... Right regulation of the actions of so complex a being as man,
living under conditions so complex as those presented by a society,
evidently forms a subject-matter unlikely to admit of definite
conclusions throughout its entire range."[2] And the lack of confidence
which the author himself felt in these parts, there is good reason to
extend to the whole structure of evolutionary ethics.
[Footnote 1: Preface to Data of Ethics, 1879.]
[Footnote 2: Preface to Principles of Ethics, vol. ii., 1893.]
Neither the purpose of their structure nor its collapse is so
explicitly proclaimed by the metaphysicians with whom this lecture has
dealt. But we hardly need to read between the lines in order to see
the prominence of the moral interest in all that Green wrote; and it
was after he had shown the inadequacy of the empirical method in the
hands of Hume to give any criterion or ideal for conduct that he made
his significant appeal to "Englishmen under five-and-twenty" to leave
"the anachronistic systems hitherto prevalent amongst us" and take up
"the study of Kant and Hegel."[1] His call to speculation has been
widely responded to; but, if we turn to the most important product of
this speculative movement, we have to extract what enlightenment we
can from the dictum that, in the only sense in which the Absolute
is good, it "manifests itself in various degrees of goodness and
badness.
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