In this document, which was originally produced to highlight the differences between the MOQ and idealism, Pirsig's comments are shown by text marked in red . The original chapter headings and page numbers (shown in brackets e.g. [123]) are included for convenient cross-reference.

Dear Anthony McWatt,

You asked in one of your letters how the MOQ compares with late 19th Century idealism. The answer that follows copies part of Frederick Copleston’s summary of that group in Volume 8 of his “History of Philosophy” and inserts comparisons the MOQ. As I’ve said before, philosophology isn’t my field, and I assume that Copleston’s understanding of the positions of the various idealists is correct. Certainly it’s better than mine, and using it and trusting it filters out a lot of red herring.
 

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[171]Chapter Six
THE BEGINNINGS OF THE MOVEMENT

Introductory historical remarks: Literary pioneers Coleridge and Carlyle; Ferrier and the subject-object relation; John Grote's attack on phenomenalism and hedonism; The revival of interest in Greek philosophy; The rise of interest in Hegel; B. Jowett and H. Stirling.

In the second half of the nineteenth century idealism became the dominant philosophical movement in the British universities. It was not, of course, a question of subjective idealism. If this was anywhere to be found, it was a logical consequence of the phenomenalism associated with the names of Hume in the eighteenth century and J. S. Mill in the nineteenth century. For the empiricists who embraced phenomenalism tended to reduce both physical objects and minds to impressions or sensations, and then to reconstruct them with the aid of the principle of the association of ideas. They implied that, basically, we know only phenomena, in the sense of impressions, and that, if there are metaphenomenal realities, we cannot know them. This is what the MOQ states. Right away it diverges from the absolute idealism that follows. Quality is a phenomenal reality. The nineteenth-century idealists, however, were convinced that things-in-themselves, being expressions of the one spiritual reality which manifests itself in and through the human mind, are essentially intelligible, knowable. In the MOQ there are no things in themselves. Subject and object are correlative because they are both rooted in one ultimate spiritual principle. This is also true in the MOQ. It was thus a question of objective rather than subjective idealism.  In the MOQ the term, “objective,” is reserved for inorganic and biological patterns and cannot include “idealism.”

Nineteenth-century British idealism thus represented a revival of explicit metaphysics. That which is the manifestation of Spirit can in principle be known by the human spirit. And the whole world is the manifestation of Spirit. It would seem at first appearance that Quality might be an equivalent of Spirit, but this would be an enormous mistake. Quality is spiritual only to the extent that motorcycles and sausages are spiritual.  Science is simply one level of knowledge, one aspect of the complete knowledge to which the mind tends, even if it cannot fully [172] actualize its ideal. Metaphysical philosophy endeavours to complete the synthesis.The MOQ agrees with this.

The idealist metaphysics was thus a spiritualist metaphysics, in the sense that for it ultimate reality was in some sense spiritual. And it follows that idealism was sharply opposed to materialism. The MOQ is not opposed to materialism as long is it is understood that materialism is a set of ideas. In so far indeed as the phenomenalists tried to go beyond the dispute between materialism and spiritualism by reducing both minds and physical objects to phenomena which cannot properly be described either as spiritual or as material, we cannot legitimately call them materialists. But these phenomena were evidently something very different from the one spiritual reality of the idealists. And in any case we have seen that on the more positivistic side of the empiricist movement there appeared an at least methodological materialism, the so-called scientific materialism, a line of thought for which the idealists had no sympathy.  If the Quantum theory can be called scientifically materialistic, then the MOQ supports scientific materialism.

With its emphasis on the spiritual character of ultimate reality and on the relation between the finite spirit and infinite Spirit idealism stood for a religious outlook as against materialistic positivism and the tendency of empiricism in general to by-pass religious problems or to leave room, at best for a somewhat vague agnosticism. The MOQ is an atheistic religious outlook that solves rather than bypasses religious problems.  Indeed, a good deal of the popularity of idealism was due to the conviction that it stood firmly on the side of religion. To be sure, with Bradley, the greatest of the British idealists, the concept of God passed into that of the Absolute, and religion was depicted as a level of consciousness which is surpassed in metaphysical philosophy, while McTaggart, the Cambridge idealist, was an atheist. The MOQ agrees with both. But with the earlier idealists the religious motive was much in evidence, and idealism seemed to be the natural home of those who were concerned with preserving a religious outlook in face of the threatening incursions of agnostics, positivists and materialists. The MOQ resolves this conflict and thus takes both sides. Further, after Bradley and Bosanquet idealism turned from absolute to personal idealism and was once again favourable to Christian theism, though by that time the impetus of the movement was already spent.

It would, however, be a mistake to conclude that British idealism in the nineteenth century represented simply a retreat from the practical concerns of Bentham and Mill into [173] the metaphysics of the Absolute. For it had a part to play in the development of social philosophy. Generally speaking, the ethical theory of the idealists emphasized the idea of self-realization, of the perfecting of the human personality as an organic whole, This is true of the MOQ, although  “self-realization” is an extremely vague and slippery word. an idea which had more in common with Aristotelianism than with Benthamism. And they looked on the function of the State as that of creating the conditions under which individuals could develop their potentialities as persons. In the MOQ the state is a social pattern, no more. As the idealists tended to interpret the creation of such conditions as a removal of hindrances, they could, of course, agree with the utilitarians that the State should interfere as little as possible with the liberty of the individual. They had no wish to replace freedom by servitude. But as they interpreted freedom as freedom to actualize the potentialities of the human personality,  This is another vague phrase that could be the same as Dynamic Quality. and as the removal of hindrances to freedom in this sense involved in their opinion a good deal of social legislation, they were prepared to advocate a measure of State-activity which went beyond anything contemplated by the more enthusiastic adherents of the policy of laissez faire. We can say, therefore, that in the latter part of the nineteenth century idealist social and political theory was more in tune with the perceived needs of the time than the position defended by Herbert Spencer. Benthamism or philosophical radicalism doubtless performed a useful task in the first part of the century. But the revised liberalism expounded by the idealists later in the century was by no means 'reactionary'. It looked forward rather than backward.

The foregoing remarks may appear to suggest that nineteenth-century idealism in Great Britain was simply a native reaction to empiricism and positivism and to laissez faire economic and political theory. In point of fact, however, German thought, especially that of Kant and Hegel successively, exercised an important influence on the development of British idealism. Some writers, notably J. H. Muirhead, have maintained that the British idealists of the nineteenth century were the inheritors of a Platonic tradition which had manifested itself in the thought of the Cambridge Platonists in the seventeenth century and in the philosophy of Berkeley in the eighteenth century. But though [174] it is useful to draw attention to the fact that British philosophy has not been exclusively empiricist in character, it would be difficult to show that nineteenth-century idealism can legitimately be considered as an organic development of a native Platonic tradition. The influence of German thought, particularly of Kant and Hegel, cannot be dismissed as a purely accidental factor. It is indeed true that no British idealist of note can be described as being in the ordinary sense a disciple of either Kant or Hegel. Bradley, for example, was an original thinker. But it by no means follows that the stimulative influence of German thought was a negligible factor in the development of British idealism.

A limited knowledge of Kant was provided for English readers even during the philosopher's lifetime. In 1785 a disciple of Kant, F. A. Nitzsch, gave some lectures on the critical philosophy at London, and in the following year he published a small work on the subject. In 1797 J. Richardson published his translation of Principles of Critical Philosophy by J. J. Beck, and in 1798 A. F. M. Willich published Elements of Critical Philosophy. Richardson's translation of Kant's Metaphysics of Morals appeared in 1799; but the first translation of the Critique of Pure Reason, by F. Haywood, did not appear until 1838. And the serious studies of Kant, such as E. Caird's great work, A Critical Account of the Philosophy of Kant (1877), did not appear until a considerably later date. Meanwhile the influence of the German philosopher, together with a host of other influences, was felt by the poet Coleridge, whose ideas will be discussed presently, and in a more obvious way by Sir William Hamilton, though the element of Kantianism in Hamilton's thought was most conspicuous in his doctrine about the limits of human knowledge and in his consequent agnosticism in regard to the nature of ultimate reality.

Among the British idealists proper, Kant's influence may be said to have been felt particularly by T. H. Green and E. Caird. But it was mixed with the influence of Hegel. More accurately, Kant was seen as looking forward to Hegel or was read, as it has been put, through Hegelian spectacles. Indeed, in J. H. Stirling's The Secret of Hegel (1865) the view was explicitly defended that the philosophy of Kant, if properly [175] understood and evaluated, leads straight to Hegelianism. Hence, though we can say with truth that the influence of Hegel is more obvious in the absolute idealism of Bradley and Bosanquet than in the philosophy of Green, there is no question of suggesting that we can divide up the British idealists into Kantians and Hegelians. Some pioneers apart, the influence of Hegel was felt from the beginning of the movement. And it is thus not altogether unreasonable to describe British idealism, as is often done, as a Neo-Hegelian movement, provided at least that it is understood that it was a question of receiving stimulus frorn Hegel rather than of following him in the relation of pupil to master.

In its earlier phases the British idealist movement was characterized by a marked concentration on the subject-object relationship. In this sense idealism can be said to have had an epistemological foundation, inasmuch as the subject-object relationship is basic in knowledge. The metaphysics of the Absolute was not indeed absent. For subject and object were regarded as grounded in and manifesting one ultimate spiritual reality. Here the MOQ agrees completely except for that term, “spiritual.” But the point of departure affected the metaphysics in an important way. For the emphasis placed in the first instance on the finite subject militated against any temptation to interpret the Absolute in such a manner as to entail the conclusion that the finite is no more than its 'unreal' appearance. In other words, the earlier idealists tended to interpret the Absolute in a more or less theistic, or at any rate in a pantheistic, sense, the monistic aspect of metaphysical idealism remaining in the background. And this, of course, made it easier to represent idealism as an intellectual support for traditional religion.

Gradually, however, the idea of the all-comprehensive organic totality came more and more into the foreground. Thus with Bradley the self was depicted as a mere 'appearance' of the Absolute, as something which is not fully real when regarded in its prima facie independence. The MOQ agrees. Oneness, nothingness, Quality and Absolute are all referent terms for the same thing. And this explicit metaphysics of the Absolute was understandably accompanied by a greater emphasis on the State in the field of social philosophy. While Herbert Spencer on the one hand was engaged in asserting an opposition between the interests of the free individual and those of the State, the idealists were [176] engaged in representing man as achieving true freedom through his participation in the life of the totality.  The MOQ supports intellectual freedom from the state but not biological freedom.

In other words, we can see in the idealist movement up to Bradley and Bosanquet the increasing influence of Hegelianism. As has already been indicated, the influence of Kant was never unmixed. For the critical philosophy was seen as looking forward to metaphysical idealism. But if we make allowances for this fact and also for the fact that there were very considerable differences between Bradley's theory of the Absolute and that of Hegel, we can say that the change from emphasis on the subject-object relationship to emphasis on the idea of the organic totality represented a growing predominance of the stimulative influence of Hegelianism over that of the critical philosophy of Kant.

In the final phase of the idealist movement emphasis on the finite self became once again prominent, though it was a question this time of the active self, the human person, rather than of the epistemological subject. And this personal idealism was accompanied by a reapproximation to theism, except in the notable case of McTaggart, who depicted the Absolute as the system of finite selves. But though this phase of personal idealism is of some interest, inasmuch as it represents the finite self's resistance to being swallowed up in some impersonal Absolute, it belongs to a period when idealism in Britain was giving way to a new current of thought, associated with the names of G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, and, subsequently, Ludwig Wittgenstein .

As far as the general educated public was concerned, the influence of German thought first made itself felt in Great Britain through the writings of poets and literary figures such as Coleridge and Carlyle.

(i) Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) seems to have made his first acquaintance with philosophy through the writings of Neo-Platonists, when he was a schoolboy at Christ's Hospital. This early attraction for the mystical philosophy of Plotinus was succeeded, however, by a Voltairean phase, during which he was for a short time a sceptic in regard to religion. Then at Cambridge Coleridge developed a perhaps somewhat surprising enthusiasm for David Hartley and his associationist psychology. Indeed, Coleridge claimed to be [177] more consistent than Hartley had been. For whereas Hartley, while maintaining that psychical processes depend on and are correlated with vibrations in the brain, had not asserted the corporeality of thought, Coleridge wrote to Southey in 1794 that he believed thought to be corporeal, that is, motion. At the same time Coleridge combined his enthusiasm for Hartley with religious faith. And he came to think that the scientific understanding is inadequate as a key to reality, and to speak of the role of intuition and the importance of moral experience. Intuition sometimes is an equivalent of Dynamic Quality.  However, it also a kind of biological instinct.  Since Western philosophy confuses these two, the MOQ avoids the term. Later on he was to declare that Hartley's system, in so far as it differs from that of Aristotle, is untenable.

Coleridge's distinction between the scientific understanding and the higher reason or, as the Germans would put it, between Verstand (empirical knowledge) and Vernunft (reasoned knowledge) was one expression of his revolt against the spirit of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. He did not, of course, mean to imply that the scientific and critical understanding should be rejected in the name of a higher and intuitive reason. His point was rather that the former is not an omnicompetent instrument in the interpretation of reality, but that it needs to be supplemented and balanced by the latter, namely the intuitive reason. It can hardly be claimed that Coleridge made his distinction between understanding and reason crystal clear. But the general line of his thought is sufficiently plain. In Aids to Reflection (1825) he describes the understanding as the faculty which judges according to sense. Its appropriate sphere is the sensible world, and it reflects and generalizes on the basis of sense-experience. Reason, however, is the vehicle of ideas which are presupposed by all experience, and in this sense it predetermines and governs experience. It also perceives truths which are incapable of verification in sense-experience, and it intuitively apprehends spiritual realities. The MOQ denies this. Reason grows out of experience and is never independent from it. Further, Coleridge identifies it with the practical reason, which comprises the will and the moral aspect of the human personality. J. S. Mill is thus perfectly justified in saying in his famous essay on Coleridge that the poet dissents from the 'Lockian' view that all knowledge consists of generalizations from experience, and that he claims for the reason, as distinct from the understanding, the power to perceive by direct intuition realities and truths which transcend the reach of the senses. The MOQ disagrees.

[178] In his development of this distinction Coleridge received stimulus from the writings of Kant, which he began to study shortly after his visit to Germany in 1798-9. But he tends to speak as though Kant not only limited the scope of the understanding to knowledge of phenomenal reality but also envisaged an intuitive apprehension of spiritual realities by means of the reason, whereas in point of fact in attributing this power to the reason, identified moreover with the practical reason, Coleridge obviously parts company with the German philosopher. He is on firmer ground when he claims an affinity with Jacobi in maintaining that the relation between reason and spiritual realities is analogous to that between the eye and material objects.

Nobody, however, would wish to maintain that Coleridge was a Kantian. It was a question of stimulus, not of discipleship. And though he recognized his debt to German thinkers especially to Kant, it is clear that he regarded his own philosophy as being fundamentally Platonic in inspiration. In Aids to Reflection he asserted that every man is born either a Platonist or an Aristotelian. I have heard that he got this from Goethe. Aristotle, the great master of understanding, was unduly earthbound. He began with the sensual, and never received that which was above the senses, but by necessity, but as the only remaining hypothesis. That is to say, Aristotle postulated spiritual reality only as a last resort, when forced to do so by the need of explaining physical phenomena. Plato, however, sought the supersensible reality which is revealed to us through reason and our moral will. As for Kant, Coleridge sometimes describes him as belonging spiritually to the ranks of the Aristotelians, while at other times he emphasizes the metaphysical aspects of Kant's thought and finds in him an approach to P]atonism. In other words, Coleridge welcomes Kant's restriction of the reach of understanding to phenomenal reality and thcn tends to interpret his doctrine of reason in the light of Platonism, which is itself interpreted in the light of the philosophy of Plotinus.

These remarks should not be understood as implying any contempt for Nature on Coleridge's part. On the contrary, he disliked Fichte's 'boastful and hyperstoic hostility to Nature, as lifeless, godless, and altogether unholy'. And he [179] expressed a warm sympathy with Schelling's philosophy of Nature, as also with his system of transcendental idealism, in which 'I first found a genial coincidence with much that I had toiled out for myself, and a powerful assistance in what I had yet to do'. Coleridge is indeed at pains to reject the charge of plagiarism, and he maintains that both he and Schelling have drunk at the same springs, the writings of Kant, the philosophy of Giordano Bruno and the speculations of Jakob Boehme. However, the influence of Schelling seems to be sufliciently evident in the line of thought which we can now briefly outline.

'All knowledge rests on the coincidence of an object with a subject.' But though subject and object are united in the act of knowledge, we can ask which has the priority. Are we to start with the object and try to add to it the subject? Or are we to start with the subject and try to find a passage to the object? In other words, are we to take Nature as prior and try to add to it thought or mind, or are we to take thought as prior and try to deduce Nature? Coleridge answers that we can do neither the one nor the other. The ultimate principle is to be sought in the identity of subject and object. This is strikingly similar to the MOQ.

Where is this identity to be found? At this point Coleridge is at the same door that Phaedrus was at, but he doesn’t have the key of Quality with him.  So he answers: 'Only in the selfconsciousness of a spirit is there the required identity of object and of representation.' What in the world is selfconsciousness of a spirit? But if the spirit is originally the identity of subject and object, it must in some sense dissolve this identity in order to become conscious of itself as object. Ridiculous. Self-consciousness, therefore, cannot arise except through an act of will, How did will get in here? and 'freedom How did freedom get in here? must be assumed as a ground of philosophy, and can never be deduced from it'. The spirit becomes a subject knowing itself as object only through 'the act of constructing itself objectively to itself'.  This is the sort of nonsense that has inspired logical positivism.

This sounds as though Coleridge begins by asking the sort of question which Schelling asks, then supplies Schelling's answer, namely that we must postulate an original identity of subject and object, and finally switches to Fichte's idea of the ego as constituting itself as subject and object by an original act. The MOQ regards the ego as a construction of all four sets of static patterns that is capable of responding to Dynamic Quality. Independently of Dynamic Quality, the patterns do not create anything or engage in any original acts. But Coleridge has no intention of stopping short with the ego as his ultimate principle, especially if we mean by this the finite ego. Indeed, he ridicules the 'egoism' of Fichte. Instead, he insists that to arrive at the absolute [180] identity of subject and object, of the ideal and the real, as the ultimate principle not only of human knowledge but also of all existence we must 'elevate our conception to the absolute self, the great eternal I am'. Coleridge criticizes Descartes's Cogito, ergo sum and refers to Kant's distinction between the empirical and the transcendental ego. But he then tends to speak as though the transcendental ego were the absolute I am that I am of Exodus and the God in whom the finite self is called to lose and find itself at the same time.

All this is obviously cloudy and imprecise. Yes. But it is at any rate clear that Coleridge opposes a spiritualistic interpretation of the human self to materialism and phenomenalism. And it is clearly this interpretation of the self which in his view provides the basis for the claim that reason can apprehend supersensible reality. Indeed, in his essay on faith Coleridge describes faith as fidelity to our own being in so far as our being is not and cannot become an object of sense experience. Our moral vocation demands the subordination of appetite and will to reason, and it is reason which apprehends God as the identity of will and reason, as the ground of our existence, and as the infinite expression of the ideal which we are seeking as moral beings. The MOQ agrees completely with the logical positivists that it is not reason that does this. In other words, Coleridge's outlook was essentially religious, and he tried to bring together philosophy and religion. The MOQ is essentially philosophical. He may have tended, as Mill notes, to turn Christian mysteries into philosophical truths. But an important element in the mission of idealism, as conceived by its more religious adherents, was precisely that of giving a metaphysical basis to a Christian tradition which seemed to be signally lacking in any philosophical backbone. The MOQ supports religion but does not support many Christian traditions.

In the field of social and political theory Coleridge was conservative in the sense that he was opposed to the iconoclasm of the radicals and desired the preservation and actualization of the values inherent in traditional institutions.  At one time he was indeed attracted, like Wordsworth and Southey, by the ideas which inspired the French Revolution. But he came to abandon the radicalism of his youth, though his subsequent conservatism arose not from any hatred of change as such but from a belief that the institutions created by the national spirit in the course of its history embodied [181] real values which men should endeavour to realize. As Mill put it, Bentham demanded 'the extinction of the institutions and creeds which had hitherto existed', whereas Coleridge demanded 'that they be made a reality'. The MOQ supports both conservatism and liberalism at the same time. Freedom and order are contradictory but both are necessary at the same time.

(ii) Thomas Carlyle ( 1795-1881 ) belonged to a later generation than that of Coleridge; but he was considerably less systematic in the presentation of his philosophical ideas, and there are doubtless very many people today who find the turbulent prose of Sartor Resartus quite unreadable. However, he was one of the channels through which German thought and literature were brought to the attention of the British public.

Carlyle's first reaction to German philosophy was not exactly favourable, and he made fun both of Kant's obscurity and of the pretensions of Coleridge. But in his hatred of materialism, hedonism and utilitarianism he came to see in Kant the brilliant foe of the Enlightenment and of its derivative movements. Thus in his essay on the State of German Literature  (1827) he praised Kant for starting from within and proceeding outwards instead of pursuing the Lockian path of starting with sense-experience and trying to build a philosophy on this basis. The MOQ is Lockean. The Kantian, according to Carlyle, sees that fundamental truths are apprehended by intuition in man's inmost nature. In other words, Carlyle ranges himself with Coleridge in using Kant's restriction of the power and scope of the understanding as a foundation for asserting the power of reason to apprehend intuitively basic truths and spiritual realities.

Characteristic of Carlyle was his vivid sense of the mystery of the world and of its nature as an appearance of, or veil before, supersensible reality. In the State of German Literature he asserted that the ultimate aim of philosophy is to interpret phenomena or appearances, to proceed from the symbol to the reality symbolized. And this point of view found expression in Sartor Resartus, under the label of the philosophy of clothes. It can be applied to man, the microcosm. 'To the eye of vulgar Logic what is man? An omnivorous Biped that wears Breeches. To the eye of Pure Reason what is he? A Soul, a Spirit, and divine Apparition.... Deep-hidden is he under that strange Garment.' And the [182] analogy is applicable also to the macrocosm, the world in general. For the world is, as Goethe divined, 'the living visible Garment of God'.

In the State of German Literature Carlyle explicitly connects his philosophy of symbolism with Fichte, who is regarded as having interpreted the visible universe as the symbol and sensible manifestation of an all-pervading divine Idea, the apprehension of which is the condition of all genuine virtue and freedom. And there is indeed no great difficulty in understanding Carlyle's predilection for Fichte. For seeing as he does, human life and history as a constant struggle between light and darkness, God and the devil, a struggle in which every man is called to play a part and to make an all important choice, he naturally feels an attraction for Fichte's moral earnestness and for his view of Nature as being simply the field in which man works out his moral vocation, the field of obstacles, so to speak which man has to overcome in the process of attaining his ideal end.

This outlook helps to explain Carlyle's concern with the hero, as manifested in his 1840 lectures On Heroes, HeroWorship and the Heroic in History. Over against materialism and what he calls profit-and-loss philosophy he sets the ideas of heroism, moral vocation and personal loyalty. Indeed, he is prepared to assert that 'the life-breath of all society [is] but an effluence of Hero-worship, submissive admiration for the truly great. Society is founded on Hero-worship.' The MOQ sees heroism as a rather low-level social quality that can be without intellectual and Dynamic merit. Soldiers are often considered heroic when all they have done is sit where an artillery shell came down. Again, 'Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in the world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here'.  That is a defect in the writing of history.

In his insistence on the role of history's 'great men' Carlyle resembles Hegel's and anticipates Nietzsche in some aspects, though hero-worship in the political field is an idea which we are likely to regard with mixed feelings nowadays. However, it is clear that what especially attracted Carlyle in his heroes was their earnestness and self-devotion and their freedom from a morality based on the hedonistic calculus. For example, while aware of Rousseau's shortcomings and faults of character, which made him 'a sadly contracted Hero' Carlyle insists that this unlikely candidate for the title possessed 'the first and chief characteristic of a Hero: he is [183] heartily in earnest. In earnest, if ever man was; as none of these French Philosophes were.'

(iii) In spite of the fact that both men delivered lectures it would be idle to look either to Coleridge or Carlyle for a systematic development of idealism. For a pioneer in this field we have to turn rather to James Frederick Ferrier (1808-64), who occupied the chair of moral philosophy in the University of St. Andrews from 1845 until the year of his death, and who made a great point of systematic procedure in philosophy.

In 1838-9 Ferrier contributed a series of articles to Blackwood's Magazine, which was published with the title Introduction to the Philosophy of Consciousness. In 1854 he published his main work, The Institutes of Metaphysics, which is remarkable for the way in which the author develops his doctrine in a series of propositions, each of which, with the exception of the first fundamental proposition, is supposed to follow with logical rigour from its predecessor. In 1856 he published Scottish Philosophy, while his Lectures on Greek Philosophy and Other Philosophical Remains appeared posthumously in 1866.

Ferrier claimed that his philosophy was Scottish to the core. But this does not mean that he regarded himself as an adherent of the Scottish philosophy of common sense. On the contrary, he vigorously attacked Reid and his followers. In the first place a philosopher should not appeal to a multitude of undemonstrated principles, but should employ the deductive method which is essential to metaphysics and not an optional expository device. In the second place the Scottish philosophers of common sense tended to confuse metaphysics with psychology, trying to solve philosophical problems by psychological reflections, instead of by rigorous logical reasoning. As for Sir William Hamilton, his agnosticism about the Absolute was quite misplaced.

When Ferrier said that his philosophy was Scottish to the core, he meant that he had not borrowed it from the Germans. Though his system was not uncommonly regarded as Hegelian, he claimed that he had never been able to understand Hegel. Indeed, he expressed a doubt whether the German philosopher had been able to understand himself. [184]  In any case Hegel starts with Being, whereas his own system took knowledge as its point of departure.  While the MOQ starts with experience.

Ferrier's first move is to look for the absolute starting-point of metaphysics in a proposition which states the one invariable and essential feature in all knowledge, and which cannot be denied without contradiction. For the MOQ this is, “Some things are better than others.”  Every infant knows this before he learns his first word. This is that 'along with whatever any intelligence knows, it must, as the ground or condition of its knowledge, have some cognizance of itself'. Already the subject-object python has him in its coils.  The object of knowledge is a variable factor. But I cannot know anything without knowing that I know. To deny this is to talk nonsense. To assert it is to admit that there is no knowledge without self- consciousness, without some awareness of the self.

It follows from this, Ferrier argues, that nothing can be known except in relation to a subject, a self. In other words, the object of knowledge is essentially object-for-a-subject. And Ferrier draws the conclusion that nothing is thinkable except in relation to a subject. From this it follows that the material universe is unthinkable as existing without any relation to subject.

The critic might be inclined to comment that Ferrier is really saying no more than that I cannot think of the universe without thinking of it, or know it without knowing it. If anything more is being said, if, in particular, a transition is being made from an epistemological point to the assertion of an ontological relation, a solipsistic conclusion seems to follow, namely that the existence of the material world is unthinkable except as dependent on myself as subject.  Yes, this is the reward of SOM.

Ferrier, however, wishes to maintain two propositions. First, we cannot think of the universe as 'dissociated from every me. You cannot perform the abstraction.' Secondly, each of us can dissociate the universe from himself in particular. And from these two propositions it follows that though 'each of us can unyoke the universe (so to speak) from himself, he can do this only by yoking it on, in thought, to some other self'. This is an essential move for Ferrier to make, because he wishes to argue that the universe is unthinkable except as existing in synthesis with the divine mind.

The first section of the Institutes of Metaphysics thus pur- [185] ports to show that the absolute element in knowledge is the synthesis of subject and object. But Ferrier does not proceed at once to his final conclusion. Instead, he devotes the second section to 'agnoiology', the theory of 'ignorance'. We can be said to be in a state of nescience in regard to the contradictions of necessarily true propositions. But this is obviously no sign of imperfection in our minds. As for ignorance, we cannot properly be said to be ignorant except of what is in principle knowable. Hence we cannot be ignorant of, for example, matter 'in itself' (without relation to a subject). For this is unthinkable and unknowable. Further, if we assume that we are ignorant of the Absolute, it follows that the Absolute is knowable. Hence Hamilton's agnosticism is untenable.

But what is the Absolute or, as Ferrier expresses it, Absolute Existence? It cannot be either matter per se or mind per se. For neither is thinkable. It must be, therefore, the synthesis of subject and object. There is, however, only one such synthesis which is necessary. For though the existence of a universe is not conceivable except as object-for-a-subject, we have already seen that the universe can be unyoked or dissociated from any given finite subject. Hence 'there is one, but only one, Absolute Existence which is strictly necessary; and that existence is a supreme, and infinite, and everlasting Mind in synthesis with all things'.

By way of comment it is not inappropriate to draw attention to the rather obvious fact, that the statement 'there can be no subject without an object and no object without a subject' is analytically true, if the terms 'subject' and 'object' are understood in their epistemological senses. It is also true that no material thing can be conceived except as object-for-a-subject, if we mean by this that no material thing can be conceived except by constituting it ('intentionally', as the phenomenologists would say) as an object. But this does not seem to amount to much more than saying that a thing cannot be thought of unless it is thought of. And from this it does not follow that a thing cannot exist unless it is thought of. Ferrier could retort, of course, that we cannot intelligibly speak of a thing as existing independently of being conceived. For by the mere fact that we speak of it, we conceive [186] it. If I try to think of material thing X as existing outside the subject-object relationship, my effort is defeated by the very fact that I am thinking of X. In this case, however, the thing seems to be irrevocably yoked, as Ferrier puts it, to me as subject. And how can I possibly unyoke it? If I try to unyoke it from myself and yoke it to some other subject, whether finite or infinite, does not this other subject, on Ferrier's premises, become object-for-a-subject, the subject in question being myself?

It is not my intention to suggest that in point of fact the material universe could exist independently of God. The point is rather that the conclusion that it cannot so exist does not really follow from Ferrier's epistemological premises. The conclusion which does seem to follow is solipsism. And Ferrier escapes from this conclusion only by an appeal to common sense and to our knowledge of historical facts. That is to say, as I cannot seriously suppose that the material universe is simply object for me as subject, I must postulate an eternal, infinite subject, God. But on Ferrier's premises it appears to follow that God Himself, as thought by me, must be object-for-a-subject, the subject being myself.  Ferrier’s philosophy demonstrates how far from some idealism the MOQ is.

(iv) Among Ferrier's contemporaries John Grote (1813-66), brother of the historian, deserves mention. Professor of moral philosophy at Cambridge from 1855 until 1866, he published the first part of Exploratio philosophica in 1865. The second part appeared posthumously in 1900 His Examination of Utilitarian Philosophy (1870) and A Treatise on the Moral Ideals (1876) were also published after his death. It is true that nowadays Grote is even less known than Ferrier, but his criticism of phenomenalism and of hedonistic utilitarianism is not without value.

Grote's critique of phenomenalism can be illustrated in this way. One of the main features of positivistic phenomenalism is that it first reduces the object of knowledge to a series of phenomena and then proceeds to apply a similar reductive analysis to the subject, the ego or self. In effect, therefore, the subject is reduced to its own object. The MOQ avoids this reduction. Or, if preferred, subject and object are both reduced to phenomena which are assumed to be the basic reality, the ultimate entities out of which selves and physical objects can be reconstructed by [187] thought. But this reduction of the self or subject can be shown to be untenable. In the first place talk about phenomena is not intelligible except in relation to consciousness. But phenomena exist independently of talk about them. We are getting into the old logical positivist fallacy here of saying, “If we cannot talk about it it must not exist.” For that which appears, appears to a subject, within the ambit, so to speak, of consciousness. We cannot go behind consciousness; If by consciousness he means intellectual consciousness the answer is, “Yes, we can. Value goes behind consciousness. It exists where there is no intellectual consciousness.” and analysis of it shows that it essentially involves the subject-object relationship. In primitive consciousness subject and object are virtually or confusedly present; In the pre-intellectual consciousness of an infant value is present and there are no subjects and objects and they are progressively distinguished in the development of consciousness until there arises an explicit awareness of a world of objects on the one hand and of a self or subject on the other, this awareness of the self being developed especially by the experience of effort. As, therefore, the subject is present from the start as one of the essential poles even in primitive consciousness, No it isn’t it cannot be legitimately reduced to the object, to phenomena. Yes it can. At the same time reflection on the essential structure of consciousness shows that we are not presented with a self-enclosed ego from which we have to find a bridge, as in the philosophy of Descartes, to the non-ego. The MOQ agrees with this last sentence.

In the second place it is important to notice the way in which the phenomenalists overlook the active role of the subject in the construction of an articulated universe. The subject or self is characterized by teleological activity; it has ends. It is the preintellectual value, not the subject, that does these things.And in pursuit of its ends it constructs unities among phenomena, not in the sense that it imposes a priori forms on a mass of unrelated, chaotic data, but rather in the sense that it builds up its world in an experimental way by a process of auto-correction. Again, It is the preintellectual value, not the subject, that does these things. On this count too, therefore, namely the active role of the self in the construction of the world of objects, it is clear that it cannot be reduced to a series of phenomena, its own immediate objects. Yes, it can, and these phenomena are not its objects. They are it’s source.

In the sphere of moral philosophy Grote was strongly opposed to both egoistic hedonism and utilitarianism. The MOQ says hedonism is the intellectual advocacy of biological quality, utilitarianism is the intellectual advocacy of social quality. He did not object to them for taking into account man's sensibility and his search for happiness. On the contrary, Grote himself admitted the science of happiness, 'eudaemonics' as he called it, as a part of ethics. What he objected to was an exclusive concentration on the search for pleasure and a consequent neglect of other aspects of the human personality, especially [188] man's capacity for conceiving and pursuing ideals which transcend the search for pleasure and may demand self-sacrifice. Hence to 'eudaemonics' he added 'aretaics', the science of virtue. Notice the root of arete here. And he insisted that the moral task is to achieve the union of the lower and higher elements of man's nature in the service of moral ideals. For our actions become moral when they pass from the sphere of the merely spontaneous, as in following the impulse to pleasure, into the sphere of the deliberate and voluntary, impulse supplying the dynamic element and intellectually-conceived principles and ideals the regulative element.  The MOQ agrees strongly agrees here, with the exception that it is the Dynamic element that supplies the impulse.

Obviously, Grote's attack on utilitarianism as neglecting the higher aspects of man through an exclusive concentration on the search for pleasure was more applicable to Benthamite hedonism than to J. S. Mill's revised version of utilitarianism. But in any case it was a question not so much of suggesting that a utilitarian philosopher could not have moral ideals as of maintaining that the utilitarian ethics could not provide an adequate theoretical framework for such ideals. Grote's main point was that this could be provided only by a radical revision of the concept of man which Bentham inherited from writers such as Helvétius. Hedonism, in Grote's opinion, could not account for the consciousness of obligation. For this arises when man, conceiving moral ideals, feels the need of subordinating his lower to his higher nature.  The MOQ agrees.

(v) We can reasonably see a connection between the idealists' perception of the inadequacy of the Benthamite view of human nature and the revival of interest in Greek philosophy which occurred in the universities, especially at Oxford, in the course of the nineteenth century. We have already seen that Coleridge regarded his philosophy as being fundamentally Platonic in inspiration and character. But the renewal of Platonic studies at Oxford can be associated in particular with the name of Benjamin Jowett (1817-93), who became a Fellow of Balliol College in 1838 and occupied the chair of Greek from 1855 to 1893. The defects in his famous translation of Plato's Dialogues are irrelevant here. Particularly his confusion of arete and virtue. The point is that in the course of his long teaching career he contributed powerfully to a revival of interest in Greek thought. And it is not without significance that T. H. Green [189] and E. Caird, both prominent in the idealist movement, were at one time his pupils. Interest in Plato and Aristotle naturally tended to turn their minds away from hedonism and utilitarianism towards an ethics of self-perfection, based on a theory of human nature within a metaphysical framework.

The revival of interest in Greek thought was accompanied by a growing appreciation of German idealist philosophy. Jowett himself was interested in the latter, particularly in the thought of Hegel; and he helped to stimulate the study of German idealism at Oxford. The first large-scale attempt, however, to elucidate what Ferrier had considered to be the scarcely intelligible profundities of Hegel was made by the Scotsman, James Hutchison Stirling (1820-1909), in his two-volume work The Secret of Hegel, which appeared in 1865 .

Stirling developed an enthusiasm for Hegel during a visit to Germany, especially during a stay at Heidelberg in 1856; and the result was The Secret of Hegel. In spite of the comment that if the author knew the secret of Hegel, he kept it successfully to himself, the book marked the beginning of the serious study of Hegelianism in Great Britain. In Stirling's view Hume's philosophy was the culmination of the Enlightenment, while Kant, who took over what was valuable in Hume's thought and used it in the development of a new line of reflection, fulfilled and at the same time overcame and transcended the Enlightenment. While, however, Kant laid the foundations of idealism, it was Hegel who built and completed the edifice. And to understand the secret of Hegel is to understand how he made explicit the doctrine of the concrete universal, which was implicit in the critical philosophy of Kant.

It is noteworthy that Stirling regarded Hegel not only as standing to modern philosophy in the relation in which Aristotle stood to preceding Greek thought but also as the great intellectual champion of the Christian religion. He doubtless attributed to Hegel too high a degree of theological orthodoxy; but his attitude serves to illustrate the religious interest which characterized the idealist movement before Bradley. According to Stirling, Hegel was concerned with proving, among other things, the immortality of the soul. In the MOQ there is no soul, except as a literary expression. And though [190] there is little evidence that Hegel felt much interest in this matter, Stirling's interpretation can be seen as representing the emphasis placed by the earlier idealists on the finite spiritual self, an emphasis which harmonized with their tendency to retain a more or less theistic outlook.  The MOQ is atheistic.

[191]Chapter Seven
THE DEVELOPMENT OF IDEALISM

T. H. Green's attitude to British empiricism and to German thought; Green's doctrine of the eternal subject, with some critical comments; The ethical and political theory of Green; E. Caird and the unity underlying the distinction between subject and object; J. Caird and the philosophy of religion; W. Wallace and D. G. Ritchie.

1. Philosophers are not infrequently more convincing when they are engaged in criticizing the views of other philosophers than when they are expounding their own doctrines. And this perhaps somewhat cynical remark seems to be applicable to Thomas Hill Green (1836-82), Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, and White's professor of moral philosophy in that university from 1878 to the year of his death. In his Introductions to Hume's Treatise of Human Nature, which he published in 1874 for the Green and Grose edition of Hume, he made an impressive broadside attack on British empiricism. But his own idealist system is no less open to criticism than the views against which he raised objections.

From Locke onwards, according to Green, empiricists have assumed that it is the philosopher's business to reduce our knowledge to its primitive elements, to the original data, and then to reconstruct the world of ordinary experience out of these atomic data. Apart, however, from the fact that no satisfactory explanation has ever been offered of the way in which the mind can go behind the subject-object relationship and discover the primitive data out of which both minds and physical objects are supposed to be constructed, The MOQ is precisely a satisfactory explanation of the way in which the mind can go behind the subject-object relationship and discover the primitive data out of which both minds and physical objects are constructed,the empiricist programme lands us in an impasse. On the one hand, to construct the world of minds and physical objects the mind has to relate the primitive atomic data, discrete phenomena. In other words, it has to exercise activity. On the other hand, [192]  the mind's activity is inexplicable on empiricist principles. It is explicable when value is brought into the picture. For it is itself reduced to a series of phenomena. And how can it construct itself? Value constructs it. Further, though empiricism professes to account for human knowledge, it does not in fact do anything of the kind. When value is included as the source of empirical phenomena it does do so. For the world of ordinary experience is interpreted as a mental construction out of discrete impressions; and we have no way of knowing that the construction represents objective reality at all. Objective reality is the most valued intellectual construction. In other words, a consistent empiricism leads inevitably to scepticism. Not when value is included.

Hume himself, as Green sees him, was an outstanding thinker who discarded compromise and carried the principles of empiricism to their logical conclusion. 'Adopting the premises and method of Locke, he cleared them of all illogical adaptations to popular belief, and experimented with them on the basis of professed knowledge.... As the result of the experiment, the method, which began with professing to explain knowledge, showed knowledge to be impossible.' Knowledge is a set of static patterns of value. 'Hume himself was perfectly cognizant of this result, but his successors in England and Scotland would seem so far to have been unable to look it in the face.' The MOQ faces it and overcomes it.

Some philosophers after Hume, and here Green is evidently referring to the Scottish philosophers of common sense, have thrust their heads back into the thicket of uncriticized belief. Others have gone on developing Hume's theory of the association of ideas, apparently oblivious of the fact that Hume himself had shown the insufficiency of the principle of association to account for anything more than natural or quasi-instinctive belief. In other words, Hume represented both the culmination and the bankruptcy of empiricism. This bankruptcy exists only in subject-object empiricism.  It does not exist in an empiricism that includes value as the source of empirical knowledge. And the torch of inquiry 'was transferred to a more vigorous line in Germany'.

Kant, that is to say, was the spiritual successor of Hume. 'Thus the Treatise of Human Nature and the Critique of Pure Reason, taken together, form the real bridge between the old world of philosophy and the new. They are the essential "Propaedeutik" without which no one is a qualified student of modern philosophy.' It does not follow, however, that we can remain in the philosophy of Kant. For Kant looks forward to Hegel or at any rate to something resembling Hegelianism. Green agrees with Stirling that Hegel developed [193] the philosophy of Kant in the right direction; but he is not prepared to say that Hegel's system as it stands is satisfactory. It is all very well for the Sundays of speculation, as Green puts it; but it is more difficult to accept on the weekdays of ordinary thought. There is need for reconciling the judgments of speculative philosophy with our ordinary judgments about matters of fact and with the sciences. Hegelianism, however, if taken as it stands, cannot perform this task of synthesizing different tendencies and points of view in contemporary thought. The work has to be done over again.

In point of fact the name of Hegel does not loom large in the writings of Green. The name of Kant is far more prominent. But Green maintained that by reading Hume in the light of Leibniz and Leibniz in the light of Hume, Kant was able to free himself from their respective presuppositions. And we can justifiably say that though Green derived a great deal of stimulus from Kant, he read him in the light of his conviction that the critical philosophy needed some such development, though not precisely the same, as that which it actually received at the hands of the German metaphysical idealists, and of Hegel in particular.

In the introduction to his Prolegomena to Ethics, which was published posthumously in 1883, Green refers to the temptation to treat ethics as though it were a branch of natural science. This temptation is indeed understandable. For growth in historical knowledge and the development of theories of evolution suggest the possibility of giving a purely naturalistic and genetic explanation of the phenomena of the moral life. The MOQ gives a purely naturalistic and genetic explanation of the phenomena of the moral life. But what becomes then of ethics considered as a normative science? The MOQ is normative. The answer is that the philosopher who 'has the courage of his principles, having reduced the speculative part of them [our ethical systems] to a natural science, must abolish the practical or preceptive part altogether'.

Quality is the most practical preception we have. The fact, however, that the reduction of ethics to a branch of natural science involves the abolition of ethics as a normative science should make us reconsider the presuppositions or conditions of moral knowledge and activity.  This is what the MOQ does. Is man merely a child of Nature? Yes. Quality is nature. Or is there in him a spiritual principle which makes knowledge possible, whether it be knowledge of Nature or moral knowledge?  The MOQ says there is no spiritual principle in man that makes knowledge possible.  Nature does the whole job. [194]  Green thus finds it necessary to start his inquiry into morals with a metaphysics of knowledge. And he argues in the first place that even if we were to decide in favour of the materialists all those questions about particular facts which have formed the subject of debate between them and the spiritualists, the possibility of our explaining the facts at all still remain to be accounted for. 'We shall still be logically bound to admit that in a man who can know a Nature—for whom there is a "cosmos of experience"—there is a principle which is not natural and which cannot without a UOTEpOV '.TpÔTEpOV be explained as we explain the facts of nature.' The MOQ says there is a principle and it is natural and it can explain everything.

According to Green, to say that a thing is real is to say that it is a member in a system of relations, the order of Nature. The MOQ says experience is reality. It doesn’t need a system of relations to be real. But awareness or knowledge of a series of related events cannot itself be a series of events. This is what Green gets himself into when he defines reality in this way. Nor can it be a natural development out of such a series. In other words, the mind as an active synthesizing principle is irreducible to the factors which it synthesizes. But Quality is not a factor synthesized by the mind.  Mind is a set of intellectual patterns synthesized by Quality. True, the empirical ego belongs to the order of Nature. But my awareness of myself as an empirical ego manifests the activity of a principle which transcends that order.  Now he is heading in the direction of the MOQ. In fine, 'an understanding—for that term seems as fit as any other to denote the principle of consciousness in question—irreducible to anything else, "makes nature" for us, in the sense of enabling us to conceive that there is such a thing'. Yes, but Quality is a better term for what he is talking about than “understanding.”  Understanding is an intellectual activity.  Pure, immediate, “artistic” valuation is not.

We have just seen that for Green a thing is real in virtue of its membership in a system of related phenomena. At the same time he holds that 'related appearances are impossible apart from the action of an intelligence'. Nature is thus made by the synthesizing activity of a mind. It is obvious, however, that we cannot seriously suppose that Nature, as the system of related phenomena, is simply the product of the synthesizing activity of any given finite mind. Though, therefore, it can be said that each finite mind constitutes Nature in so far as it conceives the system of relations, we must also assume that there is a single spiritual principle, There is that word “spiritual” again. Whenever I hear it I smell a rat. an eternal consciousness, which ultimately constitutes or produces Nature. 

From this it follows that we must conceive the finite mind as participating in the life of an eternal consciousness or in- [195] telligence which 'partially and gradually reproduces itself in us, communicating piece-meal, but in inseparable correlation, understanding and the facts understood, experience and the experienced world'. This amounts to saying that God gradually reproduces his own knowledge in the finite mind. Here comes the rat.  And, if this is the case, what are we to say about the empirical facts relating to the origin and growth of knowledge? For these hardly suggest that our knowledge is imposed by God. Green's answer is that God reproduces his Here, with the word “his,” is the anthropomorphism of the rat.  All we need now is a priest to collect money for the rat and pocket it for himself. I really have no use for these smart-talking theists.  They destroy religion. own knowledge in the finite mind by making use, so to speak, of the sentient life of the human organism and of its response to stimuli. There are thus two aspects to human consciousness. There is the empirical aspect, under which our consciousness appears to consist 'in successive modifications of the animal organism'. And there is the metaphysical aspect, under which this organism is seen as gradually becoming 'the vehicle of an eternally complete consciousness'.

Green thus shares with the earlier idealists the tendency to choose an epistemological point of departure, the subject-object relationship. Under the influence of Kant, however, he depicts the subject as actively synthesizing the manifold of phenomena, as constituting the order of Nature by relating appearances or phenomena. This process of synthesis is a gradual process which develops through the history of the human race towards an ideal term. And we can thus conceive the total process as an activity of one spiritual !!!!! principle which lives and acts in and through finite minds. In other words, Kant's idea of the synthesizing activity of the mind leads us to the Hegelian concept of infinite Spirit.  Now he has capitalized it.

At the same time Green's religious interests militate against any reduction of infinite Spirit to the lives of finite spirits considered simply collectively. It is true that he wishes to avoid what he regards as one of the main defects of traditional theism, namely the representation of God as a Being over against the world and the finite spirit. Hence he depicts the spiritual life of man as a participation in the divine life. But he also wishes to avoid using the word 'God' simply as a label either for the spiritual life of man considered universally, as something which develops in the course of the evolution of human culture, or for the ideal of complete knowl [196] edge, an ideal which does not yet exist but towards which human knowledge progressively approximates. He does indeed speak of the human spirit as 'identical' with God; but he adds, 'in the sense that He is all which the human spirit is capable of becoming'. God is the infinite eternal subject; and His complete knowledge is reproduced progressively in the finite subject in dependence, from the empirical point of view, on the modifications of the human organism.   Thus we make the slow journey from reason to Bible-babble.  These are the people who create logical positivists as a reaction.

If we ask why God acts in this way, Green implies that no answer can be given. 'The old question, why God made the world, has never been answered, nor will be. We know not why the world should be; we only know that there it is. In like manner we know not why the eternal subject of that world should reproduce itself, through certain processes of the world, as the spirit of mankind, or as the particular self of this or that man in whom the spirit of mankind operates. We can only say that, upon the best analysis we can make of our experience, it seems that so it does.'  The reason he “knows not why” is that he has abandoned intelligence for religious conformity.  Actually Green is saying things that are very close to the MOQ and it is angering to see him curtseying in this way to medieval dogmatic superstition.  The selling out of intellectual truth to the social icons of organized religion is seen by the MOQ as an evil act.

In Green's retention of the idea of an eternal subject which 'reproduces itself' in finite subjects and therefore can not be simply identified with them it is not unreasonable to see the operation of a religious interest, a concern with the idea of a God in whom we live and move and have our being. But this is certainly not the explicit or formal reason for postulating an eternal subject. For it is explicitly postulated as the ultimate synthesizing agent in constituting the system of Nature. And in making this postulate Green seems to lay himself open to the same sort of objection that we brought against Ferrier. For if it is once assumed, at least for the sake of argument, that the order of Nature is constituted by the synthesizing or relating activity of intelligence, it is obvious that I cannot attribute this order to an eternal intelligence or subject unless I have myself first conceived, and so constituted, it. And it then becomes difficult to see how, in Ferrier's terminology, I can unyoke the conceived system of relations from the synthesizing activity of my own mind and yoke it on to any other subject, eternal or otherwise. Right.  But the MOQ avoids all these problems.

It may be objected that this line of criticism, though possibly valid in the case of Ferrier, is irrelevant in that of Green. For Green sees the individual finite subject as par [197] ticipating in a general spiritual life, the spiritual life of humanity, which progressively synthesizes phenomena in its advance towards the ideal goal of complete knowledge, a knowledge which would be itself the constituted order of Nature. Hence there is no question of unyoking my synthesis from myself and yoking it to any other spirit. My synthesizing activity is simply a moment in that of the human race as a whole or of the one spiritual principle which lives in and through the multiplicity of finite subjects.  This could be “quality” except for that word “spiritual.”  Remember that people were burned at the stake to release their “spirits” from their bodies.  Quality inheres in high-priced sausages.  Spirit does not. 

In this case, however, what becomes of Green's eternal subject? If we wish to represent, say, the advancing scientific knowledge of mankind as a life in which all scientists participate and which moves towards an ideal goal, there is, of course, no question of 'unyoking' and 'yoking'. But a concept of this sort does not by itself call for the introduction of any eternal subject which reproduces its complete knowledge in a piecemeal manner in finite minds.

Further, how precisely, in Green's philosophy, are we to conceive the relation of Nature to the eternal subject or intelligence? Let us assume that the constitutive activity of intelligence consists in relating or synthesizing. Now if God can properly be said to create Nature, it seems to follow that Nature is reducible to a system of relations without terms. And this is a somewhat perplexing notion. If, however, the eternal subject only introduces relations, so to speak, between phenomena, we seem to be presented with a picture similar to that painted by Plato in the Timaeus, in the sense, that is to say, that the eternal subject or intelligence would bring order out of disorder rather than create the whole of Nature out of nothing. In any case, though it may be possible to conceive a divine intelligence as creating the world by thinking it, terms such as 'eternal subject' and 'eternal consciousness' necessarily suggest a correlative eternal object. And this would mean an absolutization of the subject-object relationship, similar to that of Ferrier. All these objections occur because Green is overburdening the word “conscious.” When you use “quality” they vanish.

Objections of this sort may appear to be niggling and to indicate an inability to appreciate Green's general vision of an eternal consciousness in the life of which we all participate. But the objections serve at any rate the useful purpose of drawing attention to the fact that Green's often acute [198] criticism of other philosophers is combined with that rather vague and woolly speculation which has done so much to bring metaphysical idealism into disrepute.

3. In his moral theory Green stands in the tradition of Plato and Aristotle, in the sense that for him the concept of good is primary, not that of obligation.  Sounds like the MOQ. In particular, his idea of the good for man as consisting in the full actualization of the potentialities of the human person in an harmonious and unified state of being recalls the ethics of Aristotle. Green does indeed speak of 'self-satisfaction' as the end of moral conduct, but he makes it clear that self-satisfaction signifies for him self-realization rather than pleasure. He is getting very close to “quality.” We must distinguish between 'the quest for self-satisfaction which all moral activity is rightly held to be, and the quest for pleasure which morally good activity is not'. This does not mean that pleasure is excluded from the good for man. But the harmonious and integrated actualization of the human person's potentialities cannot be identified with the search for pleasure. For the moral agent is a spiritual subject, not simply a sensitive organism. And in any case pleasure is a concomitant of the actualization of one's powers rather than this actualization itself.

Now it is certain that it is only through action that a man can realize himself, in the sense of actualizing his potentialities and developing his personality towards the ideal state of harmonious integration of his powers. Zen argues that it is through stillness, not action, that a man can realize himself, in the sense of actualizing his potentialities and developing his personality towards the ideal state of harmonious integration of his powers. And it is also obvious that every human act, in the proper sense of the term, is motivated. It is performed in view of some immediate end or goal. Quality. But it is arguable that a man's motives are determined by his existing character, in conjunction with other circumstances, and that character is itself the result of empirical causes. static quality. In this case are not a man's actions determined in such a way that what he will be depends on what he is, what he is depending in turn on circumstances other than his free choice? True, circumstances vary; but the ways in which men react to varying circumstances seem to be determined. statically And if all a man's acts are determined, is there any room for an ethical theory which sets up a certain ideal of human personality as that which we ought to strive to realize through our actions? Yes, Dynamic Quality. [199]  Green is quite prepared to concede to the determinists a good deal of the ground on which they base their case. But at the same time he tries to take the sting out of these concessions. The MOQ needs to concede nothing. 'The propositions, current among "determinists", that a man's action is the joint result of his character and circumstances , is true enough in a certain sense, and , in that sense, is quite compatible with an assertion of human freedom.' In Green's view, it is not a necessary condition for the proper use of the word 'freedom' that a man should be able to do or to become anything whatsoever. To justify our describing a man's actions as free, it is sufficient that they should be his own, in the sense that he is truly the author of them. And if a man's action follows from his character, if, that is to say, he responds to a situation which calls for action in a certain way because he is a certain sort of man, the action is his own; he, and nobody else, is the responsible author of it.  The freedom-order issue is handled much more simply and precisely in the MOQ by the static-Dynamic split.

In defending this interpretation of freedom Green lays emphasis on self-consciousness. In the history of any man there is a succession of natural empirical factors of one kind or another, natural impulses for example, which the determinist regards as exercising a decisive influence on the man's conduct. Green argues, however, that such factors become morally relevant only when they are assumed, as it were, by the self-conscious subject, that is, when they are taken up into the unity of self-consciousness and turned into motives. They then become internal principles of action; and, as such, they are principles of free action.

This theory, which is in some respects reminiscent of Schelling's theory of freedom, is perhaps hardly crystal clear. I would say so.  But it is clear at least that Green wishes to admit all the empirical data to which the determinist can reasonably appeal, and at the same time to maintain that this admission is compatible with an assertion of human freedom. Perhaps we can say that the question which he asks is this. Given all the empirical facts about human conduct, have we still a use for words such as 'freedom' and 'free' in the sphere of morals? Green's answer is affirmative. The acts of a self-conscious subject, considered precisely as such, How can a “self-conscious subject“ be considered “precisely?” I turn positivist when I read statements like this. can properly be said to be free acts. Actions which are the result of physical compul [200] sion, for example, do not proceed from the self-conscious subject as such. They are not really his own actions; he cannot be considered the true author of them. And we need to be able to distinguish between actions of this type and those which are the expression of the man himself, considered not merely as a physical agent but also as a self-conscious subject or, as some would say, a rational agent. 

Mention of the fact that for Green self-realization is the end of moral conduct may suggest that his ethical theory is individualistic. But though he does indeed lay emphasis on the individual's realization of himself, he is at one with Plato and Aristotle in regarding the human person as essentially social in character. In other words, the self which has to be realized is not an atomic self, the potentialities of which can be fully actualized and harmonized without any reference to social relations. Either Copleston is summarizing too much or Green’s philosophy is rambling and disconnected here.  This is just a smorgasbord of pleasant platitudes.  On the contrary, it is only in society that we can fully actualize our potentialities and really live as human persons. And this means in effect that the particular moral vocation of each individual has to be interpreted within a social context. So what is society?  Does Green ever say? Hence Green can use a phrase which Bradley was afterwards to render famous,