideals of human life presented to us which are truer to the facts of life than theories which make pleasure the end of existence, and duty but a name for self-deception. Philosophy differs from poetry, not so much in inspiration and insight as in method and system, and in Green's ethical writings we have the thought of the poet translated into the language of the philosopher. He makes us see again the pathos and dignity which Wordsworth found in humble life. He speaks with the "sweet reasonableness " which made F. D. Maurice a spiritual seer among men, while his moral judgments are as vigorous and pure as those of Carlyle, without Carlyle's puritanic hardness and bitterness of spirit. Green's private life was consistent with his thought.

The author of a popular novel has told us that to lead a really simple life is reserved for those who are intellectually very high or very low in the scale. Under modern conditions of civilisation with its too often false social standard, its criminal waste and unbeautiful luxury, simplicity of life is more of a tradition than a fact, but as far as it lay in Green's power he did lead a quiet and simple life, happy in his home, faithful in his friendship, sweet and kindly in his social relations. He realised Dante's ideal of one who was in boyhood and youth, modest, temperate, and resolute, in manhood, just and generous, in age, thankful and in perfect peace with god. (Cheers ) The lecturer pointed out that Green was no recluse, but figured in public life, that he was perhaps better known in the city of Oxford than in its cloisters, that he was a member of the School Board and of the Town Council, and was deeply interested in educational, social, and political reforms, and continued —
Our concern, however, is not so much with Green, the man and citizen, the worker for particular educational, social and political reforms, as with the philosopher or teacher of truth. I have called him a " modern philosopher," and modern philosophy has a task set before it in comparison with which the labours of ancient philosophers sink into comparative insignificance. According to one definition, philosophy is the " summing up of the whole moral and intellectual life of the ego with which it deals." It is the attempt to unify knowledge on a scientific basis, to harmonise the results of the different departments of knowledge, so that the multitude of facts may be brought under law, and the multitude of laws under one law. It seeks to interpret nature, to discover and establish ideals for human life, to understand the workings of the human spirit in society, politics, art, and religion. Now this is a sufficiently comprehensive programme, and it is no discredit to philosophy if its achievements in the past and in the present fall very far short of its hopes and its aims. But ambitious though those aims may seem, they are yet natural and necessary, being simply the highest outcome of the effort of man to understand himself and the world of which he forms a part. It is not a valid objection to say that system gives place to system, and that (though such is not the case) every philosopher contradicts his predecessor, for this is only another way of stating the fact that knowledge is ever on the increase, and that all truth cannot be held in the grasp of a single system. Wisdom is justified of her children, and if we see farther than our ancestors, it is, to quote Hegel's pithy remark, because we stand upon their shoulders. The history of philosophy is not a succession of conflicting systems, but the record of a continuous development, not a series of ingenious guesses, but the story of a progressive effort on the part of man, to "know himself" and humbly "to read God's thoughts after Him." In an essay entitled "Popular Philosophy in its relation to Life" (collected works, Vol. 3), Green explains how the need for philosophy arises, and the different ways in which man attempts to satisfy that need. It begins in wonder, in the desire to understand, in the consciousness of freedom. The reason of man sets forth with unfailing faith in its own powers,

" If she be false, oh, then Heaven mocks itself !"

And the popular philosophy of any age is simply the brief abstract and chronicle of the time, the "result of the various methods, poetic, religious, metaphysical, by which man has sought to amount to himself for the world of his experience." Here, perhaps, some of you may stumble at the word "metaphysical." Metaphysical ! that which goes beyond the physical, which transcends fact, which enters into a region which common-sense does not know and science ignores. Surely, someone may object, philosophy condemns itself in being metaphysical. But, according to Green's argument, neither common-sense nor science can move a step without being metaphysical. Man is as "metaphysical when he talks of body or matter as when he talks of force—of force as when he talks of mind—of mind as when he talks of God. He goes beyond sense as much when be pronounces that he can only know things individual or phenomena, as when he claims to know substances or the universal." As philosophy passes from the market-place to the schools, man goes on more or less systematically to "theorise upon his judgments, to seek for a science of his sciences, for the unity of principle which must be in that which he knows as it is in himself." Here, in this last sentence, we have clearly stated the special aim of Green's philosophy, and, we might say, of all modern philosophy. It is to establish a science of principles and ultimately of the universal principle in living relation to all the facts of reality. Is there such a principle, knowable or known, or is the search for it an idle pursuit of a will-o'-the-wisp leading nowhere but to dissatisfaction and confusion of spirit ? Modern materialism gives one answer to this question. Idealism, as Green understood it, gives another. In order that we may understand the question more clearly, let me put it in another form. Why is the world a cosmos and not a chaos ? Materialism begins by assuming matter as the sole principle of explanation, and goes on as Herbert Spencer does, to reduce everything to matter and motion. Matter itself, however, is left unexplained, with the result that modern materialism, in its latest form, becomes a kind of mysticism, a dogmatic agnosticism according to which matter is declared to be the mystery of mysteries, the ultimate principle of all things, yet unsolved and insoluble. Now this materialistic view of the universe is one which has done much for science and will do more. The world is regarded simply as one great and complex case of the quantitative " re-distribution of matter and motion." And so far, philosophy has no quarrel with science, and no right to quarrel with it. But philosophy goes on to assert that quantitative relations are not the only relations which exist, and which have to be considered. There are differences, for example, between the inorganic and the organic, between the natural and the moral, which are most than quantitative; and on the materialistic basis it is difficult to see how those can be explained, except on the supposition that new forms are due to new creations. And since materialism cannot admit that supposition, it takes refuge as we have seen, in an agnosticism which is the negation of all philosophy—the assertion that the only possible explanation of the universe is the explanation that no explanation is possible. The materialistic theory of the universe has important practical bearing when we transfer it to the sphere of ethics and politics, for it places the ultimate object of life in material existence and identifies human well-being with pleasure; or, as Professor Huxley says —" In the cycle of phenomena presented by the life of man no more moral end is discernible than in that presented by the lives of the wolf and of the deer. "If this were true, pessimism in ethics would be the corollary of Agnosticism in science, the moral life would be a contradiction in terms, and politics a deadly game in which the stakes are the lives of men. I do not intend to describe in detail Green's system of philosophy, for that I must refer you to his works themselves, only remarking that, with the exception of his shorter essays and addresses, they are works for the philosophical student rather than for the general reader. What I wish to do is to state briefly and as clearly as I can, his position with regard to the question of knowledge and reality, in the first place, and, secondly, to state his views on ethics and politics. In the first place, then, Green admits to the fullest extent the fact of development, that all nature is a process of unfolding. But this unfolding implies an energy, which for the purposes both of science and philosophy may be best described as immanent, not external. Nature is one, continuous throughout, and must be interpreted without the aid of a mechanical and external teleology. But natural science is not, and need not on that account be materialistic. It cannot say of mind what the Frenchman said of God, "I do not need that hypothesis." Concerned with matter as science is, it is still mind concerned with matter. The thought within answers the thought without in virtue of a real spiritual kinship existing between man and nature, and this kinship cannot be explained merely by the fact of a common material basis, but only by the supposition that they are both manifestations of a spiritual principle which can only be described as thought or reason. "All truth thus partakes of the nature of revelation." We may, if we please, regard the universe as a gradual unfolding of what is latent in matter from the simplest form in which it exists up to the point in which nature "becomes conscious of itself in man." But this explanation does not by any means involve the materialistic position that the immanent energy, the creative power is material and nothing more. On the contrary, Green held that just as in the words of Tennyson, "The highest is the measure of the man, and not the Caffre, Hottentot, Malay," so the spiritual is but the "natural rightly understood." If it is true on the one hand that the interpretation of nature by the supposition of ends external to it, has been discarded, on the other hand, the recognition of ends immanent in nature, of ideas realised within it, is the basis of a scientific explanation of life." It is as absurd, therefore, to limit the universe to the material, as it is to describe science as "godless." Both nature and man are the revelation of the Thought who is the source of all their life, and the goal of their labour. The central conception which Green developes in a hundred different ways is to be found in the idea that what from one point of view may be regarded as development may from another be regarded as revelation, that the whole round of human experience is but the self-manifestation of a single eternal energy which lives in all and through all, which "spreads undivided" in knowledge, and "operates unspent" in love. "The outer world," he writes, " is no independent existence, but a means through which man's own mind is ever more communicated to him, through which the Deity, who works unseen behind it, pours the truth and love which transform his capabilities into realities." Green's argument may be termed mystical and metaphysical, but it is at any rate free from the defects of a scepticism which finds God nowhere, or a pseudo-religious agnosticism which worships it knows not what, and finds peace of mind in intellectual suicide. Let me quote a short passage from the Essay on Aristotle, a passage in which Green's style has a quiet, and, for him, unusual eloquence :—" If, in any true sense, man can commune with the spirit within him, in the same he may approach God as one who, according to the highest Christian idea, 'liveth in him.' Man, however, is slow to recognise the divinity that is within himself in his relation to the world. He will find the spiritual somewhere, but cannot believe that it is the natural rightly understood. What is under his feet and between his hands is too cheap and trivial to be the mask of eternal beauty. But half aware of the blindness of sense which he confesses, he fancies that it shows him the everyday world from which he must turn away if he would attain true vision. If a prophet tell him to do some great thing, he will obey. He will draw up ideal truth from the deep, or bring it down from heaven, but cannot behove that it is within and around him. Stretching out his hands to an unknown god, he heeds not the god in whom he lives and moves and has his being. He cries for a revelation of him, yet will not be persuaded that his hiding place is the intelligible world, and that he is incarnate in the son of man, who, through the communicated strength of thought, is lord also of that world. " From this quotation we may see that Green looked upon religion not as something different from the ordinary life of man, a kind of spiritual top-dressing to be added to a life of material prosperity and a politics of laissez faire. Rather have we in religion gathered up all the diverse and struggling notes of human effort and human aspiration, not in any narrow or imperfect ideal—that we can say lo ! here, or lo ! there, but so large and so divine that it can contain and harmonise all that helps forward the progress of man, morally, socially, intellectually, the desires of the past, the needs of the present, and the aspirations of the future. And religion takes this not as a heaven of shadows in the clouds, but as a living stream of energy in the actual present of here and to-day, which makes for righteousness as well as culture, conduct as well as creed, inspiring men to nobler deeds, and showing them how to create a higher manhood and a purer society. So understood religion is the crown and fulfilment of science and philosophy.

Arnold tells us that conduct is three-fourths of life, and the majority of readers, I suppose, are more interested in the ethical or political teaching of a philosopher than in his metaphysical speculation. The two sides, however, are very closely connected, and Green's ethical teaching is the natural and necessary result of his theory of knowledge and reality. Just as the spiritual is the "natural rightly understood," so the moral life is regarded as the " completion " of the natural or animal. The true nature of man is thus not to be found in his being subject to physical processes like the animal. "The highest is the measure of the man," and this highest does not enter into him from out of doors, although such is the theory advanced in a recent work, according to which the natural could not become the spiritual man unless a series of miracles came to his aid. In Green's view the union of the passions and reason, the natural and moral, is not some mysterious and miraculous conjunction. The opposition between them is but the accident of growth. It is because reason is already in the passions that they can be made vehicles of the spirit and servants of righteousness, or allowed to descend into a deep which even the animal cannot reach.

Further, since the spirit which makes man a self conscious being manifests itself in all men alike, if not in the same degree, morality is more than a means of saving the individual soul, and the distinction between ethics and politics merges in a higher view in which the interests of the individual and society become one and the same. Human perfection and social good are but two ways of expressing the same ideal of humanity. The individual cannot come to know himself except in relation to the world of things of which he forms a part; still less can he lead a moral life without entering into the life which he shares with his fellows. He can only save his soul as he loses it in the wider interests of the family and the State, in making himself an organ of some social purpose, a living and active member of society. Here we have a theory of the State which rises superior to the view derived partly from Rousseau and the sentimentalists of last century, and illustrated in the opportunist politics of to-day. According to the latter, the State consists on the one hand of a mass of individuals, each seeking his own pleasure and following his own gain and, on the other hand, of an organisation which interferes as little as possible with what are called the "natural laws" which govern society. The natural laws which govern society. Yes, but what are these natural laws ? We have seen already the ambiguity of the word " natural," the way by which at pleasure it can be made to cover the instincts of the brute or the noblest aspirations of the soul, and in its former sense it belongs to the theory which would, to quote Green's words, leave "nothing of the beautiful in nature or art but that which it has in common with a sweetmeat, nothing of that which is lovely and of good report in the saint or statesman but what they share with the dandy or the diner-out." Green maintains a constant polemic against individualism as a theory of ethics and politics, not, however, in favour of an artificial State control, against which the citizens have no rights. On the contrary, his idea of a true liberal programme he declared to be the "removal of all obstructions which the law can remove to the free development of English citizens." If we were asked what result we looked for from the enfranchisement of the people, we answer—That is not the present question. Untie the man's legs, and then it will be time to speculate how he will walk. The liberation of the individual from external restraints is one of the ends of society, no doubt, but only as a means to a higher end, and this higher end demands for its realisation more than a merely negative freedom. It demands, among other things the positive development of all that is involved in the idea of citizenship.

Thou shalt not covet, but tradition
Approves all forms of competition.

So runs the latest form of the tenth commandment. It may happen, however, that in the development of the idea of citizenship it may seem good to the citizens to put certain restrictions upon competition. An English manufacturer in giving evidence before a commission of the House of Commons declared that it was to the interest of the nation that there should be unlimited competition for employment, for then the price of labour would fall, and with it the cost of production. He added that he often increased his profits by turning out workmen and replacing them by apprentices. When asked what happened to the workmen, he replied, " I do not know, I left their fate to the natural laws which govern society." A good many things have happened since that evidence was given, and we now, I suppose, generally admit that it may sometimes be the duty of the citizen, for the state's sake as well as for his own sake, to interfere with the "natural" laws which govern society, or, to put it in a more familiar way, to interfere with the forms of free contract where it is impossible to maintain the reality. Now, the philosopher is not a prophet, nor is be usually even a practical politician. He has no special nostrum for the disease of the body politic, and when a social crisis takes place, there is more need of the practical than of the theoretical philosopher. One of the neatest observers and critics of political life in Australia said the other day, "The man who would be most welcome at the coming conference would be, not the homilist with a denunciation of property on his lips and the ground plan of a new Jerusalem for labour in his pocket, but the inventive genius who would discover a real modus vivendi for labour and capital, and some workable machinery for adjusting their differences before they have time to set them by the ears and make the whole social fabric totter to its base." But if he cannot find a cure for strikes, the philosophic thinker and moral teacher can, at any rate, try to discover and enunciate those conditions under which alone the idea of citizenship can be realised. Freedom of contract and Rousseau's doctrine of natural rights are not to be accepted blindly, as if they had been given from some modem Sinai. Society enforces contracts with a purpose, and if an agitation strikes at the roots of all contract, it imperils the foundation of society itself. If the humblest labourer is in danger from the tyranny of his fellows, he has a right to call the whole force of the State to his assistance. But Green lays stress upon another truth too easily ignored, that it is bad policy to "insist on maintaining the forms of free contract where the reality is impossible;" that labourers have a right (call it natural or social, or whatever you please, to protection if they "are too weak to obtain it for themselves by contract." It is on principles such as these that Green justifies the modern interference of the State with the individual in the matters of labour, health, and education, and specially in the case of land. "Our present system of great estates gives a false set to society from top to bottom. It causes exaggerated luxury at the top, flunkeyism in the middle, poverty and recklessness at the bottom. There is no remedy for this poverty and recklessness as long as those who live on the land have no real and permanent interest in it . . . It is this debased population that gluts the labour market, and constantly threatens to infect the class of superior workmen who can only secure themselves by such a system of protection as is implied in the better sort of trades-union. The evil can only be cured by such legislation as will give the agricultural labourer some real interest in the soil." It is by such legislation that the State is to be preserved, or, to use a recent phrase, "reconstructed." The reconstruction of society is, however, as meaningless a phrase as the reconstruction of the body. You can reconstruct a lifeless stationary mechanism, but not a living and progressive organism. But if we take Green's view of the State we may use the phrase, and say truly that society is gradually reconstructing itself in the enlightened hearts and consciences of its citizens who strive to realise that ideal of citizenship which (in Green's words) is the "true basis of respect for others, and without which there is no lasting social order or real morality." "Your citizenship is in heaven," said a writer of the first Christian century, and even puts that mystic aspiration into the language of sober philosophy when he bids us seek in the commonweal our own weal, the field for the exercise and the satisfaction of our true nature as moral and spiritual beings. The pillars of society—cries one of Ibsen's heroes—the spirits of truth and freedom, these are the pillars of society.

 The Sydney Morning Herald 11 October 1890. http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article13771607