a thinking consciousness'.1 The synthetic unity is thus taken to be the basis not merely of our knowledge of uniform relations between phenomena but of there being those uniform relations. The source of the relations and the source of our knowledge of them is one and the same,' ' the consciousness [namely] which constitutes reality and makes the world one,' 'the all-uniting consciousness'. Relations ' only exist for or through the action of [this] unifying and self-distinguishing spiritual subject'. Consciousness, he says again, is 'the medium and sustainer' of relations. The eternal consciousness is 'the spirit for which the relations of the universe exist'.2

Now, as William James in his character of 'radical empiricist', so often pointed out, this argument really starts from the assumption of atomistic and unrelated sensations, such as we find it, for example, in Locke and Hume. According to this defunct psychology (which was, it must be remembered, the presupposition and the raison d'être of the Kantian scheme), what is given to us in sensation is mere multiplicity or disjunction. All unity and relatedness thus comes to be explained, by Hume, as a fiction of the imagination, and, by Kant, as superinduced upon the matter of sense by the synthetic activity of thought. Thought, in Green's phrase, is 'the combining agency which, acting as it were ab extra on the sensational flux, transforms it into a world of permanently related objects. But, as James quite unanswerably urges, if relations between objects are in any way real, they must be represented in feeling just as much as the objects which are said to be related. We ought to say a feeling of "and", a feeling of "if ", a feeling of " but ", and a feeling of "by ", quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold.'

1 Prolegomena to Ethics, pp. 32, 53.

These quotations are all from the first and second chapters of the Prolegomena to Ethics. See in particular pp. 35, 43, 52-3, 68, 78.

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And it may be taken as admitted in recent discussion that thought, in operating upon sense and transforming it, as it undoubtedly does, does not infuse into sense anything which was not already there in sensuous form.1 The unity of experience, so far as it is unified and connected, is just as real and primitive a fact as its variety, and we do not require the apparatus of a special principle to constitute and sustain relations any more than to sustain existence in general. Green's argument, therefore, reduces itself to the general mentalistic position which we have already considered.

Green's eternal consciousness, moreover, is described exactly as if it were an enlarged human mind, built upon the same pattern of relational thought, but having spread out before it a complete intellectual scheme of the cosmic relations, which is partially and intermittently present to finite minds-'communicated' to them, as he frequently says, by this eternal spiritual principle. But we want more than a conceptual scheme of this sort to give us the kind of reality and independence which all theories are forced to attribute to the world of sense-perception. To think of the world as a permanent presentation, self-presented to an eternal percipient, does not meet the case, unless we confer upon the presentation just that degree of distinct and independent being which makes it a real object contemplated by the eternal percipient, and therefore capable of being similarly contemplated by other minds. Green's own account is extremely vague as to the sense in which he understands the spiritual principle to 'sustain' and 'constitute' nature. He talks of it most frequently as ' present to' the facts, and by its presence relating them to one another. He talks at other times-pretty frequently of the 'action' or the 'activity' of the principle in 'constituting' or 'making' nature; but the agency appears 1 Psychology, vol. i, p. 245. Cf. Essays in Radical Empiricism, pp. 42-4.

on examination to be simply the combining and relating activity in knowledge- the unifying action of spirit 'from which he started.1

In fact, the more closely we examine Green's statements, the more unsatisfactory appears the result reached by his argument. He talks of it habitually as a spiritual principle, and describes it more fully as a single active selfconscious principle', or, as he puts it in the closing sentence of his long Introduction to Hume: 'The recognition of a system of nature logically carries with it that of a selfconscious subject-the designation of which as "mind”, as "human", as "personal", is of secondary importance, but which is eternal, self-determined, and thinks.' But the nature of the transcendental argument is enough to remind us that, as it is with reference to the system of nature that the principle has been deduced, it is nothing out of that reference, and it is what in that reference it does. Now what it does in relation to the manifold world is simply to unify it. Hence the designation of the principle almost ad nauseam in English Hegelian writers as a principle of unity'. The unity of apperception, Kant teaches in his Deduction, is precisely equivalent to the idea of nature as a unity, or at least the one idea is the obverse of the other. So Green tells us: That the unifying principle should distinguish itself from the manifold which it unifies is, indeed, the condition of the unification; but it must not be supposed that the manifold has a nature of its own apart from the unifying principle, or this principle another nature of

1 p. 43. On p. 34 it is described as 'an agent which distinguishes itself from the feelings, uniting them in their severalty, making them equally present in their succession'. Cf. p. 53: 'the consciousness which constitutes reality and makes the world one'. In a different context (p. 78) he speaks of our partial knowledge of the universe as rendered possible through the continued action of the eternal consciousness in and upon the sentient life'. But the reference here is to the ideal of completed knowledge as operative in a growing experience; and the expression, therefore, does not bear on the question we are specially considering. 2 p. 40

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its own apart from what it does in relation to the manifold world.... There is no separate particularity, in the agent, on the one side, and the determined world as a whole, on the other.... The world has no character but that given it by this action, the agent no character but that which it gives itself in this action.'1 Consequently, as he says in another place, 'the concrete whole may be described indifferently as an eternal intelligence realised in the related facts of the world or as a system of related facts rendered possible by such an intelligence'. 'All things in the world are determined by it, in the sense that they are determined by each other in a manner that would be impossible but for its equal selfdistinguishing presence to them all.' As such an impartial presence, the eternal consciousness becomes, in a phrase of Mr. Balfour's, just the bare geometrical point through which must pass all the threads which make up the web of nature';4 or, as we may say, it is the ideal focus into which the system of relations is reflected, the empty form of the Ego or consciousness in general, the dot upon the i, which the theory of knowledge exacts.5

This is the same result as we reached before in Ferrier's case, and it seems to confirm our view of the fallacious character of any direct argument from the conditions of knowledge to the theorem of an All-Thinker and of the universe as the system of his thought. It confirms also the nugatory nature of any conclusion that could possibly be reached by such a method, even if valid. The formal Ego, which is all that the mentalistic argument yields, is of no real account. What difference does it make whether we

1

PP.

80-1.

2 p. 38.

3 p. 82 (italics mine).

• In an article on 'Green's Metaphysics of Knowledge', Mind, vol. ix, p. 89 (1884).

So Caird speaks of the consciousness of God (which, he is insisting, is involved in the consciousness of self) as 'the consciousness of the universal unity or centre which all knowledge implies' (Critical Philosophy of Kant, vol. i, p. 215).

regard nature as existing per se, or insist that all her processes are registered in a mind, if that mind is nothing but such a register or impartial reflection of the facts? I do not think, therefore, that any such short cut to the desired goal is likely to take us there. Ultimately, I believe it is true, as I have argued all along, that we cannot take nature as existing per se; it has to be taken as an element in a whole which cannot be expressed except in terms of conscious values. All values depend on feeling, on some form of consciousness or living experience. Familiar with values in our own experience, we feel it impossible to conceive anything devoid of value (such as an unconscious material system would be) as ultimately real or self-subsistent, in other words, as a whole, a res completa. It is this moral impossibility, I think, rather than the speculative impossibility of a world unperceived or unthought of, that is the drivingpower of the idealistic argument. Such a consideration may no doubt also be impeached as circular in its proof. It is not so much an argument perhaps as an absolute conviction, but it is, I think, a conviction whose reasonableness is sustained by the unreasonableness of the opposite hypothesis.

Spirit, we believe, therefore, is the terminus ad quem of nature. As it has been finely expressed by an Eastern thinker, all external things were formed that the soul might know itself and be free '.1 Unconscious nature thus assumes the character of a means or intermediary towards an end, in so far as conscious centres of existence alone possess that degree of separateness and independence which would justify the term creation in their regard. Such terms as creation, means and end demand, as we shall find, a rigid scrutiny, which may leave little of their ordinary meaning attaching to them when they are used to describe the ultimate conditions of the universe. But with that reserve they still remain useful and intelligible modes of Kapila (quoted in Professor A. G. Hogg's Karma and Redemption).