OF THE GOOD. 



219 



when thinkers of an entirely different school, such as 

 Spencer and Lewes, realised the same want. It is 

 highly interesting and significant to see how this 

 growing want was experienced not only by thinkers 

 who, like Mill, Spencer, and Lewes, had been early 

 liberated from the influence of the existing religious 

 solution of the world-problem, but also by a thinker 

 like Green, who, as it appears, never seriously doubted 

 the truth of what we may call Christian metaphysics, 

 but revolted only against the intolerant and uncom- 

 promising manner in which they were expressed in 

 orthodox literature. He recognised that a time was 

 coming when even the genuine believer would desire 

 that his religious convictions be brought into harmony 

 with the results gained by independent and unfettered 

 research in the regions of science and history. 



Now I have had frequent occasion to remark that 

 this necessity had been felt on the Continent ever since 

 the time of the Eeformation, also that the great systems 

 of German idealism never actually broke with the 

 Christian doctrine but only desired to interpret it 

 philosophically, to arrive at its real purport and deeper 

 meaning. It is therefore natural that Green found 

 himself attracted by prominent thinkers of that school, 

 notably by Kant and Hegel, 1 and that he searched, with 



1 " We hardly need to read 

 between the lines in order to see 

 the prominence of the moral in- 

 terest in all that Green wrote ; and 

 it was after he had shown the in- 

 adequacy of the empirical method, 

 in the hands of Hume, to give any 

 criterion or ideal for conduct, that 

 he made his significant appeal to 



'Englishmen under five-and-twenty' 

 to leave the anachronistic systems 

 hitherto prevalent amongst us and 

 take up the 'study of Kant and 

 Hegel.' His call to speculation has 

 been widely responded to." (W. 

 R. Sorley, 'Recent Tendencies in 

 Ethics,' 1904, p. 123.) 



