Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/93

 GREEN'S METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE. 81 " analysis of the conditions which make experience possible " may tell us what elements are necessary to constitute experi- ence, but never can tell us anything about them apart from the experience which they constitute ; and for this plain reason that apart from experience neither they nor experi- ence are anything. It may perhaps be said in answer to these observations that I am wasting time in refuting a theory which after all Green has himself expressly repudiated. And this is in a sense unquestionably true : for on pp. 56, 57 of the Prolegomena we are given fair warning that, if the author uses language to express the relationship of the spiritual principle to nature which (i strictly taken " implies that this relationship is that of a cause to its effect or of a substance to its accidents, it must be "on the clear understanding that this language is of a metaphorical character ". This disclaimer certainly appears to be sufficiently explicit, yet the more it is examined the more difficult does it seem properly to interpret it. In the first place it is purely negative. It tells us what Green does not mean when he uses certain language ; it wholly fails to explain what it is that he does mean. Yet this is after all the important point. Philosophy is not poetry ; it can- not be content to use language which makes no nearer approach to a meaning than that of vague suggestivenessC It cannot be permitted, like mathematics, to introduce into its reasonings expressions incapable of interpretation ; and if it uses metaphor at all it must be as an occasional luxury? not as its daily bread. Yet I think that every candid reader of the Prolegomena will admit that this ascription of causal or quasi-causal activity to the self-conscious intelligence is* no mere rhetorical figure but is ingrained in the very sub- stance of Green's system. I take as specimens two short extracts in addition to those I have already given, from among scores which might be quoted. " We have followed him (Kant), as we believe every one must who has once faced the question, in maintaining that a single active self-conscious principle, by whatever name it be called, is necessary to constitute a world of experience, as the condition under which alone phenomena, ie., appear- ance to consciousness, can be related to each other in a single universe. This is the irrefragable truth involved in the proposition that the under- standing makes nature." 1 And again : " The difficulty of saying what this all-uniting self-seeking self-realising subject is, arises from its being the only thing, or a form of the only thing, iR 40. 6