The law of our being, so revealed, involves in its turn civic or political duties. Moral goodness cannot be limited to, still less constituted by, the cultivation of self-regarding virtues, but consists in the attempt to realize in practice that moral ideal which self-analysis has revealed to us as our ideal. From this fact arises the ground of political obligation, for the institutions of political or civic life are the concrete embodiment of moral ideas in terms of our day and generation. But, as society exists only for the proper development of persons, we have a criterion by which to test these institutions, viz. do they, or do they not, contribute to the development of moral character in the individual citizens? It is obvious that the final moral ideal is not realized in any body of civic institutions actually existing, but the same analysis which demonstrates this deficiency points out the direction which a true development will take. Hence arises the conception of rights and duties which should be maintained by law, as opposed to those actually maintained; with the further consequence that it may become occasionally a moral duty to rebel against the state in the interest of the state itself, that is, in order better to subserve that end or function which constitutes the raison d’être of the state. The state does not consist in any definite concrete organization formed once for all. It represents a “general will” which is a desire for a common good. Its basis is not a coercive authority imposed upon the citizens from without, but consists in the spiritual recognition, on the part of the citizens, of that which constitutes their true nature. “Will, not force, is the basis of the state.”
Green’s teaching was, directly and indirectly, the most potent philosophical influence in England during the last quarter of the 19th century, while his enthusiasm for a common citizenship, and his personal example in practical municipal life, inspired much of the effort made, in the years succeeding his death, to bring the universities more into touch with the people, and to break down the rigour of class distinctions.
Of his philosophical doctrine proper, the most striking characteristic is Integration, as opposed to Disintegration, both in thought and in reality. “That which is” is a whole, not an aggregate; an organic complex of parts, not a mechanical mass; a “whole” too not material but spiritual, a “world of thought-relations.” On the critical side this teaching is now admittedly valid against the older empiricism, and the cogency of the reasoning by which his constructive theory is supported is generally recognized. Nevertheless, Green’s statement of his conclusions presents important difficulties. Even apart from the impossibility of conceiving a whole of relations which are relations and nothing else (this objection is perhaps largely verbal), no explanation is given of the fact (obvious in experience) that the spiritual entities of which the Universe is composed appear material. Certain elements present themselves in feeling which seem stubbornly to resist any attempt to explain them in terms of thought. While, again, legitimately insisting upon personality as a fundamental constituent in any true theory of reality, the relation between human individualities and the divine Person is left vague and obscure; nor is it easy to see how the existence of several individualities—human or divine—in one cosmos is theoretically possible. It is at the solution of these two questions that philosophy in the immediate future may be expected to work.
Green’s most important treatise—the Prolegomena to Ethics—practically complete in manuscript at his death—was published in the year following, under the editorship of A. C. Bradley (4th ed., 1899). Shortly afterwards R. L. Nettleship’s standard edition of his Works (exclusive of the Prolegomena) appeared in three volumes: vol. i. containing reprints of Green’s criticism of Hume, Spencer, Lewes; vol. ii. Lectures on Kant, on Logic, on the Principles of Political Obligation; vol. iii. Miscellanies, preceded by a full Memoir by the Editor. The Principles of Political Obligation was afterwards published in separate form. A criticism of Neo-Hegelianism will be found in Andrew Seth (Pringle Pattison), Hegelianism and Personality. See also articles in Mind (January and April 1884) by A. J. Balfour and Henry Sidgwick, in the Academy (xxviii. 242 and xxv. 297) by S. Alexander, and in the Philosophical Review (vi., 1897) by S. S. Laurie; W. H. Fairbrother, Philosophy of T. H. Green (London and New York, 1896); D. G. Ritchie, The Principles of State Interference (London, 1891); H. Sidgwick, Lectures on the Philosophy of Kant (London, 1905); J. H. Muirhead, The Service of the State: Four Lectures on the Political Teaching of T. H. Green (1908); A. W. Benn, English Rationalism in the XIXth Century (1906), vol. ii., pp. 401 foll.
(W. H. F.,* X.)
GREEN, VALENTINE (1739-1813), British engraver, was born at Halesowen. He was placed by his father in a solicitor’s office at Evesham, where he remained for two years; but ultimately he decided, on his own responsibility, to abandon the legal profession and became a pupil of a line engraver at Worcester. In 1765 he migrated to London and began work as a mezzotint engraver, having taught himself the technicalities of this art, and quickly rose to a position in absolutely the front rank of British engravers. He became a member of the Incorporated Society of Artists in 1767, an associate-engraver of the Royal Academy in 1775, and for some forty years he followed his profession with the greatest success. The exclusive right of engraving and publishing plates from the pictures in the Düsseldorf gallery was granted him by the duke of Bavaria in 1789, but, after he had issued more than twenty of these plates, the siege of that city by the French put an end to this undertaking and caused him serious financial loss. From this cause, and through the failure of certain other speculations, he was reduced to poverty; and in consequence he took the post of keeper of the British Institution in 1805, and continued in this office for the remainder of his life. During his career as an engraver he produced some four hundred plates after portraits by Reynolds, Romney, and other British artists, after the compositions of Benjamin West, and after pictures by Van Dyck, Rubens, Murillo, and other old masters. It is claimed for him that he was one of the first engravers to show how admirably mezzotint could be applied to the translation of pictorial compositions as well as portraits, but at the present time it is to his portraits that most attention is given by collectors. His engravings are distinguished by exceptional richness and subtlety of tone, and by very judicious management of relations of light and shade; and they have, almost without exception, notable freshness and grace of handling.
See Valentine Green, by Alfred Whitman (London, 1902).
GREEN, WILLIAM HENRY (1825-1900), American Hebrew scholar, was born in Groveville, near Bordentown, New Jersey, on the 27th of January 1825. He was descended in the sixth generation from Jonathan Dickinson, first president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University), and his ancestors had been closely connected with the Presbyterian church. He graduated in 1840 from Lafayette College, where he was tutor in mathematics (1840-1842) and adjunct professor (1843-1844). In 1846 he graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary, and was instructor in Hebrew there in 1846-1849. He was ordained in 1848 and was pastor of the Central Presbyterian church of Philadelphia in 1849-1851. From August 1851 until his death, in Princeton, New Jersey, on the 10th of February 1900, he was professor of Biblical and Oriental Literature in Princeton Theological Seminary. From 1859 the title of his chair was Oriental and Old Testament Literature. In 1868 he refused the presidency of Princeton College; as senior professor he was long acting head of the Theological Seminary. He was a great Hebrew teacher: his Grammar of the Hebrew Language (1861, revised 1888) was a distinct improvement in method on Gesenius, Roediger, Ewald and Nordheimer. All his knowledge of Semitic languages he used in a “conservative Higher Criticism,” which is maintained in the following works: The Pentateuch Vindicated from the Aspersions of Bishop Colenso (1863), Moses and the Prophets (1883), The Hebrew Feasts in their Relation to Recent Critical Hypotheses Concerning the Pentateuch (1885), The Unity of the Book of Genesis (1895), The Higher Criticism of the Pentateuch (1895), and A General Introduction to the Old Testament, vol. i. Canon (1898), vol. ii. Text (1899). He was the scholarly leader of the orthodox wing of the Presbyterian church in America, and was moderator of the General Assembly of 1891. Green was chairman of the Old Testament committee of the Anglo-American Bible revision committee.