Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/83

GREEN'S REFUTATION OF EMPIRICISM. 69 this, it may be asked, either an identical proposition or un- true an identical proposition, if understood strictly as thus put ; untrue, if taken to mean that the conception of an order of nature does not admit of being generated out of materials other than itself? Now it is just the difficulties in the way of explaining the origin of the conception ir question out of anything else than judgments which pre- suppose it, that we wish to exhibit. They are the difficulties which beset any theory that would treat the knowledge of nature as itself the result of natural processes." In the exposition of the said ' difficulties ' lies the sum and substance of Green's criticism of empiricism ; and here, so it seems, we are to gain the desired assurance that his proof of the ideality of nature is something more than the "identical proposition" that "without a conception of an order of nature we could not conceive an order of nature ". The exposition in question purports to show that " a con- sciousness of events as a related series . . . has not any element of identity with, and therefore cannot properly be said to be developed out of, a mere series of related events, of successive modifications of body or soul. . . . No one and no number of a series of related events can be the conscious- ness of the series as related." l Green himself subsequently interprets this doctrine to mean that "no knowledge, nor any mental act involved in knowledge, can properly be called a ' phenomenon of con- sciousness '. It may be of phenomena ; if the knowledge is of events, it is so." : The head and front, therefore, of the empiricist's offending is that he subjects thought to historical treatment. " The attainment of the knowledge, again/' Green gener- ally allows, "as an occurrence in the individual's history, a transition from one state of consciousness to another, may properly be called a phenomenon ; but not so the conscious- ness itself of relations or related facts not so the relations and related facts present to consciousness in which the knowledge consists." 3 The "transition from one state of consciousness to another," which "may properly be called a phenomenon," presumably falls within the province of the psychologist; while "the consciousness itself," "in which the knowledge consists," must since no "mental act in- volved in knowledge can properly be called a phenomenon of consciousness " fall wholly outside that province. Thus the psychologist has left on his hands a series of transitions 1 Op. cit., 16. 8 Op. cit., 57. 3 Ibid.