Green, Thomas Hill
Green, Thomas Hill
an English philosopher, was born in 1836. He was educated at Rugby and at Balliol College. In 1859 he took his bachelor’s degree; began to study Hegel, and gave a good deal of attention to the Tubingen school, especially Baur. Among the fruits of these studies were two essays on the Development of Dogma. In 1866 he commenced lecturing at Balliol, and in 1878 was elected to the office of Whyte’s professor of moral philosophy, and shortly after resigned. his tutorship. He died March 26, 1882. For the North British Review he contributed, in 1866, on the Philosophy of Aristotle, and on Popular Philosophy in its Relation to Life. His main work followed in 1874, as part of a new edition of Hume’s works by Green and Grose, in four volumes. The first two volumes, including the Treatise on Human Nature, were prefaced by lengthy introductory dissertations; one dealing with the theoretical philosophy of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume; the other with the ethical views of these writers and their contemporaries. “The former,” says a writer in the Academy, “is a probably unequalled piece of minute and at the same time comprehensive criticism of the origins of current English philosophy.” In December 1877, professor Green began, in the Contemporary Review, a series of papers on “Mr. Herbert Spencer and Mr. G.H. Lewes: their Application of the Doctrine of Evolution to Thought.” Besides, in several short reviews published in the Academy, he has made contributions of permanent value to the literature of philosophical criticism. See Contemporary Review, May 1882. (B.P.)
Fuente: Cyclopedia of Biblical, Theological and Ecclesiastical Literature
Green, Thomas Hill
(1836-1882) Neo-Hegelian idealist, in revolt against the fashionable utilitarian ethics and Spencerian positivism and agnosticism of his time, argued the existence of a rational self from our inability to derive from sense-experience the categories in which we think and the relations that pertain between our percepts. Again, since we recognize ourselves to be part of a larger whole with which we are in relations, those relations and that whole cannot be created by the finite self, but must be produced by an absolute all-inclusive mind of which our minds are parts and of which the world-process in its totality is the experience.
An examination of desire and will leads to the same conclusion. These, too, betoken a self which fulfills itself in attaining an ideal. This ideal can be found only in the Absolute, revealed now not only as an absolute mind but as an absolute moral person, enshrining goodness and beauty as well as truth — that is as God. — B.A.G.F.
T. H. GreenProlegomena to Ethics, 1883.