fluence which are transforming man’s social and religious life. What he owes to previous writers is, so to speak, a concern of his own, with which his readers have directly nothing to do, and for which they need not care. For them the only question of interest is, whether in the writer they have immediately to deal with, there is a living source of light which is original in the sense that, whatever may be its history, it carries its evidence in itself. And this evidence must lie in its power to meet the questions of the day, and in the form in which they arise in that day. A volume of Essays such as the present, touching on so many important topics, can be only a small contribution to that critical reconstruction of knowledge which every time has to accomplish for itself. But it will, I believe, serve the purpose of its writers, if it shows in some degree how the principles of an idealistic philosophy may be brought to bear on the various problems of science, of ethics, and of religion, which are now pressing upon us.
A better indication of the spirit and aims with which the writers of this volume have written, than can be given in any such general statement as the above, may be found in their wish to dedicate it to the memory of Professor Green; an author who, more perhaps than any recent writer on philosophy, has shown that it is possible to combine a thorough appropriation of the results of past speculation with the freshness and spontaneity of an original mind. To Professor Green philosophy was not a study of the words of men that are gone, but a life transmitted from them to him — a life expressing itself with that power and authority which belongs to one who speaks from his own experience, and never to ‘the scribes’ who speak from tradition. It may be permitted to one who had the privilege of a long and unbroken friendship with him to take this opportunity of saying a few words on his general character, as well as on the special loss which philosophy has sustained in his death.
Those friends who can look back on Professor Green’s life with the intimate knowledge of contemporaries cannot fail to be struck with the evidence of consistency and unswerving truth to himself, which it presents. His fellow-students at the University were specially impressed by two features of bis character, which then stood out with the greater clearness from their contrast with the usual ten-
