T. H. GREEN, PHILOSOPHICAL WORKS. (ll.) 97
velopment is given to this attempt to bring eternity and time together. The lectures on Kant's Ethics (pp. 83-155), with which must be taken the later-placed discussion "On the different senses of Free- dom as applied to Will and to the Moral Progress of Man " (pp. 308-333), are connected in the closest way with the discussions of the Prolegomena to Ethics. So far as they simply reinforce Green's own ethical doctrines, they call for no further criticism in these pages. But the comments upon Kant's positions will be very useful to the sympathetic student who, in spite of the best ' wish to believe,' feels himself pulled up from time to time by some of Kant's characteristic doctrines. Thus, for example, the notion that the moral will must be determined by the mere idea of conformity to law, from which all relation to a ' matter ' or object is excluded, is admitted to be an impossible demand. " When Kant excludes all reference to an object, of which the reality is desired, from the law of which the mere idea determines the good will, he means all reference to an object other than that of which the presentation ipso facto constitutes the moral law (p. 131). In fact, Kant himself in the Metaphysic of Ethics implicitly founds the possibility of absolute law upon the existence of an object of absolute worth. Again, Green modifies the rigour of the Kantian antithesis between " the desire for pleasure on the one side (in which case the will is ' heteronomous ') and desire for fulfilment of the moral law on the other (in which case alone, according to him, it is * autonomous ')." Moral action involves " the presentation by the agent of himself as an absolute end," but the self thus presented is not " an empty and abstract self " a mere " subject of law " ; it is " a determinate self " a self determined according to the man's dominant interests. " The conceived object, to which in willing he seeks to give reality, may be a state of himself as enjoying certain animal pleasures, or a state of himself as fulfilling some vocation dimly conceived as belonging to him in a divine plan of the world. . . . Or it may be (and more probably is, most men being neither sots nor heroic philosophers) some state of himself as filling a certain position in relation to his family or neighbours or fellow-citizens, and finding happiness therein. Or it may be an object which could not naturally be described as a state of himself at all, but which is still determined by the relation in which he places it to himself, the ruin of an enemy, the happiness of a beloved person, the suc- cess of a political movement, the painting of a picture, the writing of a book, the improvement of his neighbours, the conversion of the heathen." In point of fact, the idea of an absolute and uni- versal moral law arises only at an advanced stage and as the result of reflection upon moral experience. Among other points to which attention may be drawn is the discussion of the different senses of the term Freedom in Kant, and in connexion with that the criticism of Kant's distinction between the empirical and the