Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/81

GREEN'S REFUTATION OF EMPIRICISM. 67 reality is thought, in the same sense as that in which thought is here said to be real, reality must at best consist in successive states of consciousness ? And if it is not in this sense, but in a sense absolutely different from this, that the real is to be identified with the work of the mind, then the fact that thought is really in time only escapes being utterly irrele- vant, by being, to say the least of it, peculiarly embarrassing. But, after all, we only penetrate to the true inwardness of the argument, when we observe that the reality here claimed for thought is avowedly shared by mistaken beliefs. The mere fact, then, of a thought being real in this sense, is no guarantee against its being entirely false. And the reduction of all reality to thought, as thus understood, is precisely what constitutes dogmatic scepticism, or rather nihilism. And the argument does not even escape verbal self-con- tradiction. For thought is said to be " as real as anything else " ; and this necessarily implies that there is something else real besides thought. Which precludes ab initio the reduction of all reality to thought in the sense in which thought is here spoken of. The fact of the matter is, that so to take advantage of the twofold nature of thought, whereby thought has temporal existence as well as meaning, as to obliterate, along with the distinction between reality and thought, the distinction be- tween reality and illusion a consummation which Green, in the passage under discussion, is avowedly 1 striving to effect to do this is to deny the distinction between truth and error. Which, again, is to assert that one assertion is as good as another and (so far as this particular assertion is concerned) a good deal better too. Surely it is a significant thing that on the threshold of the temple of idealism assertion should be solemnly required to divest itself of all meaning. The confusion we have noticed is too hopeless to be really made any worse by the fact that Green, after rejecting as illusory the distinction between illusion and reality, inconti- nently ' passes ' (the expression is his) to an inquiry into the nature of this distinction under the form of the question, " How do we decide whether any particular event or object is really what it seems to be, or whether our belief about it is true ? " And indeed I think a comparative study of the subjoined passages which are not chance utterances, but 1 " The very question, What is the real ? which we seem to answer by help of this opposition [between the real and the work of the mind] is a misleading one, so far as it implies that there is something else from which the real can be distinguished " (ibid.). 2 Op. cit., 24, second paragraph.