Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/109

 96 CEITICAL .NOTICES : view against the other in respect of its philosophical tenability ; but when Agnostics and Idealists are alike found identifying their position with Kant's, I think it might be in the interest of clear thinking to disengage our arguments and results from anything more than a historical dependence .on the inextricably tangled (though, of course, infinitely valuable) system of Kant. These remarks do not at all afl'ect the value of Green's work, which, by the freedom of its criticism, does to a large extent so disengage itself. Some of his criticisms will be very helpful to the student struggling among Kant's multitudinous distinctions and divisions. Take, for example, his remark that " the ' Trans- scendental Analytic ' would have been much simpler if the account of the categories prior to the ' Deduction ' had been omitted". " What is fancifully called the ' Deduction of the Cate- gories ' " deduces in reality only the unity of apperception, and the real deduction of the categories is given, so far as it is given at all, in the 'System of Principles'. The account of ( Schematism ' would then disappear, the imaginary necessity for such a contriv- ance arising solely from the fact that the categories are supposed to be first of all independently, or, in Kant's language, ' metaphy- sically,' reached as pure logical conceptions, and only afterwards adjusted to the sensuous matter of experience. The Section on " The Empirical Eeality of Time " (pp. 72-81) is particularly inte- resting from the independent development of the discussion. Green here touches a question which arises out of the Kantio- Hegelian as it did out of the Berkeleyan idealism. " Admitting an eternal thinking subject as the corr datum of nature, without which nature could not be, what is nature for such a subject ? " " The answer is," Green proceeds, " it is just what it is for our reason, which is this eternal thinking subject." This is a position akin to that of Berkeley in Siris, when he says that " there is no- sense nor sensory, nor anything like a sense or sensory, in God". But Green goes on to admit that "when we come to say what it [nature] is for our reason, we cannot get beyond the mere formal conditions of there being a nature at all," these formal conditions being embodied in the following "formal definition of nature": " For reason . . . nature is a system of becoming which rests on unchangeable conditions ". Does not this seem to eviscerate the universal consciousness of what might be termed broadly the content of reality ? Moreover, in spite of the elimination of sen- sibility, it appears in the sequel of Green's discussion that actual ' changes ' or ' events ' have meaning only for a sensitive con- sciousness. " Sensibility is the condition of existence in time, of there being events related to each other as past, present and future" (p. 79). Consequently, as the condition of "changes- prior to the existence of feeling on earth or anywhere else," Green seemingly postulates what he calls " an eternal sensibility " " a sensibility which never was not ". The precise meaning of these expressions, however, is not quite clear, and no further de-