Page:Philosophical Review Volume 12.djvu/566

550 Spencer. "For instance, in the chapters on Marital, Parental, and Filial Beneficence, and in those which discuss the positive duties of 'aiding the sick and the injured,' and giving 'pecuniary aid to relatives and friends,' Mr. Spencer's counsels, judicious for the most part, are usually courageously commonplace. He tells us that when a man in business thinks of asking a brother to lend him money, 'there may fitly be hesitation on both sides'; and suggests that the brother who hesitates to lend may feel that he is taking a 'wise forethought' for the welfare of a brother disposed to borrow, by sparing him the anxiety that the debt would cause. Perhaps it would be difficult for philosophy to illuminate further this delicate problem; but certainly one hardly required to have surveyed the process of the world from the nebula to the nineteenth century, in order to attain this degree of insight into fraternal duty " (pp. 310-311).

Most readers will doubtless turn with special interest to the lectures on Green, not only on account of the essential importance of Green's theory, but because it is this form of ethical theory that offers the most serious opposition to that of Sidgwick himself. The discussion suffers, however, from a single fatal defect, already suggested, namely, the author's inability to appreciate the point of view which he is criticising to the extent which is necessary to give his criticism substantial value; with the best intentions in the world, Sidgwick never seems to have been able to take, even provisionally, and in order to understand its significance, the idealistic point of view. In the discussion of Green, we seldom feel that Sidgwick is master of the situation as we do throughout the discussion of Spencer and Martineau. The discussion gathers round three main points : (1) the connection, or absence of connection, between Green's ethics and his metaphysics; (2) Green's failure to differentiate will from intellect, or to recognize the fact of "wilful choice of evil"; (3) the ambiguity of his view of the good, his oscillation between a wider view of it as realization of capabilities in general and a narrower view of it as realization of moral capability, the latter view alone establishing its "non-competitive" character. 1. Sidgwick succeeds, I think, in making out the absence of any organic connection between Green's ethics and his metaphysics. "Supposing that the argument in Book I is completely cogent, it still remains for Green to explain the bearing of it on the problems of ethics: to explain how we are to get an 'idea of holiness,' of an 'infinitely and perfectly good will,' out of this conception of a combining, self-distinguishing, and self-objectifying agency: to explain what