Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/397

 H. SIDGWICK, Ethics of Green, Spencer, and Martineau. 383 self-consciousness (Memoir, xcii.-iii.). This way of operating, when exercised through human limitations, is the individual way of an individual human spirit ; for though in one sense logic is every- where the same, yet in another sense every set of ideas has a logic of its own, here giving rise to the structure of character by the same kind of effort towards a whole by which in cognition the logical spirit gives rise to science. Thus it is that persons are different, and these differences are in one sense obviously and really rooted in natural events. But the differences are not due .to natural events, because the contribution of such events to in- dividual human life lies in the transformation which they have undergone, through the new bearings upon one another which the inherent effort towards a " whole " is always introducing. And it is for this reason, viz., that self-consciousness involves a definite though self-adapting Logic, and a definite road to perfection, that the whole of morality, and indeed the whole of life and experience, can be wrapped up in what, if we could separate it into elements, seems as if it would be a bare series of natural events on the one hand, and a meagrely defined Self-Consciousness on the other. I may refer by anticipation to the middle paragraph on page 47, to the effect that the self-conscious entity is to all appearance fully realised at present. This puts in a nutshell the whole question of principle which separates Sidgwick's mind from Green's. To Green the spirit's own nature, in view of its particular present imperfections, prescribes the road which it has to travel towards realisation ; and by its laws, just as we know how to make definite new science out of old plus experience, so we know how to make definite new morality out of old plus experience. The opinion that Green's exclusion of indeterminism he would refuse to call it Determinism destroys imputability (p. 20) seems to me well met by the old answer, which Green states very clearly in sections 110 and 112. It is breaking the connexion between act and character, not maintaining it, that cuts the nerve of responsi- bility. The charge that Green ignores the wilful choice of wrong (p. 25) has, I think, a strong appearance of truth. Yet it is intro- duced by what I believe to be a misinterpretation, which places Green's view in a needlessly unfavourable light. When Green condemns the expression that Desire conflicts with Keason, Sidg- wick takes this to mean (p. 23) that Green ignores the obvious truth that one may act contrary to one's rational judgment. For this is Sidgwick's own meaning in saying that " Desire conflicts with Keason," and he does not think (p. 29) that any one has seriously used the expression to imply a separation and opposition of the two. But I take it that Green is speaking in a sense akin to that of Hume (Treatise, Bk. II., III., iii.) " Of the Influencing Motives of the Will ". " Nothing is more usual in Philosophy, and even in common life, than to talk of the combat of Passion and Eeason, to give the preference to Eeason, etc. On this mode