Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/85

 GREEN'S REFUTATION OF EMPIRICISM. 71 assert that nature, far from having no element of identity with thought, is itself a thought-product. Green first maintains, ostensibly in harmony with the teaching of Kant, that "the understanding makes nature" ( 11-14). In answer to the objection that the proof given only establishes that " without a conception of an order of nature we could not conceive an order of nature," he next contends that knowledge of nature cannot be a " result of natural processes " on the ground that there is no " element of identity " between nature and knowledge ( 15-18). On the strength of these considerations, and fortified by the insight that thought is " as real as anything else " ( 21-23), he proceeds to argue ( 26-37) that, succession being a relation, successive events are not successive ; l and that not only our knowledge of nature, but nature itself, as " the system of related appearances," is " impossible apart from the action of an intelligence". 2 Green himself avers 3 that this does not mean either that nature and knowledge are to be " identified," or that nature is a " result " of intelligence ; but it assuredly can mean nothing else. Besides, his original undertaking was to equate the "real" with " the work of the mind"; 4 and it is certainly in this sense that his results are applied in the sequel. 5 In short, Green argues that because thought (being eternal) has no element of identity with nature, while at the same time (in virtue of having a history) it is as real as anything else ; therefore the truth of Kant's dictum is, that nature in its totality is an eternal thought and empiricism is a va-repov -n-porepov. He thus dexterously contrives to make his premisses not only mutually destruc- tive, but also severally subversive of his conclusion. And if the premisses, when separately analysed, are found to be of more than dubious import, the conclusion taken by itself scarcely even pretends to have a meaning. Just by way of rounding off the above demonstration of the ideality of nature, Green endeavours, in 42-51, to show that the distinction between the ' form ' and ' matter ' of experience the distinction with which he has been working all along is one of those which have no " counterparts in the real world " ; which " exist only for us, . . . not in the world as it is in itself or for a perfect intelligence "." That 1 " The objects between which a relation subsists, even a relation of succession, are, just so far as related, not successive " (op. cit., 81). 2 Op. cit., 36. 3 Ibid. 4 Cf. op. cit., 19 and 24. 5 Cf. op. cit., 42. 6 Op. cit., 43.