Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/185

GREEN'S ETHICS. 173 influence which the study of Aristotle has obviously had on Green's speculation, may perhaps surmise that our ideal of human perfection so far as it is practical and tin a narrow sense) ethical, and not scientific or merely intellectual belongs rather to the human soul as a function of an animal organism, modified by being made a vehicle of the eternal consciousness, and not to that eternal conscious- ness itself, as making the animal organism the vehicle. And this surmise would certainly find considerable support in the analysis and exposition of the psychological elements of moral action desire, intellect, volition which Green has given in Book ii. The author, indeed, is specially concerned to maintain the real unity between the effort of the self-con- scious soul in learning to know, and its effort " in the way of giving to or obtaining for objects, which various suscepti- bilities of the self-consoious soul suggest to it, a reality among matters of fact " (p. 138). But he recognises that its efforts of this latter kind, to a large extent, " originate in animal wants or the susceptibility to animal pleasure, in the sense that without such want or susceptibility they could not be " (p. 129) ; and though he denies that the desires most important in the moral life of civilised man such as love, envy, ambition are directly dependent on animal susceptibilities, I do not understand him to deny that they may be traced ultimately to animal feelings, as modified by the supervention of self-consciousness carrying with it a con- sciousness of the individuality of other persons. Certainly animals feel love, envy, jealousy ; and no reason is suggested why a reproduction of the eternal consciousness should have these emotions, independently of the conditions of the animal organism to which it is subject. Admitting Green's account of the manner in which the self-conscious self reacts upon the desires thus organised, so that they be- come something different from what they would be in a merely animal soul : admitting that it presents to itself objects of desire, distinct from itself and from each other, and that in seeking the realisation of any particular object it is always seeking its own satisfaction ; I should still have in- ferred that it is only because it has " supervened upon the appetitive life " of an animal organism that the self-conscious self has such desires for the realisation of objects at all. And since the essential characteristic of moral action, as explained in Book ii., consists in the presence of this self- distinguishing and serf-seeking consciousness, identifying itself with different particular desires or rather usually with a complex resultant of several distinguishable desires ;