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"382 CRITICAL NOTICES : explain any difficulty in the Prolegomena. Many of his criticisms would fall away simply in face of citations from the Memoir.) But .there is no doubt, I think, that for Green the conceptions to which he attached his Ethical ideas were warranted Metaphysical con- ceptions. I would point out first, as against the criticism that Green's Metaphysics give us at best a progress in knowledge, that Book I., " The Metaphysics of Knowledge," is not to be taken as the whole Metaphysic from which the Ethic is deduced. It is merely the first elucidation or approximation, to which a parallel, .and not merely derivative, metaphysic of morals and action is afterwards added. 1 But then, in relation to the latter, as to the former, no doubt the criticism appears to have point. What can you get out of a " self-distinguishing consciousness " more than that it should do what ex hyp. it is always doing, viz., distinguish itself? And if you add that its nature is to be eternal, what difference does that make to its content ? I have elsewhere 2 set out my views on this and kindred points .at greater length than would be proper in a review. But I will here take this criticism and that on Green's Freedom of the Will together, and try to put briefly what seems to me the cardinal point. That on the Freedom of the Will (as treated in the Pro- legomena) is (p. 20) that the universal or common element of the Self, as the same for all individuals, cannot be the determinant of choice, and this must therefore be found in the particular element "the particularity of the chain of natural causation" (p. 17). And this amounts to Determinism. The objection is a very natural and a very troublesome one ; one which all of us must have felt. The cardinal point, which it shares with the allegation that there is a gap between Green's Metaphysic and his Ethics, is, I suggest, the conviction that mere thought cannot modify con- tent. What in particular can thought do ? we ask. It seems a sort of contentless activity. Things come into it and combine and we are aware of them. But thought, it seems, cannot contribute any particular element to the combination; cannot make sweet into sour, or blue into red, or pain into pleasure. We are, then, what has come together in us, and nothing more, and our par- ticular choices are a name for the results of a particular combina- tion. Such reasoning implies the separation of the universal and particular element, and consequently the inertness of the former ; and it is to this that Green objects in principle. For him, as I understand him (e.g., Prolegomena, 89), self-consciousness has a definite way of operating, which involves an effort at a type of perfection definable in its general character from the nature of 1 For the distinction see sect. 85. 2 In a paper on " Recent Criticism of Green's Ethics " in Aristotelian Proceedings, 1901-2, and in a discussion of Mr. McTaggart's recent work, shortly I hope to appear in MIND.