conceptions so that they may be adequate to the expression of a larger experience than that with which we started.
The peculiar difficulty of Green's ethics seems to me to arise from the special characteristic of the metaphysical conception which he reaches, and by which he seeks to explain morality; and this, again, seems to me to be connected with an incompleteness in his view of the moral experience which has to be expressed by that conception.
Green is never able to show how the conception of an eternal self-consciousness,—"one self-conditioning and self-determining mind,"—of which all knowledge and morality are reproductions, succeeds in "expressing" the salient facts of moral experience. The assertion of eternity is not an explanation of the temporal process; our understanding of the gradual way in which, in spite of error and in spite of evil, knowledge and morality are slowly attained is not really facilitated by any mere insistence upon the doctrine that complete knowledge and perfect goodness are eternally present to this infinite self-consciousness. It may even be held that the assertion of the eternal realization of this perfection makes it more instead of less difficult to understand the radical distinction of good and evil in the moral consciousness, and the prominence of evil as a fact in human development and in the world-process.
The data which Green had in view when he spoke of "moral and intellectual experience" were the facts of knowledge and desire. He does not seem to have given special recognition, among his primary data, to the judgments of worth or goodness; yet these are as much parts of our experience as judgments about matters of fact or efforts after certain objects or ideals; and it is their presence that makes our experience not merely a knowing and active, but also a moral experience. In not giving explicit recognition to this fact of moral approbation, or judgment of goodness, Green seems to me to overlook an aspect of the moral consciousness which needs to be taken into account for the formation of an adequate ethical conception.
The place of this consciousness of moral approbation may perhaps be said to be taken, in Green's system, by the experience of
