Page:The Idealistic Reaction Against Science (1914).djvu/126

 relations places itself outside time, and shares in the Absolute Thought. That which we term our mental history is not the development of this eternal aspect of consciousness by which we are made one with God, and which is not subject to development in time, but is rather a history of the process by which the animal organism becomes the vehicle of this development. The empirical consciousness in its incessant evolution and its interruptions and disturbances should not make us forget its eternal element, that Absolute Thought, which is consciousness of time, but which is not itself in time; which is consciousness of becoming, but escapes all change.

3. Criticism of Green’s Pan-logism. — Green’s philosophy with regard to scientific research differs widely from the empty dialectic of Hegel, which alleged that all the determinations of nature could be constructed out of nothing by means of artificial negations. English Neo-Hegelianism lays no claim to the place of science; its aim is rather to integrate the fragmentary results attained by science, and to find amid the isolated laws and supreme categories of the real the ultimate tie of necessity binding them together in thought. In this direction Green’s epistemology makes a notable step in advance on the logic of Hegel, but he does not succeed in shaking off the prejudice of pan-logism, and persists in the assertion that living concrete reality can be reconstructed by means of a system of abstract relations. There is something in the psychic fact as immediately experienced which no effort of dialectic can ever identify with a system of conceptual relations; sensations, feelings, passions, impulses, volitions as they are given in the concreteness of the human personality, are possessed of an individual aspect which cannot be foreseen, and which, as we shall see, plays into the hands of the opponents of intellectualism. Green asserts that there is no difference between conceiving and feeling, that it will suffice to add to the idea of horse, for instance, the relation of being felt, for the concept of horse to be