Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/79

 GREEN'S REFUTATION OP EMPIRICISM. 65 general meaning of the passage seems sufficiently clear. 1 What Green here asserts is nothing less than this : that the two ' moments ' of (a) thought as containing time, or thought as knowledge, and (b) thought as contained in time, or thought as psychical occurrence, do not admit of a genuine synthesis. Thus his effort to overcome the dualism of thought and reality eventuates, on his own showing, in an irremediable dualism of two aspects of thought. Nor will this outcome of idealism seem at all strange, if we recognise it as simply another expression for that absolute distinction between succession of consciousness and consciousness of succession which is the mainstay of the ' absolute idealist '. And, taking the idealistic conclusion on its own merits, it is difficult to see in it any improvement on the crudest form of empiricism. For consider : while in the one aspect thought is active and ' constitutive ' and autocratic, in the other it is passively receptive of a miraculous revelation. We are left quite in the dark as to how it is ever possible for our purely passive consciousness to distinguish the objective ' communication ' from mere subjective fancy ; seeing that so soon as it starts in to make distinctions on its own account it must cease to be purely passive. And the darkness deepens into a darkness that can be felt, when we hear that, " the one indivisible reality of our consciousness " notwithstand- ing, the object as ' communicated ' to us is never the object "' Undoubtedly that which any event seems to us to be may be nay always is more or less different from what it really is. The relations by which we judge it to be deter- mined are not, or at any rate fall short of, those by which it is really determined." 2 And again : " It is true indeed . . . that the principle which enables us to know that there is a world, and to set about learning its nature, is identical with that which is the condition of there being a world ; but it is not therefore to be imagined that all the distinction and relations, which we present to ourselves and necessarily present to ourselves in the process of learning to know, have counterparts in the real world. Our presentation of them, as a part of our mental history, is a fact definitely related and conditioned in the reality of the world ; but the distinctions presented may 1 If, that is, we do not too strictly interpret the previous assertion, that " consciousness in the former sense " " consists in ... successive modifications of the animal organism ". For that, as it stands, is ' crass materialism '. Prolegomena to Ethics, 23. 5
 * is it exists for the eternal consciousness :