Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/103

GREEN'S METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE. 91 itself, since it is impossible that the eternal reason, as denned, should be anything for us as thinking beings, and we can say therefore nothing intelligently concerning it at all. That is not known which is not in consciousness. That cannot be known which cannot be brought into consciousness. Thus things-in-themselves cannot be known because they can only come into consciousness on condition of ceasing to be " things-in-themselves ". Thus also the eternal " subject " cannot be known because it can only come into conscious- ness on condition of being an object. To say therefore that I have any knowledge, direct or indirect, either of things-in- themselves or of the eternal consciousness is something like a contradiction in terms. The nature which in words we ascribe to them is one with which the essential constitution of our knowing faculties makes it impossible we should ever become acquainted. Vith this criticism, which, if valid at all, is mani- festly capable of very wide extension, I close this brief survey of the argumentative basis on which rests the Neo-Kantian system as it was conceived by Green. Let me conclude this article by taking note of the singular resemblance which this system itself, in its general outlines, bears to that of a philosopher to whom its author would certainly have conceived himself to be in no way specially indebted. Kant, as the reader knows, is the philosophical progenitor to whom Green would in the main trace the lead- ing characteristics of his theory ; yet strangely enough it is Berkeley's general conception of the universe to which, by a kind of afacisni, Green's bears the strongest resemblance. The technical language in which the two thinkers express themselves is so different, the points from which they attack philosophical problems are so widely separate, their dialectic is so utterly unlike, that we may easily be tempted to forget how nearly similar are the results at which they finally arrive. Berkeley by an examination of the nature of per- ception, Green by a criticism of the conditions of experience, alike reach the conviction that the world of objects exists only for mind ; both deduce from this the reality of free- dom ; both assume the existence of a universal spirit in order that their idealised universe may be something more than the phantasm of the individual consciousness ; with both this assumption develops into something which re- sembles, though it never actually becomes, a species of Pantheism. Yet it happens strangely enough that, with all this agreement in the substance of their creed, Berkeley is the philosopher whom Green has treated with least sym- pathy. He never forgot that Berkeley was a sensational,