The Metaphysics of Knowledge

Excerpt from The Metaphysics of Being an Examination of Some Phases of T. H. Green's Theory of Reality
During the last twenty five years, no attempt among English speaking people to offer a reasoned and systematic account of the nature of ultimate reality has been productive of more fruitful criticism and suggestion than that of Green. No other single force has been so effective in the exposure of the fundamental inconsistencies and contradic tions of the national empiricism, inherited through a long line of ancestors from Locke and Hume. Whatever may be said of the success or failure of Green's own constructive conception of the Real considered as a system, it may be conceded, without fear, that his polemical work represents the high-water mark of English philosophical criticism. But to those acquainted with his philosophical activity as a whole, it is well known that this criticism moves throughout under the lead of a certain idealistic interpretation of the nature of the Real. His central conception is that the universe is a single activity or energy, of. Which it is the essence to be self-conscious, that is, to be itself and not itself in one. Of this activity every particular existence is a limited manifestation, and among other such existences, those which we call *ourselves.' In so far as there is a 'we' at all and a world which may be called 'ours, ' it is because the self which is the unity of the world is communicated under the particular conditions of our physical organization.
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