I am far from denying the greatness of this conception or its practical value.  There is no stronger support to moral endeavour than the conviction that the moral life is a realisation of the divine purpose, that in all goodness the spirit of God is manifest, that the good man is the servant of God or even His fellow-worker.  By whatever metaphor this may be expressed—­and Green’s statement that the divine self—­consciousness ‘reproduces’ itself in human morality is also a metaphor—­it betrays the assurance that moral achievement is permanent, and that (in spite of all apparent failures) goodness will prevail.  He who fights for the good may be confident of victory.

This is the practical value of the conception; but in order that it may have this practical value, the distinction of good from evil must be first of all made clear.  Green’s appeal to an eternal self-consciousness does nothing of itself to elucidate this distinction.  Tendencies to exalt selfish interest over common welfare, and to prefer sensual to what are called higher gratifications, enter into the nature of man, and have fashioned his history.  Green does not even ask the question whether these also are not to be considered manifestations or ‘reproductions’ of the eternal self-consciousness.  But his metaphysical view does not exclude them; and if they are included, morality disappears for lack of any criterion between good and evil.  If good is to be discriminated from evil, it must be by some other means than by describing the whole conscious activity of man as a reproduction of the divine.  Instead of doing anything to solve the problem of the meaning of goodness, Green simply brings forward a new difficulty—­that of understanding how the temporal process in which human morality is developed can be related to a reality which is defined as out of time or eternal.  This difficulty cannot be avoided in a metaphysical theory of morality.  And it does not stand alone.  Green’s own dialectics were directed against the Sensationalist and Hedonist theories which used to be regarded as typical of English thought; and on them they acted as a powerful solvent.  His own views of the spiritual nature of man and its relation to the eternal self-consciousness were worked out with the confidence and enthusiasm of a reformer rather than with the caution of a critic.  But criticism has followed, and not only from the representatives of opposed schools.  Writers whose intellectual affinities are on the whole the same as his have let their dialectic play around his fundamental conceptions with a result very different from that which he contemplated.  Mr Bradley, like Green, has faith in an eternal Reality, which might be called spiritual, inasmuch as it is not material; like Green, he looks upon man’s moral activity as an appearance—­what Green calls a reproduction—­of this eternal reality.  But under this general agreement there lies a world of difference.  He refuses, by the use of the term self-consciousness, to liken his Absolute to the personality of man, and he brings out the consequence, which in Green is more or less concealed, that the evil equally with the good in man and in the world are appearances of the Absolute.