Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/191

GREEN'S ETHICS. 179 given in Book i. is necessarily conceived as unalterable : it is eternally in reality all that the human spirit is in possibi- lity, and there are no conceivable perfections that could be added to it ; and the process of man's moral effort is surely futile if it is to end in nothing but the existence of that* which exists already. 1 It may be said that objections of this kind may be brought against every philosophical theology, unless it diverges widely from religious common-sense : a plain man cannot but conceive the world-process, divinely ordered, as designed to bring about some good not yet realised which must be good from a divine or universal point of view, and yet he cannot conceive the Divine existence as at any time defective or wanting in any respect. I admit the force of the rejoinder ; only, unlike Green, I should draw from it the inference that we ought not to use these theolo- gical notions, while yet unpurged of such palpable incon- sistencies, as the basis of a philosophy of practice. If, however, we leave on one side these theological difficul- ties, can we find the " abiding self-satisfaction " which a moral agent is supposed to seek, in the first of the alterna- tives above suggested in the conception, that is, of a society of persons who somewhere, somehow, in the indefinite future, are to carry further that movement towards perfection which is so seriously impeded among the human beings whom we know ? We might perhaps accept the solution it being granted that the human spirit can be abidingly satisfied with movement instead of rest, progress instead of perfection if a " better state of humanity " could be taken as a convertible term for the "better state of myself" at which, as a moral agent, I necessarily aim. In several passages Green seems to pass backwards and forwards between these two notions as if they might be used indif- ferently in 8s reasonings ; but I cannot see how his moral psychology justifies this procedure. He has laid it down that " in all desire, or at any rate in all that amounts to will, it is self-satisfaction which the self-conscious agent neces- sarily seeks ... a certain possible state of himself which in the gratification of the desire he seeks to reach " (pp. 177, 182) : and since he J}^s also explained how the most characteristic human desires depend on the conscious 1 It may perhaps be said that I ought not to apply such a conception as " already existing " to a Being whose existence is expressly stated to be out of time. And, though I cannot profess to be able to reason about such a Being without tacitly conceiving it in some relation to time, I should not have ventured to use the phrase in the text if Green had not set me the example ; e.g., in speaking (p. 181) of a "best state of man already present to some divine consciousness ".