of a moral agent can really find rest."[1] In this statement two points seem to be involved which the use of the rather metaphorical term ‘finding rest’ tends to confuse.  If we are looking for the distinction simply of a good action or motive from a bad one we may point to the approval of conscience in the former case:  this has a permanence—­or rather an independence of time—­which distinguishes it from the satisfaction of some temporary desire.  But I do not think that this is what Green means.  He wished to avoid falling back upon mere disconnected judgments of conscience after the manner of the intuitional moralists.  The ‘true good’ for him seems to mean the attainment, the complete realisation, of the moral ideal.  Were this reached we should indeed ‘find rest,’ for moral activity as we know it would be at an end.  But the moral ideal is never thus attained; its realisation, as Green holds, is only progressive and never completed.  Consequently ‘rest’ is never ‘found.’  It is of the nature of the moral life to press onward constantly towards a goal which it cannot attain; each achievement leads to a further effort and a higher reach.

[Footnote 1:  Ibid., sec. 171, p. 179.]

By itself, therefore, the assertion that the moral agent ‘finds rest’ in the ‘true good’ does not enable us to distinguish the moral agent or the moral action from the immoral.  For we are unable to define the ‘true good.’  It is not a part of experience; it is an ideal:  and Green allows that we can give no complete account of it; he even says that we can give no positive account of it.  At the same time this consideration leads to another and connected method for distinguishing good from evil.

“Of a life of completed development,” Green holds, “of activity with the end attained, we can only speak or think in negatives, and thus only can we speak or think of that state of being in which, according to our theory, the ultimate moral good must consist."[1] But the development is a real process which manifests itself in habits and social institutions; and from these its actual achievements we can to a certain extent see what the moral capability of man “has in it to become,” and thus “know enough of ultimate moral good to guide our conduct.”  One of the most valuable portions of Green’s own work is his description of the gradual widening and purifying of human conceptions regarding goodness in character and conduct.  But all this implies some standard of discrimination and selection between what is good and what is evil in human achievement.  Which developments are truly realisations of “the moral capability of man,” and so tend to the attainment of ultimate good, and which developments are expressions of those capacities which seek an apparent good only and are to be classed as evil, as impediments to the realisation of the good,—­these have to be discriminated; and is it so clear that from the mere record of human deeds we are able to draw