GREEN, THOMAS HILL (1836-82). An Eng lish philosopher, born in Birkin, Yorkshire. He was educated at Rugby and Oxford, was elected fellow of Balliol College in 1860, tutor there in 1866, and Whyte professor of moral philosophy in 1878. A disciple of Wordsworth, Kant, and Hegel, he turned his critical powers upon their opponents, the empiricists. He maintained that empiricism disintegrates all experience into iso lated sensations, and fails to explain how such sensations can constitute a knowledge of an ordered objective world. This knowledge, he maintained, presupposes the existence of a time less intelligence as the essential principle of all cognitive beings. This eternal principle, as it appears in finite beings, is a 'reproduction' of the one timeless omniscience which is the indis pensable condition of the existence of the world of nature. And not only human knowledge, but also human volition, points to this eternal spirit, for a timeless principle is necessary to change a natural animal want into such motives as deter mine the will. So influential has Green's teach ing been that there has grown up a body of thinkers, first at Oxford, then elsewhere, who are united in maintaining Green's fundamental doc trine of the eternal consciousness as the postulate of experience. These thinkers form what is
sometimes Neo-Hegelian School. Ed ward Caird, F. H. Bradley, B. Bosanquet, John Watson, D. G. Ritchie, A. Seth, Pringle-Pattison, John Dewey, and very many other English and American philosophers have been profoundly in fluenced by Green's views, however far they may be from subscribing to them. He is supposed to be the original of "Mr. Gray" in Mrs. Ward's Robert Elsmere. Green's works include an Intro duction to Hume's Treatise of Human Nature (1874) ; Prolegomena to Ethics (1883) ; and lec tures on various subjects, posthumously published under the editorial supervision of Nettleship (1885-88). Consult the biographical sketch con tained in vol. iii. of these collected works; also Fairbrother, The Philosophy of T. H. Green (London, 1896) ; A. Seth, Hegelianism and Per sonality (Edinburgh, 1887) ; Ritchie, "The Polit ical Philosophy of T. H. Green," in The Prin ciples of State Interference (London, 1891) ; Sidgwick, "Green's Ethics," in Mind, ix. (ib., 1884) ; Upton, "The Theological Aspects of the Philosophy of T. H. Green," in The New World, i.
(Boston, 1892).
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