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prerogative of man, which places him in a class by himself and unites all men to each other, and yet makes each man a distinct unit in himself. this fact of self-consciousness then, is the central conception of Green's philosophy, and from it he went forth to find a scheme of thought in which each man is an end in himself, and yet an end which can be realised only in relation with the whole world of things and persons in which he finds himself. Accordingly, we find in his works that personality is the essential feature of human nature; but personality can be deep and full only in proportion to the breadth and depth of the relations of the individual to other beings and to other men. What a man is in himself as a spiritual being he can comprehend only when he realises his position as a member of the vast organism made up of the self-conscious beings who are and have been and will be. This is the essential element of Green's moral teaching. In his metaphysic and psychology he looks at man as a selfconscious being who feels and thinks, and by feeling and thinking brings himself to apprehend the common knowledge and experience of humanity, and to increase them; so in ethics, Green looks on man as the source of action. For to him "the will is not some distinct part of a man separable from intelligence and desire, nor a combination of them. The will is simply the man himself, and only so the source of action." We get rid of the endless discussions about faculties and other abstractions of like order. We are able, under Green's guidance, to look at the man as a whole. We are not troubled much with intellect, desire, will; but we are made acquainted with men who think, feel, and act. How great a gain this is we shall readily understand if we reflect that scarcely any book on English psychology has ever touched on the question of personality. As a rule, English psychology discuss faculties as if they had an existence apart from the self. But with Green we are never allowed to forget that all experience is of the self, and all conduct is with a view to realise the self.

Thus, in the Prolegomena to Ethics a note is struck almost unheard of in English ethics up to his time. It is akin to what we read in the metaphysic, for there, too, personality is the great conception. Take the following: "Meanwhile, as must constantly be borne in mind, in saying that the human spirit can only realise itself, that the

divine idea of man can only be fulfilled in and through persons, we are not denying but affirming that the realisation and fulfilment can only take place in and through society. Without society no persons; this is as true as without persons, without self-objectifying agents, there could be no such society as we know. Such society is founded on the recognition by persons of each other, and their interest in each other, as persons-i.e. as beings who are ends to themselves, who are consciously determined to action by the conception of themselves, as that for the sake of which they act. They are interested in each other as persons, in so far as each, being aware that another presents his own self-satisfaction to himself as an object, finds satisfaction for himself in procuring or witnessing the self-satisfaction of the other. Society is founded on such mutual interest, in the sense that unless it were operative, however incapable of expressing itself in abstract formulæ, there could be nothing to lead to that treatment by one human being of another as an end, not merely a means, on which society, even in its narrowest and most primitive forms, must rest" (Prolegomena, pp. 199, 200). Society realised in individuals, and individuals realised through society. Man never to be used by his fellow as a means, but always as an end; man bound to realise himself, and to realise the moral ideal in himself, such are the often recurring ethical thoughts of Green. The moral ideal has a personal character, and is to be realised through persons and in persons. From this central point his discussion spreads out in many directions to most fruitful issues. This point of view determines his views of institutions, usages, customs, nationalities, even humanity itself. For to him humanity is an organism which tends more and more to realise itself, till it becomes a kingdom of moral persons, in whom the one divine mind has gradually reproduced itself.

But perhaps the most distinctive part of his ethical discussion is that on freedom. No doubt the main part of this contribution to ethics is due to Hegel, but Green has made it his own, and has been largely the means of making a home for this rational conception of freedom in our mother tongue. In truth, all British philosophers who have worked under the influence of Hegel have helped to deliver us from the vain notion that the freedom of the will could be discussed as if it were a problem in dynamics. For ages the question

was discussed as to whether the will were free, whether it was determined by the stronger motive, and on these terms there could be no solution. On the one hand, an undetermined will was a monstrosity, and an irrational absurdity; and, on the other hand, a will absolutely determined by the strongest motive, as a balance dips in the direction of the greatest weight, leaves to such a will no ethical meaning. But Hegel and his followers lift the problem out of the sphere of mechanics by the phrase which unites the antimony, and gives a rational meaning to freedom. Freedom is selfdetermination. It belongs to self-conscious beings who have the power of forming an ideal, and of taking means to realise it. In thought, it means that we must bring our thought up to the objective standard of the time; in conduct, it means that we must make our conduct uniform to the objective standard of the right and the good.

With Green, therefore, self-consciousness is the key both to metaphysics and to ethics. Because man is a self-conscious being, knowledge is possible; and because man can form an ideal, and can strive to make his conduct conform to it, ethics is possible. We cannot describe the steps which Professor Green takes in the application of this category to all the problems which arise in metaphysics, ethics, psychology, and logic. On the one hand, he has to deal with the problem of the unity of the world, the unity of history, and the unity of the human organism throughout all time, and to show how in the light of self-consciousness we can arrive at the notion that man and the objects of his knowledge form part of one system, and that the system is a rational, ordered system. In this part of his work he has succeeded, and has taken his place among the great thinkers of the world. But in ethics a great deal of his work will have to be done over again, and something which is lacking has to be supplied. We venture to suggest that here Green has not been faithful to his own principle, and has not given to self-consciousness all the rights it can claim. He has not fully recognised all that is implied in personality. Self-consciousness in his ethical system tends to vanish, and is replaced by a universal self, which is sometimes set forth as that which thinks in all thinkers. To take one out of many passages bearing on the point: "Our formula then is, that God is identical with the self of every man, in the sense of being the realisation of its determinate possibilities, the completion of

that which, as merely in it, is incomplete and therefore unreal; that in being conscious of himself man is conscious of God, and thus knows that God is; but knows what He is only in so far as he knows what he himself really is" (Works, iii. p. 227). Again: "If, then, we are in earnest in speaking of a 'development' of humanity, we must suppose an eternal self-consciousness, which is all that the human self-consciousness has in it to be, and which is conscious of the latter, not merely as a fact, but as an integral element in it, our being and life; and secondly, we must think of the end of human development as one in which what we know of our personality is not extinguished, but survives in a more adequate form as a state of being in which that reconciliation of the claims of persons, as each at once a means to the good of the other and an end to himself, already partially achieved in the higher forms of human society is completed" (Works, iii. p. cxli). The crucial question is not answered either here or anywhere else in the writings of Professor Green, What is the relation of the universal self-consciousness to the self-consciousness of finite beings? Are we to conclude that God is personal only in man, and man immortal only in God? We have sought with all diligence to find out Professor Green's meaning; but neither from him, nor from any who agree with him, can we find any answer to this question. Is God anything in Himself? Is there a divine centre of thought, activity, blessedness; and is there an existence of God for Himself? Green's way of speaking about the universal self-consciousness seems to imply that it has no reality in itself; the only reality it has consists in the fact that it is the logical subject of all possible experience. The attempt to unify the divine and human subject seems to destroy the reality of both.

The appeal must always be to the self-conscious subject. To quote Professor Seth: "There is no deliverance of consciousness which is more unequivocal than that which testifies to this independence and exclusiveness. I have a centre of my own, a will of my own, which no one shares with me or can share, a centre which I maintain in my dealings with God Himself. For it is eminently false to say that I put off, or can put off, my personality here. The religious consciousness lends no countenance whatever to the representation of the human soul as a mere mode or efflux of the divine. On the contrary, only in a person, in

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a relatively independent or self-centred being, is religious approach to God possible. Religion is the self-surrender of the human will to the divine. 'Our wills are ours to make them thine.' But this is a self-surrender, a surrender which only self, only will, can make" (Hegelianism and Personality, pp. 217, 218). It is no doubt a much more difficult task to think of a system of self-centred beings, as existing in a unity, and uniting together for a common end, than to think of a universal self-consciousness which becomes conscious in finite beings. In the former case, we have to find a rational basis for common knowledge and common action, which will also have regard to the possibilities of each self-centred individual. quires a larger calculus; but then it has the advantage of recognising what is true, and it can look both at God and the individual man, and on humanity as something real. The whole of things need not be looked at as self-determination of an eternal subject. On the contrary, we may reach the higher thought of God and man as real persons, as beings possessed of freedom, self-consciousness, and self-determination, existing in a community in which each is recognised as real in himself and real in his relations to all others. For a universal self-consciousness is no adequate idea for God, nor is even self-consciousness an adequate conception for man. Nor is the Hegelian

formula one which recognises the true idea of personality.

Green's philosophy becomes most inadequate when it becomes a philosophy of religion. We have indeed no complete exposition of his views on this topic, but we have many references, and to himself his philosophy was eminently a religious one. But the same defect is found in his philosophy of religion as is found in his ethics. He has not recognised the full significance of humanity, and therefore he has not recognised the significance of Christ. His paper on Christian Dogma is most instructive, both in itself and in the light which it casts on the working of his mind. It helps us to understand that for Green, notwithstanding all that he has written on self-consciousness, the essential character of philosophy consists in that it is a 'system of ideas." The self is for the ideas, is valuable as that by which the system of ideas can be worked out and brought into clear consciousness. But in a mere system of ideas there can be no recognition of the fact that every man, as respects

conduct and character, is in some sense unique; and the same circumstances are not the same for any two men. Following Baur, Green gives us a history of the manner in which the Jesus of the gospel history has become the Christ of the creeds. The result shortly is "of Christ's life, as a series of occurrences enacted in this world of space and time, no concrete representation can henceforth be formed, no intelligible predicates can henceforth be applied to it." He tries to show how, in endeavouring to construe to itself the doctrine of the person of Christ, the Church abstracted more and more from the attributes of the historical Christ. It may be admitted that the Church had a difficult task to do, and it may be that she has not yet succeeded in making clear to herself all that is implied in the doctrine of the person of Christ. But when philosophy, either in the hands of Green or of any other, has made clear to itself what is implied in personality; when it can adequately explain any one human individuality, and place him, as a product fully accounted for and duly labelled, in a system of ideas, it may then say that theology has failed to give a complete account of the person of Christ. Has Green thought of how many contrary-we might say, contradictory-notions are united in self-consciousness? Personality is the unity of many opposites, and for these philosophy has not yet found a formula. If in Christ, then, -even in the historical Christ,—we have a larger number of opposites; if in Him we have the meeting of the infinite and the finite, the union of God and man, of absolute self-assertion with utter selfdenial, the consciousness of infinite power with the constant resolution never to use it, it is not surprising that we are somewhat unable to assign to them a mere place in a system of ideas. But we

may see, notwithstanding, that through the personality of Christ lies the most hopeful way for the search after absolute truth. But for Green the historical Christ has vanished, and has been succeeded by the idea. "To the modern philosopher the idea itself is the reality. To them Christ is the necessary determination of the eternal subject, the objectification by this subject of himself in the world of nature and humanity."

The eternal subject, however, can never be accepted as a substitute for the living God, nor can mankind afford to take the "idea" of the modern philosopher as a substitute for the living Christ. Ideas are only ghosts after all, and are simply

abstractions which fall short of, or are one-sided descriptions of, objective realities. What is to hinder us from continuing to think of Christ after the fashion of a Paul or a John; or what is to prevent us from seeing in His concrete person that union of all opposites from which nothing but sin and evil are excluded. Green himself has taught us a better way of looking at personality than was current in other philosophies. We have only to follow him when he shows us the philosophical and

ethical truth of self-consciousness, to reach some conception of the truth of the personality of Jesus Christ. We have only to refuse to place personality under the iron mechanical rule of an impersonal idea to get rid of many things which he has rather inconsistently brought upon us. But of all things we are sure that, come what may, men will not give up the Christ, and if philosophy can exist only by attenuating Him to an idea, then so much the worse for philosophy.

Its relation to the Higher Criticism is spoken of rather despondingly, as if Judaism could not accept the results of a true criticism of Holy Scriptures. My purpose is briefly to show that the criticism of Scriptures is nothing new to Judaism, and that it would long since have ceased to exist if it were not by virtue of its fundamental principles of religion and morality strong enough to survive ephemeral attacks. And surely the intrinsic value of passages and books which modern criticism places later than the common view assumed is not impaired thereby, even granted that some, certainly not all, modern theories are correct.

Philo, the Alexandrian Jewish philosopher, 54 A.D., who is responsible for much that Christianity possesses, treats many passages of the Bible allegorically or parabolically.

In the pages of the Talmud, 300 B.C.-600 A.D., we find critical views concerning the authorship of certain passages and books of Scriptures uttered with a boldness that will even astonish modern critics. This is the more remarkable, as the Talmud is considered a guide-book of religion by socalled orthodox Jews. To my opinion, however, it is one of the greatest works of reform that has been handed down to posterity. For its main task is to adapt the biblical laws and the Jewish religion to the circumstances and exigencies of the times and countries in which Jews resided after exile and dispersion. What a radical reform, for instance, is the rule laid down in the Talmud (and accepted by

nounces that the law of the land in which the Jew resides is the law that must be obeyed by him (27 nnbbot 827).

Now, in the treatise of Bawbhaw Bathraw, several pages are devoted to the discussion regarding the authorship of some passages and books of the Bible. One Rabbi asserts that the eight last verses of the Pentateuch which report the death of Moses cannot have been written by Moses himself, but by Joshua.

Another doctor, speaking of Job, makes the daring assertion, "Job never lived, nor was he created"; but the book is a parable, i.e. a poem

איוב לא היה ולא נברא) invented by a poetic mind .(אלא משל היה

Of Isaiah, Proverbs, Song of Songs, and Ecclesiastes, it is asserted that they were written by men of the great synagogue, which actually brings these books down to the time of the Maccabees.

I cannot give the whole extract here, which may be left for some other occasion, but the discussion in that treatise is highly significant.

Coming down to the dark Middle Ages, we meet with some of the greatest lights of Jewish scholarship and biblical criticism shining in the Pyrenean peninsula.

Ibn Ezra (born 1088, died 1167), the great scholar, thinker, and poet, whom Spinoza admiringly quotes, and who is therefore the forerunner of modern criticism, doubts the Mosaic authorship of (a) the verse, Gen. xii. 6, "And the Canaanite was then in the land"; (b) Gen. xxxvi. 31–43, and other passages.