Page:The Idealistic Reaction Against Science (1914).djvu/127

 transformed into the perception thereof; it is, however, one thing to think of feeling and another actually to feel.

Green, however, passes with the greatest ease from the concept of the sensation to the sensation itself, without perceiving that between the two there is an impassable gulf fixed. We may think that all the conditions necessary to the verification of a sensation have been fulfilled, but this will not make us feel. If it were so, the blind could restore their own sight by studying a treatise on optics! Nor can the sophistical argument be adduced that one of the essential conditions is lacking, namely, the normal structure of the eye, since, according to Green, the complete concept of this structure should suffice to transform the idea into a real fact. The intuitionists cannot succeed in accounting for the constant and universal in reality; Green goes to the opposite extreme, and places himself in a position which prevents his understanding that which is individual, concrete, and changeable in the history of the world. From his point of view, indeed, there is no such thing as time, there exists merely the concept of time, which is something external to time; there is no such thing as change, but only the idea of change, which is external to it; there is no such thing as an individual, but only the concept of one which by its very nature must of necessity be universal. If reality then be a network of eternal relations, present in their totality to the Absolute Consciousness; if even a human person be but a fragmentary group of those relations, does it not become impossible to explain the evolutionary motion of things, their incessant transformation, and everything which is most spontaneous, living, and fruitful in the concrete development of our inner life? In the eternal immobility of the idea, time with its efficacious rhythm, and the world as a whole, become, to quote Bradley, merely an illusory appearance. But is not the birth of this illusion too an inexplicable mystery, if human consciousness be a web of unchangeable