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THE PROBLEM OF CONDUCT. 367 rand obedience to law and that restatements of the results of the work of his generation may still not be wholly out of place in an ethical treatise. Chapter ii., "Metaphysical Ethic Considered" submits to de- tailed criticism Green's doctrines of an ideally Best and of the Eternal Self in forms which we venture to think the reader may find some difficulty in recognising. On the former Green is repre- sented as holding that you must in outline at least know the best toward which humanity is gravitating before you can compare one type of life or one form of society with another, and say " This is better than that ". " Such," we are told, " is the theory expressed or implicit which is responsible for the arrangement and method of the Prolegomena". On carefully rereading the passage in Green referred to (Prolegomena, p. 180), I cannot find any justification for this interpretation. It seems to me, on the contrary, an express repudiation of any attempt at such an outline. What Green throughout emphasises is something quite different, viz., that human conduct is continually influenced by the ideal of a life in which elements that commonly fall apart, such as duty and happiness, self and other, truth and goodness are completely harmonised. We may differ as to the extent to which this harmony may be carried and as to the ultimate satisfactoriness and "reality" of ethical experience, but the importance of this ideal as a factor in moral consciousness is not likely to be denied, at least in a work like the present, the whole argument of which as I understand it rests upon this assumption. I have a similar difficulty in accepting the interpretation of Green's doctrine of the Eternal Self as equivalent to the assertion of an unevolved and purely abstract subject of experience. Green's statements, it must be admitted, leave some room for doubt as to his view of the origin of human consciousness, but a careful study of the Prolegomena leaves, I think, no doubt that the "eternity" he speaks of is to be looked for not primarily in the absence of any traceable origin in time but in the character of human intelligence as a relating principle. As mental contents have their character determined by the whole in which they are elements so have actions : as in knowledge there is no resting- place short of the conception of a completely organised experience, so in conduct there is none short of the completely organised volition which is the counterpart of the ideal represented by civil society. To a writer holding this view it is not difficult to see how the character of this whole and not the descriptions of sociology must be the starting-point of moral as well as of political philosophy. Mr. Taylor speaks as though there was a difference in this respect between the Prolegomena and the Lectures on Political Obligation. But any difference of treatment is superficial. The theory of the Common Good, whatever its value, underlies both. Kecent discus- sion has raised other issues and calls for a restatement of the