THOMAS HILL GREEN.* Tins is an edition in separate and
cheaper form of the late Lewis Nettleship's Life of Green, which appeared in 1888 in the third volume of the "Works." Perhaps the best proof of the merits of the biography was that it satisfied even those pupils and friends (and they were not few) by whom Green was reverenced as a saint.
It is indeed a singularly frank and faithful, and yet loving, account of a man who lived the life of a philosopher, and was at the same time so much more. He was philosopher, theologian, politician, Town Councillor, educational reformer, temperance lecturer, College tutor, and University Professor. He preferred hard thinking to wide reading, and was not in the academical sense a learned man. Though a son of the Church, and never unfriendly, he sat loosely to it, and used to say that "whatever he had found in Oxford of political sense was among the Dissenters." He was in many ways a modern Puritan, saved by his philosophy from the faults of the original He had no natural liking for business, but from a consciousness of this as a weakness he always impressed on his pupils the need of being practical. He had no liking for public appearances, and little pleasure in public speaking, but he found it his duty to play an active part in the civic govern- ment of the city of Oxford, with all the sacrifice of tranquillity that this involved. He felt bound to stand up for his political convictions and ideas of reform. There was never a better instance of Plato's philosopher in the Republic who descends into the Cave against his will, and cannot be spared there, though at the cost of his comfort.
This biography is written after the plan now generally accepted as on the whole the best. The hero's views are described so far as possible in his own words, and the history of his life is given largely in his own letters or in documents quoted as they stand. The parts are in this case so skilfully woven into a whole that we feel no other method could have given us an equally profound impression. There is at least one recent biography, in many ways inviting comparison, where the new method has much less success. Nettle- ship has striven to present the whole man, including his philosophical doctrines. There is, perhaps, no book except Mr. Caird's Life of Hegel where the attempt has succeeded so well.
For the ordinary reader the work of Green will be his philosophy, and in the first instance his political philosophy. The name Philosophical Radical does not fit him; he had passed beyond Bentham. His admiration for Bright was unbounded, but he had a larger political horizon. "True political freedom" meant for him not the mere removal of obstacles to free contract, but "the power on the part of the citizens as a body to make the most and best of themselves; to contribute equally to a common good." Freedom of contract is a negative freedom, only valuable as a means to positive freedom in this sense (p. 185). He might, in fact, be called a Constructive Philosophical Radical. For securing equal opportunities of development to all be would allow interference with individual freedom in regard to labour, land, education, and alcohol, to make no longer list. He had a political sagacity that approached prophetic foresight. Mr. Fyffe, the historian, wrote (in the Times of March 28th. 1882): "His political judgment was, I think, without exception, the best that I have ever known"; and he quotes examples. There is nothing in Green's politics of the dreaminess asso- ciated with the Idealistic Philosopher. There is clear insight, firm, unhesitating, ruthlessly frank expression.
These qualities, or at least the last of them, are not to be expected in his religious teaching. There is indeed on his own part the strongest conviction ; but there is "the dread always present to him, and increasingly so as be grew older, of using strong words with little meaning" (p. 221), together with the "consciousness with how little of personal example he could enforce his words" (p. 137). Nettleship thinks it necessary to defend him against the charge of speaking more confidently on the nature of God in the two sermons ("On Faith" and "On the Witness of God") than in the Prolegomena to Ethics. It might have been enough to say that the latter deals with ethics and not theology. His
• • Memos? of Thomas Hal Green, late Fellow of BalUol Col:fp:Word. and Ilrhyto's Pro essor of Moral Philosophy in the University of ord. By B. Nettleahip, allow of Balliol College, Oxford. With a New face by Yr& T. H. Green, and a Portrait. London, Longmans and Co. Oa ad. net.] opinions are not doubtful So far as the conclusions of a philosophy like his can be briefly set forth at all, they may be gathered from such sentences as the following :— "Philosophy is a progressive effort towards a fully articu- lated conception of the world as rational" (p. 101). "We are potentially the consciousness which has the universe for its object ; it is also true that we never get beyond the potentiality" (p. 114). "All truth partakes of the nature of revelation, and though [men of genius] are bound to work actively on their own part, yet it is only by humbly resigning themselves 'in a wise passiveness' to the heavenly influences which are ever about them that their minds can attain to that harmony with themselves and the divine idea which is the key of all knowledge" (p. 130). "It is the littleness not the greatness of man which separates him from the divine" (p. 130). The impulse to knowledge comes from the con- sciousness of the one complete reality which the self potentially is; the inextinguishable, unfulfilled demand for the complete reality is faith (p. 148). Death is "the transi- tion by which the highest form of nature, i.e., the highest realization of spirit, short of its realization in itself, passes into a perfectly adequate realization, i.e., a spiritual one" (p. 158). "All that the good have been to each other by means of sensuous symbols here they will still be, though the symbols are different" (p. 166).
This last quotation is from touching private letters which give the very heart of the man. He describes himself as naturally genial and joyous : not very robust, but "never weary of life, as the youth of this age are fond of saying that they are." Almost from boyhood he has had a con- sciousness like "that which our religious ancestors used to describe as being at peace' or under grace." He has almost instinctively looked at the world as a manifestation of God, and let it have its own way with him. This has bound his days together "with natural piety," and made his life, in spite of great trials," very peaceful" (p. 164). "The sense of death" has always been about him from childhood, and "to look through death" he finds to be "the great permanent trial of reason" (p. 165). He is steeped in Wordsworth, and this was not accidental. If Wordsworth is a Christian, Green should have the name. If the spiritual meaning be the essence of Christianity. Christianity was certainly his creed ; and he clings to its language.
The unique influence of Green on his contemporaries was not due to mere intellectual superiority. It came largely from the spirituality of his teachings and his life, combined as it was with a manly strength of judgment and clear common-sense in worldly affairs. Such a man becomes a guide to others, because they feel that so sane a judgment is unlikely to come to unsupportable conclusions. In this instance, they knew that he was true to himself, and immov- ably faithful to duty in scorn of consequence.
When all such reasons have been told, there remains besides the personality of the man. The man was greater than his works, noble as these were. He quickened the spiritual life of his pupils in a way they could not explain. He seemed to convey in living presence a testimony to the truths he taught. If he had lived longer, he might, it is true, have influenced a new generation of pupils ; but he could not have increased his influence on those that had once passed through his hands ; it was already supreme. Though he died in his forty-sixth year, he had "fulfilled •a long time," and verified his own striking expression : "There is no waste in a good man's death" (p. 165).
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