separate contribution to our knowledge of the world from that of feeling,
because both are equally required in order to have experience, a fact that
Locke’s abstractionist model obscures:
The ‘sensible thing’ thus reappears, no longer, however, as a ‘sensibile’ but as a
‘cogitabile,’ not as a complex of attributes, but as the emptiest of abstractions.
The antithesis between thought, as that in which we are active, and experience,
as that in which we are simply receptive, vanishes, for thought appears as a
factor in experience even in its remotest germs. Thought again appears as a
process of concretion, at least as much as of abstraction.
72
Having sketched Green’s general argument against abstractionism, how
might this have led him to adopt a conception of the concrete universal that
is more properly Hegelian than any we have so far discussed? I think we can
see how, by looking at his early essay ‘The Philosophy of Aristotle’ (first
published in the North British Review in September 1866), which was to lay
the groundwork for much of his subsequent thought. Green begins that essay
by first criticizing Locke, along the lines we have discussed; but he traces the
source of Locke’s position to one side of the intellectual legacy left by Plato
and Aristotle, while arguing that another side of that legacy could have
prevented anything like Lockean empiricism emerging, if it had been
properly developed. Green therefore claims that ‘we may distinguish two
really inconsistent theories of knowledge running through Greek philoso-
phy’,
73
one wi th affinities to Locke’s, and one antithetical to it and closer to
his own; and the source of this inconsistency in their position lies in the fact
that Plato and Aristotle saw universality in both abstract and concrete terms.
Thus, on the one hand, Green argues, Plato and Aristotle had a superficial
view of universality, because they saw the universal in terms of the property
or properties that enable us to group individuals into a class on the basis of
their perceptible similarities – so, for exampl e, on this view, ‘the essence of
an acid will be that it sets the teeth on edge, that being the obvious property
by which the sensation is first defined in thought, and which is thus
associated with its name’.
74
However, Green remarks, ‘[b]y the identification
of the universal with a class, the true view of it is lost as soon as it is
gained’,
75
because then the universal can only come to seem accidental to the
individual, and as such the latter is treated as ontologically distinct from the
former, as a ‘bare individual’ accessible to the senses alone:
By such a process [the] emptiness [of the universal] becomes yet more empty,
and meanwhile the individual thing is asserting its independence. Instead of
72
Green, ‘The Philosophy of Aristotle’, 52.
73
Ibid., 53.
74
Ibid., 57.
75
Ibid.
146 ROBERT STERN
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