be known to us as more than a combining intelligence, the source of the systematic unity of nature, we may and ought to believe it to be more; and that Green must be supposed to mean this when he describes the "attitude of man towards an infinite spirit" as "not the attitude of knowledge" but only of "awe and aspiration" (p. 329). But the reason he gives for excluding the attitude of knowledge is a reason which, so far as it is valid at all, applies precisely to that conception of the spiritual principle which is given in Book i.: "knowledge," he says, "is of matters of fact or relations, and the infinite spirit is neither fact nor relation"; and since the net result of the "Metaphysics of Knowledge" is at any rate to establish the necessary existence of an eternally complete thinking consciousness which is "neither fact nor relation," but yet "needed to constitute" facts and relations, it seems to me merely an eccentric subtlety of metaphysical terminology to say that we have no "knowledge" of such an eternal mind. We have at any rate, if we have followed assentingly a hundred pages of close argument, a reasoned conviction with regard to it; and my point is that Green seems unaware of the barrenness of this conviction for his ethical purposes, and nowhere offers us a suggestion of any other reasoning by which his philosophical conception of the Divine Mind might be turned into one capable of furnishing us with an adequate ethical ideal. I, at least, can find no grounds in the argument of Book i. for attributing to the spiritual principle any such characteristic as the term "holiness" expresses: I cannot even find adequate reasons for attributing to it anything analogous to Will. It is merely, so far as I understand, an eternal intellect out of time, to which all time and its contents are eternally and (we may say) indifferently present: being equally implied in the conception of any succession, it is not shown to carry with it the conception of progress towards an end in the series of motions or changes of which the process of the world in time consists. And even if we grant that such a progress is implied in the development of the eternal consciousness in us, it is, as I have already said, still a purely intellectual progress, a growth of that which knows in knowledge alone.
I have so far proceeded on the assumption that the "human perfection" which we are trying to define is the perfection of that spiritual principle which is said to be in a manner identical with God, being an imperfect reproduction of the eternal divine consciousness. But, the classically instructed reader of the Prolegomena, remembering the ethical psychology of Aristotle, and noting the large share of
