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GREEN'S ETHICS. 183 he does not identify himself, 1 " by which he is consciously affected but which are not he " ; and which Green, indeed, with a certain eccentricity of terminology, is reluctant even to call " his desires ". I trust the reader will not think that I ani disputing about words ; the question, I take it, is not of language but of the correctness of a certain psychological analysis ; I seem to discern, in Green's account of moral action, pagan or neo-pagan forms of ethical thought com- bined with Christian or post-Christian forms without any proper philosophical reconciliation. It may be said, however, that these objections are purely formal, or at least that they do not affect the substance of our author's own doctrine : let us leave them, therefore, and try if, when we examine in detail the content of Green's con- ception of a " true good" for the individual, we find it really so constituted that it cannot possibly come into competition with the true good of any other individual. It is difficult to see how this can be maintained with reference to the wide ideal of human perfection which is put forward in many passages of the treatise. The " realisation of human capa- bilities " at which we ought to aim is repeatedly stated to include "art and science" as well as "specifically moral virtues " : we must suppose " all that is now inchoate in the way of art and knowledge " to have reached completion in it (p. 309) : the development of arts and sciences is " a necessary constituent" of any life which "the educated citizen of Christendom " presents to himself as one in which he can find satisfaction (p. 415). But if I am right in thinking the development of artistic faculty and taste a part of my true good, I surely cannot be wrong in regarding the latter as including " objects that admit of being competed for," so long as the material conditions of our spiritual existence remain at all like what they are at present : indeed I should have thought that a writer like Green, who steadily refuses to take a hedonistic view of ordinary human aims and efforts, must regard the " realisation of scientific and artistic capacities," taken in a wide sense, as constituting the main motive of the keen struggle for material wealth which educated and refined persons generally feel themselves bound to keep up, for their children even more than for themselves. The thoughtful trader knows that wealth will enable him to provide himself and those he loves with books, pictures, prolonged education, varied travel, opportunities of intellectual society : and, knowing this, he allows himself to adopt methods of dealing which sometimes, perhaps, are hardly compatible with Green's ideal of* justice. Sirni- 1 Cf. especially Bk. ii. ch. 2, p. 151.