Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/76

V.-GREEN'S REFUTATION OF EMPIRICISM. BY HOWAED V. KNOX. WHEN the critic raises any objection to the idealistic identi- fication of thought and reality, he is apt to be met by some remark to the effect that his objection is due to his " taking the identity abstractly, as if it excluded difference ". But if the identity is such as to include difference, then, surely, unless we know the nature of the difference, we do not know the nature of the identity. Until the difference is defined, the identity must remain abstract. Yet nowhere in the writings of ' absolute idealists ' can we discover any nearer approach to an explicit definition of this difference in identity than is contained in the empty formula, that whereas objects exist only for thought, thought exists for itself ; or, as T. H. Green puts it in one place : J " Undoubtedly there is something other than thought. Feeling is so ; the whole system of nature, on which feeling depends, is so ; its other- ness from thought makes it what it is, but this is the same as saying that relation to thought makes it what it is, that but for thought it would not be." The formula is empty, because what we want to know is just this : In what way is nature different from thought, if it is constituted by thought, and if "but for thought it would not be"? Or, rather, the formula itself suggests a more urgent form of the same question, namely : How if all relation is in and for thought is relation to thought possible ? We must, then, try to discover for ourselves what it is that the idealist means when he proclaims the identity of thought and reality. With this end in view, I propose to examine the first two chapters of the Prolegomena to Ethics : for if, as Green says, " No one is more emphatic than Locke in op- posing what is real to what we ' make for ourselves,' the work of nature to the work of the mind," it is certain that no one is more emphatic than Green himself in repudiating any such opposition of thought to reality. The fact, more- over, that Green is greatly concerned to refute empiricism, 1 Works, ii., 181.