fiedly resists all specification, and which is therefore useless as an organ for our moral activity.
I have now attempted to show that Green takes the bare fact that there is unity in moral experience, abstracts that unity from experience (although its sole function is to be the unity of experience) and then, setting this unity over against the experience robbed of its significance, makes of the unity an unrealized and unrealizable ideal and condemns the experience, shorn of its unity, to continual dissatisfaction. I have tried to show this, both in general, from the nature of Green's analysis, and, more in particular, from a consideration of the three special modes in which the ideal endeavors to get relatively concrete form. Since I have treated the theory as reduced to its naked logical consistency, I may have appeared to some to have dealt with it rather harshly, though not, I hope, unjustly. But aside from the fact that the truest reverence we can render any of the heroes of thought is to use his thinking to forward our own struggle for truth, philosophy seems, at present, to be suffering from a refusal to subject certain ideas to unswerving analysis because of sympathy with the moral atmosphere which bathes those ideas, and because of the apparent service of those ideas in reclothing in philosophic form ideas endeared to the human mind through centuries of practical usefulness in forms traditional and symbolic.
In closing, I wish to point out that the abstract theories of morals, of which we have just been considering the best modern type, are not aberrations of an individual thinker; that, on the contrary, they are the inevitable outcome of a certain stage of social development, recurring at each of those nodal points in progress when humanity, becoming conscious of the principle which has hitherto unconsciously underlain its activity, abstracts that principle from the institutions through which it has previously acted preparatory to securing better organs for it — institutions, that is, through which it shall flow more freely and more fully. The error consists in transforming this purely historical opposition, an opposition which has meaning only with reference to the movement of a single process, into a rigid or
