Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/77

GREEN'S REFUTATION OF EMPIRICISM. 63 would scorn, by reason of the defining power of the negative, to mark his work as specially suitable for our present pur- pose. I. Green's final conclusion concerning the relation of man, as intelligence, to nature, is contained in the following pas- sage : We are not, however, fully stating the seemingly para- doxical character of e very-day perception, in merely saying that it is a determination of events in time by a principle that is not in time. That is a description equally applicable to fact, and to the perception of fact. . . . We contradict ourselves, if we say that there was first a chaos and then came to be an order ; for the ' first ' and ' then ' imply already an order of time, which is only possible through an action not in time. As little, on the other hand, can we suppose that which we only know as a principle of unity in relation, to exist apart from a manifold which through it is related. But we may avoid considering this principle, or the subject of which the presence and action renders possible the rela- tions of the world of becoming, as itself in becoming, or as the result of a process of becoming. It seems to be other- wise with our perceiving consciousness. The very conscious- ness, which holds together successive events as equally present, has itself apparently a history in time. It seems to vary from moment to moment. It apprehends processes of becoming in a manner which implies that past stages of the becoming are present to it as known facts ; yet is it not itself coming to be what it has not been ? " It will be found, we believe, that this apparent state of the case can only be explained by supposing that in the growth of our experience, in the process of our learning to know the world, an animal organism, which has its history in time, gradually becomes the vehicle of an eternally com- plete consciousness. What we call our mental history is not a history of this consciousness, which in itself can have no history, but a history of the process by which the animal organism becomes its vehicle. ' Our consciousness ' may mean either of two things ; either a function of the animal organism, which is being made, gradually and with interrup- tions, a vehicle of the eternal consciousness ; or that eternal consciousness itself, as making the animal organism its vehicle and subject to certain limitations in so doing, but retaining its essential characteristic as independent of time, as the determinant of becoming, which has not and does not