322 426 94 Patten, Simon N., Can Economics furnish an Objective Standard for Morality? W. T. Harris, Scartazzini, J. A., Congruence of Sins and Punishments, Dante's Inferno (Tr.), Spence, Payton, Spectrum Spread of Sensations, . Sterrett, J. Macbride (Tr.), Hegel on Religion of Old Testament, THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THOMAS HILL GREEN'S PHILOSOPHICAL AND RELIGIOUS TEACHING.1 BY PERCIVAL CHUBB. The assertion that we live in a revolutionary age is now commonplace enough not to excite feelings of consternation among educated people. We most of us admit the fact, and, except at moments when social disturbances make it especially evident, it has ceased to disquiet us. Occasionally some persons whose recollection reaches back to the "good old days" are startled into a new sense of the change that is coming over things, or slumbering orthodoxy is awakened to the fact that beneath the surface of society there is at work a powerful leaven of skepticism and of revolt against "the established fact" in religion, science, art, and social life, a leaven of new ideas and new aspirations. Thus, when "Robert Elsmere" was published, a fresh fit of dismay seized the hosts who walk in the beaten paths of dogmatic Christianity, although the doubts which turned the hero of that novel. from his first faith have long been current coin among thinking people, and are quite familiar in the literature of the age. The novel only expressed, in a way to arrest popular attention, what is taking place all around us-the dissolution and rejection of the old view of the world. The old conception of the universe, This was one of a series of three lectures on T. H. Green's life and teaching. It was delivered to a mixed audience, and written with such an audience in view. - which gave a unity to common thought and life, is breaking up; the old sanctions of right and duty are ceasing to bind; the old order of society is called in question-ay, is openly rebelled against by masses of people driven by discontent born of a new vague feeling of injustice and of hope. The evidences of this change (especially of the social change) may be less obvious, and the sense of it less acute, in America than in Europe, where the signs of upheaval are frequent and unmistakable; but there are clearly marked signs here, too-signs visible from Europe; which is indeed only to be expected, seeing that America now forms part of that close confederation of nations which share in the influences of a single Time-Spirit. The truth is, then, if we come to realize our situation, that our lives are cast in a momentous epoch of the world's history. As Mrs. Lynn Linton wrote a year or two ago: "We are in the midst of one of the great revolutions of the world. The old faiths are losing their hold and the new are not yet rooted; the old organization of society is crumbling to pieces, and we have not even founded, still less created, the new." If that is true, a great task is imposed upon us, the task of building a new world; of finding a new faith and establishing a new social order. If we ask ourselves what is the first and the main work to be undertaken in the pursuit of this end, we shall find, I think, that it is an intellectual work. If the world is to be once more for us what it was to those of old, a cosmos, a divine unity; if life is to have a rational meaning which gives it deep significance and worth; we must go in quest of a new philosophy which shail satisfy the modern mind's requirements, and with them the requirements of the heart and imagination. As a matter of fact, we find numbers. of people who recognize that this is the task of the age. Some stand appalled before it, not knowing where to turn for help. Others seem to get a certain satisfaction either in Agnosticism or in a gospel of Culture which counsels them to seek consolation and delight in a nosegay of ideas (if I may be allowed the phrase) culled from "the best that has been thought and said in the world." There is a strenuous and sincere Agnosticism which commands all our respect and requires our consideration. It is, in the view of the present writer, the consequence of taking a wrong turn in the road of thought and getting into a cul-de-sac. But the cul-de-sac is genuine, and we sympathize with the baffled pilgrim. There is, however, another and more prevalent kind of Agnosticism which is the mere outcome of intellectual indolence; and that is simply deplorable. As for Culture, its nosegay may be pretty, but the flowers are separate and are apt to fall to pieces at any moment; moreover, plucked from the shrubs which bore them, they are without the sap of life and must, sooner or later, fade and droop. Now, no man has felt the stern necessity for a sound and thorough philosophy as the basis of a worthy life and a means of deliverance from our present dangers, more than the late Professor Green. No one has appreciated more keenly than he the evils that result from contentment with that fortuitous concourse of ideas, miscalled Culture, which affects to do duty for a philosophy. No one has seen more clearly the hopelessness and, as he believed, the error of the modern Agnosticism which results in an intellectual deadlock. It seemed to him that, without some rationali. e., consistent-view of the world and of human life, men tended more and more to be ruled by personal taste and inclination, and to be driven by the pressure of circumstances, instead of resisting circumstances with a will that is firm in its allegiance to principle. In this tendency he saw the seeds of modern decadence; and he attributed to it the disappointing results of so many originally hopeful movements of reform in the past. For him the only safety lay in the domination of our spiritual life by our intellect, in the subjection of feeling and impulse to reason and will. It is a notable saying of his that "It is the true Nemesis of human life that any spiritual impulse not accompanied by clear and comprehensive thought is enslaved by its own realization." This saying gives the key to his work as a philosopher; and it will be readily seen how unsatisfactory to him were some of the most marked tendencies of modern life. The fashionable rejection of philosophy seemed to him disastrous. In his earliest essays we find him tilting against the great enemies of integrity in our personal and national life-divided, unharmonized knowledge and detached thinking. He says: "To be free, to understand, to enjoy, is the claim of the modern spirit. It is a claim which is constantly becoming more articulate and conscious of itself. At the same time it is constantly finding expression in practical contradictions of thought, which rhetoric, itself the child of the claim, is always at hand to manipulate, to entangle, to weave into the feelings and interests of men. The result is the diffusion over society of a state of mind analogous to that which we sometimes experience when discussion has carried us a long way from our principles and we find ourselves maintaining inconsistent propositions.' Similarly, in the Introduction to his latest work, the "Prolegomena to Ethics," we find him, with the Culture gospel of Matthew Arnold in his mind, insisting on the unsatisfactoriness of the position in which men allow certain ideas, derived from poetry and philosophy, "to a joint lodgment in their minds, with inferences from popularized science, which do not admit of being reconciled with these deeper convictions in any logical system of beliefs." In this way it is Green's immediate significance as a philosopher that his philosophy is brought into close relation with the needs and insufficiencies of the age. The preceding quotations make his position clear. On the one hand he sees that a mind, divided against itself because it has no co-ordinating creed or philosophy is necessarily weak and ineffectual. On the other hand, he sees that, so far as there is a popular philosophy--the philosophy of scientific Materialism and Agnosticism, of which Mr. Herbert Spencer is the most distinguished exponent-it is a very slough of despond and confusion. It is this philosophy that he has constantly in his mind, and that acts as a foil to his own views. The further value of Green's philosophical teaching, in relation to that work of reconstruction which lies before us, is that it branches out, as by a natural growth, to the domains of religion, ethics, and politics. These are all co-ordinated in one organic view of life. I venture to think, then, that Green is one of the men who has a message for the new time, and that he will be found to be one of our deliverers in this present intellectual and moral crisis. In order to understand Green's philosophical work, it will be necessary to take a short survey of the development of English thought during the last two centuries. This is all the more necessary, because his own work was based on a minute inquiry |