and who never satisfied himself — as men of idealistic tendencies are too apt to satisfy themselves — with an intuitive grasp of any comprehensive idea, until he had vindicated every element of it by the hard toil of an exhaustive reflexion. Hence he was almost painful in the constancy of his recurrence to certain fundamental thoughts, which he never seemed to have sufficiently verified and explained, and which he was ever ready to reconsider in the light of new objections, even those that might seem to be comparatively unimportant to others. In this he showed how a deep faith in certain principles may be united with the questioning temper of science, and even with a scrupulous scepticism which is ever ready to go back to the beginning, that it may exhaust everything that can be said against them. For such a mind there must always be a wide division between faith and reason, or (what in philosophy comes to the same thing) between a principle and its development into a system. Its appropriate activity must be rather to lay and to try the foundations than to build the superstructure. But it is the result of such work, and of such work alone, to secure that the foundations are immovably fixed on the rock.
Professor Green’s great influence on the life of the University and the City of Oxford, to which so many testimonies have been given since his death, was not due to any of the usual sources of popularity. Wanting in superficial readiness of sympathy, wanting also in the sanguine flow of animal spirits, and by constitutional reserve often prevented from expressing what he felt and wished to express, he yet gradually created in those around him a sense of security in trusting him which was due to the transparent purity of his aims and to the entire absence of personal assumption and petty ambition. It was due, it may be added, to the secret fire of ethical enthusiasm, which gradually made itself felt through the unpretending simplicity and business-like directness of his manner. His very reticence and unwillingness to speak, except upon knowledge and from necessity, gave an additional, and sometimes an almost overpowering, weight to his words when he did speak. And in later years the consciousness of the success of his work, both speculative and practical, (however he might underestimate it), and also the consciousness of the sympathy, which he found in his home and in a widening circle of friends who understood him, seemed to
