[Footnote 2: Prolegomena, § 172, p. 180.] [Footnote 3: Ibid., §§ 173, 174, p. 181.] Now I am willing to admit that Green showed a correct instinct in examining the nature of man before entering upon his properly ethical enquiry. One must know what man is before one can say what his 'good' or his duty is; and it is only because man's nature cannot be accounted for as a merely natural or animal product that the way is open for an idealist ethics such as Green's. But perhaps Green laid too much stress on the problem of historical causation. What matters it how we came by our knowledge, provided it is the case that we can know ourselves and the world? If we can now distinguish right and wrong, can ally ourselves with the good, and follow a moral ideal, of what great importance are the steps by which the moral consciousness was attained? And the question here is whether the special results reached by Green in his metaphysical enquiry into human nature have brought us any nearer to a solution of the present ethical difficulty. As we have seen, the metaphysical view which Green arrives at is that the consciousness which is in man and which raises him above nature is the manifestation of--the "reproduction" of itself by--an eternal self-consciousness. Man's own self-consciousness in knowledge and volition is simply God's self--consciousness "reproduced" (to use Green's term) in man's animal nature: so that the animal body and its temporal activities become in some unexplained (and no doubt inexplicable) way "organic" (to use Green's terminology once more, where no terminology seems adequate) to a spiritual reality which is eternal and infinite. I am far from denying the greatness of this conception or its practical value. There is no stronger support to moral endeavour than the conviction that the moral life is a realisation of the divine purpose, that in all goodness the spirit of God is manifest, that the good man is the servant of God or even His fellow-worker. By whatever metaphor this may be expressed--and Green's statement that the divine self--consciousness 'reproduces' itself in human morality is also a metaphor--it betrays the assurance that moral achievement is permanent, and that (in spite of all apparent failures) goodness will prevail. He who fights for the good may be confident of victory.