rks still
too strongly here for his anti-sensationalism to be outgrown quickly.
Green more than any one realized that knowledge _about_ things was
knowledge of their relations; but nothing could persuade him that our
sensational life could contain any relational element. He followed
the strict intellectualist method with sensations. What they were not
expressly defined as including, they must exclude. Sensations are not
defined as relations, so in the end Green thought that they could
get related together only by the action on them from above of a
'self-distinguishing' absolute and eternal mind, present to that which
is related, but not related itself. 'A relation,' he said, 'is not
contingent with the contingency of feeling. It is permanent with
the permanence of the combining and comparing thought which alone
constitutes it.'[1] In other words, relations are purely conceptual
objects, and the sensational life as such cannot relate itself
together. Sensation in itself, Green wrote, is fleeting, momentary,
unnameable (because, while we name it, it has become another), and for
the same reason unknowable, the very negation of knowability. Were
there no permanent objects of conception for our sensations to be
'referred to,' there would be no significant names, but only noises,
and a consistent sensationalism must be speechless.[2] Green's
intellectualism was so earnest that it produced a natural and an
inevitable effect. But the atomistic and unrelated sensations which he
had in mind were purely fictitious products of his rationalist fancy.
The psychology of our own day disavows them utterly,[3] and Green's
laborious belaboring of poor old Locke for not having first seen that
his ideas of sensation were just that impracticable sort of thing, and
then fled to transcendental idealism as a remedy,--his belaboring of
poor old Locke for this, I say, is pathetic. Every examiner of the
sensible life _in concreto_ must see that relations of every sort, of
time, space, difference, likeness, change, rate, cause, or what not,
are just as integral members of the sensational flux as terms are, and
that conjunctive relations are just as true members of the flux as
disjunctive relations are.[4] This is what in some recent writings of
mine I have called the 'radically empiricist' doctrine (in distinction
from the doctrine of mental atoms which the name empiricism so
often suggests). Intellectualistic critics of sensation insist that
sensa