Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/88

74 HOWAED V. KNOX : GEEEN'S REFUTATION OF EMPIRICISM. eternal consciousness is directly equivalent to an absolute distinction betiveen consciousness sub specie temporis and con- sciousness sub specie seternitatis. And this, as we have seen, involves the extrusion from consciousness sub specie temporis of the content of consciousness. Further : the absolute distinction between succession of consciousness and consciousness of succession is avowedly based on the fact that the former is a succession ; and this argument is equally applicable to the time-process of nature as a whole. Nor does Green, in his eagerness to discredit empiricism, for a moment hesitate to avail himself of the principle as so extended. " Nature," he says, "with all that belongs to it, is a process of change: change on a uniform method, no doubt, but change still. All the relations under which we know it are relations in the way of change or by which change is determined. But neither can any process of change yield a consciousness of itself, which, in order to be a consciousness of the change, must be equally present to all stages of the change ; nor can any consciousness of change, since the whole of it must be present at once, be itself a process of change." J In other words, nature is not the eternal consciousness ; has indeed (to use Green's own expressions) no "community," no " element of identity" therewith. Thus, the object is definitely extruded from consciousness sub specie seternitatis. And how we can be even so much as conscious of the object, 2 when the object is not in any sense in consciousness, is a question to which we shall in vain demand an answer from the ' ab- solute idealist '. The doctrine, then, that thought is not in time the doc- trine which purposed torise on stepping-stones of dead empiri- cists to the lofty heights of a twofold identification of nature and of our thought with the divine consciousness this doctrine has for its content a threefold absolute distinction between God, ourselves and nature. That is to say, it makes psychology impossible, it makes knowledge of nature im- possible ; and, since it leaves the word ' consciousness ' without the vestige of a meaning, it makes philosophy im- possible. 1 Op. cit., 18. 2 Cf. op. cit., 57. The passage referred to is quoted above, p. 69.