370 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



human intellect, no theoretical verdict but only a 

 practical resolve of the will and character can avail. 

 Towards this assertion a large amount of recent 

 philosophical writing converges from many different 

 sides. 



Mansel's Lectures, though the argument is now dis- 

 carded as too crude and unphilosophical, did, however, 

 a great deal to draw attention to those very writings 

 against the influence of which Mansel himself desired to 

 58. warn religious thinkers in England. A school of phil- 

 oxford osophy sprang up later in Oxford, mainly under the leader- 



philosophy. 



ship of Thomas Hill Green. He took up in earnest the 

 study of Hegel's philosophy, which, before his time, had 

 in this country been almost the monopoly of a solitary 

 thinker, James Hutchison Stirling, who in his ' Secret of 

 Hegel' (1865) had attempted to open the eyes of the 

 English philosophical public to the importance of the 

 greatest among German idealistic systems. In the same 

 year there appeared also J. S. Mill's 'Examination of 

 Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy,' in which many 

 of the lines of reasoning are criticised which had been 

 taken over from Kant : to these works must be added 

 a third very important publication, the ' Translation of 

 the Dialogues of Plato with Introductory Essays,' by 

 Benjamin Jowett. This began to appear in 1871 ; in 

 it the translator took the opportunity of discussing many 

 of the theories of modern German idealism in their 

 relation to ancient Greek speculation. Green undertook 

 to bring the idealistic argument into connection with 

 the fundamental critical problem, as it had been 

 suggested, but not solved, by David Hume ; and Edward 



