supposition of knowledge, implies the action of one self-conditioning and self-determining mind; and that, as our knowledge, so our moral activity was only explicable on supposition of a certain reproduction of itself, on the part of this eternal mind, as the self of man."[1]
The greater part of the metaphysical portion of the Prolegomena was published by Green himself in Mind under the title "Can there be a Natural Science of Man?" This title suggests that his purpose was to refute the competency of the mechanical theory, as applied to mind and morals by Hume and by the modern naturalists, and to substitute a more adequate view. Such an inquiry could not have been carried out without being based upon experience, seeing that the whole question in dispute concerns the interpretation of experience. He begins by acknowl- edging our experience,—moral as well as intellectual,—as the fact or datum to be explained, and he goes on to seek a conception adequate to its explanation. That this correctly describes his starting point and procedure, as he conceived them, is clear from the sentences which follow the above quotation:
"Proof of such a doctrine, in the ordinary sense of the word proof, from the nature of the case there cannot be. It is not a truth deducible from other established or conceded truths. It is not a statement of an event or matter of fact that can be the object of experiment or observation. It represents a conception to which no perceivable or imaginable object can possibly correspond, but one that affords the only means by which, reflecting on our moral and intellectual experience conjointly, taking the world and ourselves into account, we can put the whole thing together and understand how (not why, but how) we are and do what we consciously are and do. Given this conception, and not without it, we can at any rate express that which it cannot be denied demands expression, the nature of man's reason and man's will, of human progress and human shortcoming, of the effort after good and the failure to gain it, of virtue and vice, in their connection and in their distinction, in their essential opposition and in their no less essential unity."
- ↑ Prolegomena to Ethics, § 174, p. 181.
