into the ancestry of latter-day thought in England. He went back to the first founders of modern speculation, Locke and Berkeley and Hume; and his earliest important production was his lengthy Introduction to the works of Hume-perhaps the most subtile piece of criticism which has appeared in recent times. Here he discovered the parentage of our modern errors. He found that our philosophy was, as to its first principles, just where Hume had left it. The wave of philosophical thought which had gathered in Germany had for the most part gone over its head. Worse still, our English thinkers did not seem to see what Kant saw with alarm-that with Hume philosophy had been brought to an impasse. That was just the reason why it had made no further step forward in England; it had accepted Hume's which are Locke's--postulates, and had necessarily been barren of any noteworthy progeny.

At the beginning of this century Carlyle, touched with the emancipating spirit of German thought, which had extricated itself somewhat from the Humean coils, found philosophy in England a "mud-philosophy"; and poured his fierce but necessarily ineffectual anathemas upon it—ineffectual, that is, except in so far as they kept alive the stubborn but unreasoning spirit of revolt against the mud-philosophers. His rebellion typifies the history of spiritual life in England since Hume, which has been largely one of opposition between professional philosophy and some of the chief forces in literature. If we call over the roll of philosophers we shall see that for the most part they have been the descendants of Hume— all with a marked family likeness. Scotland has produced a few recalcitrants-Reid, Stewart, Hamilton; but they were not big enough to turn the current, and indeed had not "the root of the matter in them," to use a favorite expression of Green's. Tracing the main line of descent in England, we find that Hume begat Hartley, Hartley begat James Mill and Bentham, who begat John Stuart Mill; but here the type undergoes a little modification through alliance with another family-the physical scientists. Darwin and the Evolutionists appear and prove immensely attractive to the philosophers. The union produces the full-fledged scientific, materialistic philosophy of Lewes and Spencer and their adjutants. Thanks to the wonderful clew to history which evolution has undoubtedly supplied, the marvellous vistas of time and

space and change which science has disclosed, and even more to the materialistic, commercial tendencies of the age-thanks to these, I say, the philosophy of evolution, as it is styled, has carried all before it, and Herbert Spencer is now the ruling light in the philosophic firmament. But already his beams have begun to pale by the rising of a new and larger light.

We must note, however, before passing on to investigate this new and hopeful illuminant, that the philosophers have not, as I suggested, had it all their own way. Arrayed against them all along has been a line of poets and writers whose teachings have been the negation of the ruling philosophy. At the end of last century and the beginning of this, we have Wordsworth and Coleridge and Shelley giving song to the old faith in a spiritual world and a spiritual presence in the heart of man and nature. German influences, although they do not touch the hard-hearted philosophers, touch the littérateurs. Kant and Fichte and Schelling and Goethe and Schiller have their disciples in Coleridge, De Quincey, Maurice, Carlyle, and others. There are frequent revolts and reactions. The finer spirits at Oxford get comfort in the peace and charm of Catholicism, and give us the Tractarian Movement. Maurice and Kingsley rebel in the Church. Emerson conveys

across the ocean the message of Transcendentalism. Tennyson and Browning hand on the fire of the former faith in God and the future. A fierce Protestantism against Materialism in thought and life utters its voice in Ruskin. Still, all these influences have been overborne to a dangerous degree by the dead weight of modern materialistic civilization, which naturally finds congenial sustenance in a materialistic philosophy. That philosophy is separatistic and disintegrating in its influence; and, as I have remarked, has not, in Green's opinion, any power of reconstruction in it. We must replace it by a new philosophy and a new attitude toward the facts of life-an attitude similar to that of the poets and religious teachers, but backed by a clearly reasoned and consistent creed.

The main lines of this new philosophy Green finds marked out by Kant and the post-Kantians. And I should have noticed, as one of the saving influences at work in our midst, the ascendency which this philosophy has already gained here and there-in Scotland, for instance, where Kant and Fichte and Hegel have found

champions like Dr. Stirling and Dr. Smith the translator of Fichte. But the growth of this influence has really been contemporaneous with, and not anterior to, Green's career. Green, then, builds on Kant and his successors, Fichte and Hegel; but he revises their results, goes back once more to the main line of English development, and gives his work an English impress and a modern application.

We are now in a position to pass in review the leading tenets of Green's philosophy. It will be convenient if in our attempt to do so we set out, as he himself does, by showing the inadequacy and inconsistency of that which now prevails among us in England. This philosophy is, as I have just observed, a combination of the sensationalism of Hume and the naturalism of the scientific evolutionists. The one supplies an answer to the question, What is experience? or What is involved in knowledge? The other professes to answer the questions, What is man? What is his relation. to Nature? How has he come to be what he is?

Now Hume, carrying with unerring logic the premises of Locke to their last conclusion, had arrived at the result that all knowledge is reducible to sensations. He said that all the simple elements of knowledge come to us through the senses, and all that we know consists in combinations and recombinations of these elements of sense. These combinations and recombinations, constituting ideas of varying complexity, are not the work of an arranging mind, but result from the tendency of the sensations to recur in their original order and to cohere in certain groups. The original sensations were called impressions; their reproductions—— fainter than the originals-were called ideas. The idea of a horse, for example, is nothing but a reassemblage or faint reproduction in the mind of the complex of sensations which have constituted our manifold experiences of that animal. The sensations which in their union constitute its mane, associate themselves with the sensations which in their union constitute its tail; and so on with the rest of the beast. It all comes of ideas having an inexplicable habit of forming regular associations. That is all we can say of them. They do not inhere in anything, and may upset our expectations at any moment. Thus cause and effect are reducible to that orderliness of sequence in which certain sensations usually follow one another.

This doctrine of the association of ideas is a wonderful solvent; it not only dissolves cause and effect, but it dissolves the idea of a mind, an Ego, an external world. If ideas make their associations on their own responsibility, there is obviously no need of a master of ceremonies, a director, or a referee. If a thing and a sensation are one and the same, then we may dispense with the unnecessary assumption of an external world. The curious tendency of these assumptions of cause and effect, of a self, of an external world, to form themselves, Hume never explained. In short, the whole philosophy is a felo de se. For, let us observe, the very initial distinction of an original sensation from its reproduction necessitates a distinguishing and recognizing mind; it implies memory; it implies judgment. The idea of orderliness in association or in sequence implies the same. Nevertheless, it is a fact that this contradictory philosophy has been good enough for the bulk of English philosophers since Hume; and the same sensationalism and the same associationism survive in the materialistic philosophy advocated by men of no less eminence than Mr. Herbert Spencer. The theory of evolution has made the way much clearer for them. It did seem not a little difficult to account for the elaboration through a single person's experience of such a wonderfully complex system of associations as that which the man of to-day possesses. Evolution explains that it is not the work of the individual, but has been the work of ages. Man had a considerable number of associations stored up when he first appeared on the earth; his sub-human ancestors, possessed of the power of hereditary transmission, left them as their legacy to him. In short, the slowly accumulated effects of experience have been handed on from generation to generation through a purely physical agency-the modification of bodily structure; and so we no longer need to assume a priori forms of thought to account for elementary conceptions. Mr. Spencer has a more elaborate argument in support of his sensationalism; but it is at bottom the same old contention that the edifice of thought is built up of bricks of sensation, cemented by the tendency to association. The only difference is that the flux of the mind's thoughts and sensations is styled a series of states of consciousness; but it is still a straggling, disorderly procession with no spectator to view it, or know it as a procession.

But with Spencer we have something which Hume had not--

Nature, an external world. This is clearly necessary as a basis for the thesis that man is a product of Nature, and the latest phase in a process of animal or physical development. How does Mr. Spencer get his Nature, his external world? He assumes the reality of an external order and an elementary consciousness of it. He professes to prove the existence of such a reality, and its power of determining thought; but observe the flaw in the proof. He starts, as he must, from the conception of knowledge as involving a relation between a subject and an object. But he then proceeds to assign to one of the terms of this relation an independent, superior existence-in short, he destroys the correlation. The object, only known, to start with, in relation to a subject, is known also (by what is now said to be a deliverance of consciousness) as existing out of relation to it-i. e., an object is supposed to be known after we have cancelled the knowing subject. Nay, more, the object is actually claimed to be the cause and determinant of the subject. The result is, in other words, that the objects of thought, while these are objects only by reason of there being a subject, are illogically supposed to be the cause of the subject which is the condition of their appearance. There is, of course, a great parade of demonstration in the "Principles of Psychology"; but that is, in brief, the sum of the argument. It is thus that we get the cause of thought and of man as external Nature. The way is clear for a natural history of man by the application of the evolution hypothesis.

Now let us see what Green-apart from the foregoing criticism which is really a rough epitome of his own arguments-has to say with regard to these views, and what is the truth which he opposes to them. In the first place, he affirms that of mere sensation we know, and therefore can say, nothing; it is an abstraction. Clearly, of sensation in general we can know nothing; we only know particular sensations. Let us take one. What is implied when we affirm the experience of a sensation of redness? Simply the fact that the mind has been at work distinguishing the sensation as one of redness from other sensations that are of different colors. Its reality is constituted for us by its relations to other colors-its place in the color scale. The greater the number of relations we are able to place it in, the fuller is the reality which it has for us. If we are uncultivated, these relations will be few; if we are sci