simply going to get something more, wealth, pleasure, morality, or whatever), but action as the self. To find the self in the highest and fullest activity possible at the time, and to perform the act in the consciousness of its complete identification with self (which means, I take it, with complete interest) is morality, and is realization.
The method with which Green meets the difficulty (though he never, as far as I recall, specifically recognizes it) is to split the presupposed self into two parts, one the self so far as realized up to date, the other part the ideal and as yet unrealized self. The realized self then becomes the agent, the ideal self the goal of action. The realized self acts for the ideal self. In so acting, its motive is the ideal self, perfection, goodness.[1] We might ask, how, with such a break between the already realized self and the ideal self, the ideal self can possibly become an end at all; we might ask, that is, how this ethical theory is to be reconciled with Green’s psychological theory that the object of desire is always the self. With this complete breach of continuity, it is difficult to see how the ‘ideal self’ can interest the agent (the realized self) at all. But this might take us too far from our immediate purpose; and it is enough here to repeat, in changed form, the objection just made. If the particular act is done for the sake of goodness in general, then, and in so far, it is done immorally. For morality consists in not degrading any required act into a mere means towards an end lying outside itself, but in doing it for its own sake, or, again, in doing it as self. It is, I think, a simple psychological fact that no act can be completely done save as it absorbs attention.[2] If, then, while doing the act attention must also be directed upon some outside ideal of goodness, the act must suffer, being divided. Not being done for its own sake, or as self, it is only partially done.[3] In other words, acts are to be
- ↑ See, for example, Prolegomena, pp. 202–205.
- ↑ I cannot refrain from saying that to my own mind this statement is purely tautological. The attention is not something outside the act, and then directed upon it, but absorption of attention and fulness of activity are two ways of naming the same thing.
- ↑ We should, then, reverse Kant’s statement. Instead of saying that an act
