the distinction?  Do we not need some criterion of goodness to guide our judgment? and does not Green himself use such a criterion when he appeals to the tendency of certain institutions and habits to “make the welfare of all the welfare of each,” and of certain arts to make nature “the friend of man"?[2] Common welfare and the utilisation of nature in the service of man seem to be taken as tests of the true development of moral capabilities.  The criteria themselves may be excellent; but they are not got out of the mere record:  they are brought by us to its contemplation.  To this special question I can find no answer in Green.  He is indeed aware that there is a difficulty; or rather he admits that something has been “taken for granted.”  He has assumed that there is “some best state of being for man”; that this best state is eternally present to a divine consciousness; and further, that this “eternal mind” is reproducing itself as the self of man.[3] On this supposition only, he says, can our moral activity be explained; and he holds that the supposition can be justified metaphysically and has been so justified by himself in the earlier part of his treatise.

[Footnote 1:  Prolegomena to Ethics, sec. 172, p. 180.]

[Footnote 2:  Prolegomena, sec. 172, p. 180.]

[Footnote 3:  Ibid., secs. 173, 174, p. 181.]

Now I am willing to admit that Green showed a correct instinct in examining the nature of man before entering upon his properly ethical enquiry.  One must know what man is before one can say what his ‘good’ or his duty is; and it is only because man’s nature cannot be accounted for as a merely natural or animal product that the way is open for an idealist ethics such as Green’s.  But perhaps Green laid too much stress on the problem of historical causation.  What matters it how we came by our knowledge, provided it is the case that we can know ourselves and the world?  If we can now distinguish right and wrong, can ally ourselves with the good, and follow a moral ideal, of what great importance are the steps by which the moral consciousness was attained?  And the question here is whether the special results reached by Green in his metaphysical enquiry into human nature have brought us any nearer to a solution of the present ethical difficulty.  As we have seen, the metaphysical view which Green arrives at is that the consciousness which is in man and which raises him above nature is the manifestation of—­the “reproduction” of itself by—­an eternal self-consciousness.  Man’s own self-consciousness in knowledge and volition is simply God’s self—­consciousness “reproduced” (to use Green’s term) in man’s animal nature:  so that the animal body and its temporal activities become in some unexplained (and no doubt inexplicable) way “organic” (to use Green’s terminology once more, where no terminology seems adequate) to a spiritual reality which is eternal and infinite.