Isaiah Berlin: A Kantian and Post-Idealist Thinker

By Robert A. Kocis

Reacting against both the British Idealists and the logical positivists, Isaiah Berlin forged a new philosophy best described as post-Idealist. This philosophy was deeply informed by Kantian categories and methods, and conditioned by Vichian themes of historical and cultural variation. An advocate of pluralism without relativism, Berlin believed that it was possible to adopt and live by values, but he could not achieve moral certainty that our values are objectively preferable to all others. Like Collingwood and Oakeshott (and some neo-Kantians), Berlin believed that concepts matter and that they have a history; that human values are numerous and incommensurable; that rationalism in politics is dangerous; and that positivists’ hopes for rigorous social sciences are unrealistic. Interestingly, Collingwood and Oakeshott, both also candidates for post-Idealism, shared Berlin’s commitment to these themes. Ultimately, Berlin’s ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ is perhaps best perceived as a critique of Bradley’s Ethical Studies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: Aug 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781786838971

Book preview

Introduction

Berlin attributes to Bertrand Russell the belief that the deepest convictions of philosophers are not to be found in their formal arguments. Rather, their fundamental beliefs are like citadels to be guarded against the enemy with elaborate arguments, but ‘the inner fortress itself – the vision of life for the sake of which the war is being waged – will, as a rule, turn out to be relatively simple and unsophisticated’.¹

For Berlin himself this inner citadel is the belief that humans – as self-transforming beings capable of ends, as purposive beings – require liberty to shape their destinies in accordance with their own pluralistic values, with minimal societal or governmental coercion.² He made no secret of his liberal proclivities: ‘Fundamentally, I am a liberal rationalist.’³ Similarly, he said that ‘I was, and remain, an incurably sceptical liberal, a convinced gradualist.’⁴ While Berlin reminded us repeatedly that negative liberty (NL) is not the only value, clearly it held a special place among the stars in his moral heavens.⁵ He wrote, for instance, that liberty, although not licence nor an easy achievement, is one value without which ‘all things wither’.⁶ His liberal roots are beyond doubt and are on display in virtually every piece he wrote.⁷

In ‘John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life’, he provides one clear exposition of this core belief while describing John Stuart Mill’s account of liberty: ‘man differs from animals primarily neither as the possessor of reason, nor as an inventor of tools and methods, but as a being capable of choice, one who is most himself in choosing and not being chosen for; the rider and not the horse; the seeker of ends, and not merely of means, ends that he pursues, each in his own fashion’.⁸

Liberty comes in (at least) two flavours, and Berlin clearly prefers one over the other. In his well-known essay ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, Berlin offers reasons to prefer negative liberty (NL) over positive liberty (PL). His language in doing so was uncharacteristically strong. At one point, he called PL ‘a monstrous impersonation’; at others he wrote of a ‘magical transformation’ or again of ‘sleight of hand’. Against whom this was this onslaught directed?⁹ It helps if we keep in mind Berlin’s reminders to us of his topic. In preferring NL to PL, he was not preferring laissezfaire capitalism over the social welfare variants.¹⁰ Rather, Berlin reminded us that he, like Benjamin Constant,¹¹ is not employing the terms in that contemporary, colloquial way.¹² What is critically important is to identify the targets against whom Berlin was directing all of his fire-power to protect that inner citadel.

It was obviously not liberals like John Stuart Mill nor the creators of justifications for social welfare programmes like Hobhouse and Hobson.¹³ Berlin provides a few telling examples: his named targets are the Idealists of the generations preceding his own.¹⁴ ‘Hegel, Bradley, Bosanquet have often assured us’ that ‘by obeying the rational man we obey ourselves: not indeed as we are, sunk in our ignorance and our passions, weak creatures afflicted by diseases that need a healer, wards who require a guardian, but as we could be if we were rational …’¹⁵ He further identifies those who believe in Objective Reason like ‘the tough, rigidly centralized, organic state of Fichte …’ because they ‘certainly supposed themselves to be fulfilling, and not resisting, the rational demands which, however inchoate, were to be found in the breast of every sentient being’.¹⁶ In short, the basic core of Berlin’s own beliefs was shaped in opposition to the Idealists of the generations preceding him. Indeed, what is frequently missed in discussions of ‘Two Concepts’ is that the target of this important essay was (arguably) Bradley’s Ethical Studies.¹⁷ (See Chapter 3.) This, then, contributes to the central hypothesis of this work: that Berlin – and Collingwood and Oakeshott¹⁸ – responded in rather predictable ways to the Idealists of the preceding generation.

This consequently becomes a clue that helps to reveal something that is missing – ironically – in most efforts at understanding and assessing Berlin’s corpus. This is ironic because Berlin thought of himself, not entirely accurately,¹⁹ as a historian of ideas.²⁰ After he so carefully examined so many thinkers – Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Vico, Herder, Marx, Helvetius, Rousseau, Fichte, Hegel, Saint-Simon, Turgenev, and de Maistre, merely as a few examples – it is a telling piece of irony that commentary on Berlin has been predominantly focused on certain conceptual themes (like pluralism) rather than on the historical context²¹ in which he developed his philosophy.²²

In the history of philosophy (and of political philosophy) it is commonplace to locate Aristotle as a thinker who followed and was influenced by Plato before him; the Romans are typically portrayed as descendants of the Greeks; after Hegel came Marx; after the doubts of Hume, Kant emerged to mitigate his scepticism; after Kant, Fichte and Hegel tried to improve upon the master. But little attention has been paid to the relationship of Berlin to the generations just before him. The task here is to ask in a systematic way ‘who came before Berlin and what is the relationship between them on the one hand and him and his contemporaries on the other’?

We know that Kant was a formative influence; in Ignatieff’s tapes, Berlin confirmed that the Kantian Rachmilevitch ‘was a dominant influence on me’.²³ He has told us that ‘Anglo-American philosophy and Kant formed me’.²⁴ (During Berlin’s formative years, the analytic school was not yet in command; the British Idealists and then the Realists were.) Kantian themes, especially analysis of concepts and categories of thought, appear with surprising frequency.²⁵ By the same token, he was in open rebellion against the British Idealists. Berlin himself has informed us that ‘I was brought up originally as an English Hegelian. I rebelled against that, because I couldn’t understand Hegelian language, and when I read the English Hegelians I found myself floating about in a kind of a mist which I really did not and still do not enjoy.’²⁶ There is a peculiar phenomenon here that merits exploration: Berlin is a thinker ‘formed’ by Kant – who is frequently viewed as the first of the modern Idealists – while rejecting the British Idealists. What was Berlin’s relationship with the Idealists who preceded him? Can he consistently embrace Kant while rejecting the British Idealists?

Consequently, an appreciation of Kant’s Idealism – along with that of the British Idealists – is essential to understanding Berlin (and Collingwood and Oakeshott). They are, I will maintain, all ‘post-Idealist’ thinkers, having (1) infused certain parts of Kant into their DNA while distancing themselves from the preceding Idealists with respect to (2) the historical variability of concepts and categories, (3) embraced value pluralism, (4) an opposition to rationalism in politics, and (5) articulated anti-positivist insights into the philosophy of the social sciences and history. There is a generational dynamic at work here, and it bears examination. It was, in short, quite understandable that, after Kant brought to the foreground certain universal ideas and categories of thought – space, time, number, and causation – succeeding generations would be concerned with the various ways that different cultures, at different times, approached these varying forms of thought.

Instead of attending to the philosophical tradition immediately preceding Berlin, most analyses of his thought have dealt with certain specific concepts, like pluralism, incommensurability, liberty, hedgehogs and foxes, rationalism, monism, or moral relativism. And as such analyses were conducted, they tended to be within the analytic tradition: that is, the analyses have sought to stipulate precise definitions of these concepts so that a more ‘scientific’ philosophy might result. (Gray’s emphasis on the strong version of incommensurability claim is a classic example; Gray stipulates the meaning of the term in a way that drives him to arrive at his notion of ‘radical choice’ in Berlin’s thought even though Berlin never wrote of such a choice. This approach can bring much precision to a conversation, but, as I will argue, misses Berlin’s point.) For Berlin was about almost everything except such scientific precision; he believed that it was a mistake to rephrase all questions as precisely as possible to make possible a science of politics.²⁷ For Berlin, the philosophical questions surrounding politics were unlikely to disappear. (And if some were to disappear, others would appear to replace them.)²⁸

So, the hypothesis to be examined here is that much of what Berlin wrote was about Kantian themes but that much of the remainder was an oedipal reaction against the British Hegelians. Colloquially, Berlin – and Collingwood and Oakeshott – were Kantians who responded as Herder did to his master, Kant. More formally, the hypothesis is that Berlin – along with Collingwood and Oakeshott – was/were: (1) systematically engaged in Kantian examinations of the concepts and categories of human cognition; but (2) aiming at systematically attending to historical changes in concepts; (3) advocates of cultural and moral pluralism; (4) opposed to rationalism in politics; and (5) committed to bringing out important (anti-positivist) insights into a philosophy of history and the social sciences.

Many of these themes were also sounded by Herder, as well as Vico, who may well have served as inspirations to Berlin, Collingwood and Oakeshott. (We know that Collingwood introduced Berlin to Vico and Herder and that both read Vico and Herder closely.) The ideas of the historical changing of concepts, of cultural and moral pluralism, of opposition to (Enlightenment) rationalism, were all themes that Herder (and Vico before him) sounded. It is worth noting in this context that these five themes rarely appear in other Western political philosophers; none of them is in evidence in (say) the early Rawls, H. L. A. Hart, Lon Fuller or Robert Nozick, to take a few prominent examples.

All of these thinkers – Berlin, Collingwood, Oakeshott – accept, in an almost Idealist way, that Kantian conceptual analysis is an appropriate way to examine concepts and categories (so, ‘concepts matter’).²⁹ But their analysis is opposed to that of the (logical) positivists, who take concepts and define them rigidly so that a disciplined ‘science’ of politics becomes possible. Second, unlike other Kantians and the British Idealists, these thinkers believed that concepts and categories are not eternal but rather vary over time and space (‘concepts have a history’). Third, unlike the Idealists, they all recognized the importance of cultural variation and espoused cultural and value pluralism. Fourth, they all espoused the idea that the Enlightenment ideals of Rationalism must be opposed (an opposition to Rationalism). Fifth, all have original and similar things – opposed to positivism – to say about the philosophy of history and the social sciences.

These hypotheses arise out of a recognition of the irony that Herder, the proponent of cultural variety and pluralism, was a student of Kant, the great universalist. This irony inspired a guess that generations resembling Kant in this way are likely to be followed by generations who respond in ways similar to that of Herder to Kant. Every Kant has (or should have) a Herder. And the Idealists (Kant, Fichte, Hegel and the British Idealists) were the ‘Kant’ to the Herders of Berlin, Oakeshott and Collingwood.³⁰

But if Berlin is rarely examined in relation to the Idealists who preceded him, so too are his contemporaries Oakeshott and Collingwood – who are so hard to categorize – rarely examined in the context of their predecessors and their contemporaries. Like Berlin, they were working in the shadows of the British Idealists but recognized that their time (that of the British Idealists) had passed – still more, they had no desire to join the analytic tradition that was sweeping the Anglo-American tradition. Like Berlin, they (Oakeshott and Collingwood) all succeeded a generation dominated by British Idealism; all sought to take what was good of the Idealist generation (like the epistemological importance of concepts and categories) while rejecting the ontological beliefs in the Absolute or in monism. For examples: where Kant maintained that cognition requires certain ‘categories’ of thought like causation, Collingwood deeply examined the history of causation and demonstrated the plurality of meanings that this concept had had at different moments and in different contexts. (Berlin also depicted causation as a concept with a history, originating in the fourth century BC.³¹) Similarly, where the British Idealists argued for a notion of (positive) liberty, Berlin provided a deep and historical analysis of the plurality of meanings that liberty can take so as to show NL a better ideal than PL. Again: where Kant posited the need for time as a presupposition of cognition, Collingwood examined the idea of history – one measure of time – and showed that notions of time and history varied – over time.³²

Rarely is Sir Isaiah Berlin grouped with other philosophers of his generation, but I hope to show that he shares a similarity of themes and substance with Collingwood and Oakeshott. Also like his contemporaries, Berlin helps to create a post-Idealist alternative to the analytical school that grew up around Russell, Moore, A. J. Ayer and Wittgenstein. The hypothesis is defended here by a textual exegesis of the writings of these philosophers. In that exegesis, rather than simply summarizing – and possibly distorting – their thought, I try to put their central ideas forward by using the words and organization of these authors themselves. (It is interesting to note, for example, that the structure of Berlin’s critique of PL follows the structure of the argument of Bradley in Ethical Studies.)

In short, although these thinkers never thought of themselves as part of a ‘movement’, it is more than mere coincidence that they came to emphasize certain themes and that these themes tended to dominate their philosophies in reaction to their predecessors. So the first chapter will be devoted to a quick and short synopsis of the British Idealists; the following chapter will examine these five themes as found in the writings of Collingwood and Oakeshott; after that, in the second half of the book, the focus will be on examining critically the writings of Berlin in the context of these themes, in the hope of shining new light on his achievements. Berlin (1) writes as one who is squarely in a post-Idealist world, accepting the Kantian belief in the need for certain concepts and categories for any human cognition; (2) presents a viable alternative to modern philosophers of Natural Law (like Lon Fuller) and Natural Right (like the early Rawls).

Methodological Notes

First, since the hypothesis – that these thinkers share similarities around these five themes – is a claim that these philosophers wrote certain things about certain themes, much of the evidence will be their writings. Our hypothesis is that they wrote and believed certain things about the five themes and their writings are the best test of the hypothesis. So that the reader does not have to trust my paraphrasing (or simplifying or summarizing), I have generally tried, where possible, to let them speak in their own voices, following their organization of the arguments.

Second, we will spend a good deal of time examining pluralism. Unfortunately, pluralism is a many-splendoured thing and I have found it useful to distinguish at least three senses of the term as employed by Berlin and the other thinkers. The first, pluralism1 is the most basic sense of the word. It is stipulated that pluralism1 refers to the existence of a plurality of ultimate human values, whether singly or in conjunction as a system of values. Pluralism2 will refer to pluralism1 plus the incompatibility thesis – the tragic claim that one cannot hold all of these values at the same time, within one lifetime or one way of life. Pluralism3 is pluralism2 plus incommensurability, the claim that no rational criterion or combination of criteria can provide reasons for rank ordering these ultimate values and the cultures based on them. The incommensurability claim, in turn, comes in a stronger and a weaker variant; the weaker simply denies that there is a privileged point in history where one can judge other cultures inferior to one’s own while the stronger denies that moral reasoning is possible, leading to moral scepticism and moral relativism. Gray believed that Berlin embraced the stronger variant, a view rejected here.³³

To illustrate, there is evidence that Oakeshott and Collingwood subscribed to pluralism1, probably to pluralism2, and even, at times, to pluralism3. Berlin professes to subscribe to all three, embracing the weaker variant of incommensurability. (If he had embraced the stronger variant, it would have rendered components of his thought incoherent. If the stronger variant of incommensurability were true, one could not give grounds for preferring one value over another; but Berlin did believe, for instance, that there are grounds for preferring NL to PL. See the final chapter.)

Third, I have not presupposed that all readers will come to this book with a ready knowledge of what these philosophers believed and wrote. However, some basic knowledge of the language of political philosophy is presupposed, although I have attempted to stop and define all necessary terms as we proceed.

Fourth, it is worth repeating that these five themes cannot be found in all political philosophers. There are no indications of these five themes in (the early) Rawls, in Lon Fuller or in Robert Nozick (to take but three prominent examples).

Fifth, because our discussion is confined to these five themes, these expositions of the philosophers involved are not meant to be comprehensive. What is provided is what is necessary to support the hypothesis – and not more. Nor are any of the interpretations of these philosophers meant to be original. What is original is (a) the contextualizing of Berlin’s thought relative to the generation of Idealists who preceded him and (b) contextualizing Berlin relative to his contemporaries, his fellow post-Idealists.

The Idealists: A First Glance

Whatever difficulties may attend efforts to arrive at a noncontroversial definition of Idealism, it is largely easy to point to certain thinkers as members of that philosophical approach. It is relatively non-controversial, for instance, to maintain that Immanuel Kant is the founding figure of modern Idealism, and that he was followed by Fichte and then Hegel, who was a proponent of Absolute Idealism. Similarly, there is little controversy that British Idealism was associated with T. H. Green and his students and fellow travellers, like Bosanquet, Bradley, Muirhead and Ritchie. Also, it is not controversial to claim that the British Idealists saw themselves as Hegelians, although some may dispute that.

Kant’s starting point was that our basic awareness of ourselves is as cognitive beings. Before him, both rationalists and empiricists had posited the subject/object divide and then asked how subjects could possibly ever know objects. Kant sought a ‘Copernican’ revolution in which the focus of attention is diverted from the subject/object opposition to the phenomenon of human cognition (erkenntnis). The transcendental argument asks not ‘how can a subject ever know an object?’ but instead, presuming that human cognition exists, asks ‘what presuppositions are necessary to explain that cognition?’ A central part of the answer to that question is that humans must be able to employ certain (universal) concepts and categories (like time, space, causation, and number) to be cognizant of the things of which we are cognizant. (Note that, in Kant’s case, this may be no more than how and what cognitive humans – scientists in particular – thought in the eighteenth century.) Positing these concepts and categories, in turn, enables us to conceive of perception differently. Where empiricists assume that we ‘see’ blotches of colour relatively passively and learn to associate certain blotches with trees, the Idealists believe that we see ‘trees’ because the mind actively employs ideas (ίδεας in Greek, formas in Latin) in perceiving. Perception is thus transformed from a passive reception of raw data into an active process of bringing mental constructs to bear on what is perceived. As Collingwood put it, in perceiving we single out a particular thing from the constant flow of input from the environment, and then we give it a name, determining and objectifying it.

Fichte continued the Kantian project by asking first how the ego (the ‘I’) comes to be and suggests that the ego must come to posit and affirm itself before it can become aware of other entities; he later became an advocate of German nationalism and authoritarian leadership. Hegel, in turn, posits the ‘Absolute’ which engages itself in a historical process of dialectical self-development until true morality emerges in the existence of the rational-legal state. (Some, including Berlin, blame Hegel for the authoritarianism and statism that infected later thinkers like the fascists.)

The British Idealists

This short summary (provided here and in the first chapter) of the British Idealists cannot do justice to the diversity and variety of their beliefs. However, the reader is well-directed to: (1) A. J. M. Milne’s The Social Philosophy of English Idealism,³⁴ (2) Peter P. Nicholson’s The Political Philosophy of the British Idealists,³⁵ and (3) David Boucher’s summary of their historical importance in his small but weighty book on the British Idealists. According to Boucher, ‘The roots of British Idealism were established in Scotland and Oxford during the middle of the nineteenth century and rapidly became the dominant philosophy’.³⁶ Among its proponents were: Edward Caird, T. H. Green, F. H. Bradley, Bernard Bosanquet, Henry Jones, Andrew Seth, D. G. Ritchie, J. S. Mackenzie, Fraser Campbell, William Wallace, W. R. Sorley, M. M. E. McTaggart, John Watson, and J. H. Muirhead.³⁷ Its dominance was challenged at the beginning of the twentieth century by G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, whose work, in conjunction with that of A. J. Ayer, Alfred North Whitehead, Ludwig Wittgenstein and others, ultimately gave rise to the tradition called the ‘analytic’ school of philosophy. (After this, it is almost as though all memory of the British Idealists were erased, although the fact that so many prominent Idealists were seen as ‘German’ may have played a role in the context of two world wars.)³⁸

Among the Idealists are classed the ‘Subjective Idealists’ (an epithet sometimes aimed at Kant and, at other times, Bishop Berkeley),³⁹ the Transcendental Idealists (Kant and the Kantians), and the Absolute Idealists (Hegel and the Hegelians); in this sense, the British Idealists were Hegelians. In addressing the age-old question of the one and the many, they embraced the monistic alternative. Epistemologically (in terms of theories of knowledge) they were akin to the Kantians in seeking to articulate the notion of cognition (erkenntnis) rather than that of mere perception. But the Idealists’ truly imaginative and creative epistemological contributions were (1) the coherence theory of truth, a belief that propositions have truth value only in a broader (theoretical) context and (2) a philosophy of science that enabled them to appropriate Darwin and other natural scientists to the Idealist fold.⁴⁰

The most common approach to human nature among the British Idealists is a type of self-maximization or self-realization, a belief that humans are developing in positive directions and toward a discernible goal. For T. H. Green, legislation and the programmes of the social welfare state are necessary means to achieve that end; for Bradley, humans must be free to pursue that goal; and for Bosanquet, this required that government avoid social welfare programmes and encourage a Spencerian self-reliance. In the field of moral philosophy, this meant that the realm of ends (teleology) is primary and what is defined as right or duty (deontology) is whatever is conducive to achieving the end of human maximization.

Similarly, in the realm of politics, almost all embraced a variant of ‘positive liberty’, although this meant quite different things for the several of them. Bosanquet confronts us with the anomaly of a devotee to PL who is nevertheless opposed to the programmes of the social welfare state (SWS), embracing instead private charities as capable of steering the impoverished away from waste and towards ‘thrift’ or an ability to save bits of money, especially by curtailing money spent on alcohol. By contrast, PL for Green implied that individuals should be accorded certain new rights, by the government, to the basic necessities of life so that maximal self-realization might be achieved.⁴¹

Options for the Next Generation of Thinkers

If the preceding generation believed what the British Idealists believed, what options are open for the next generation? Of course, one might, as Moore and Russell did, reject such beliefs with both hands, setting an alternative course for the neo-empiricism of the analytic tradition. Or one might, as Oakeshott appears to have done, start out as an Idealist and then settle into some sort of reaction against Idealism without fully rejecting it. Or one might, as Collingwood and Berlin seem to have done, immerse oneself thoroughly in the thought of philosophers like Vico and Herder, recognizing the special ways that we can have ‘maker’s knowledge’ of social phenomena and embracing a plurality of cultural variations, each seen as its own set of ‘ultimate’ values.⁴²

Berlin, Oakeshott and Collingwood resounded a series of themes that are virtually predictable for a generation of post-Idealists who chose not to follow the analytic school. The reaction of the post-Idealist generations looks something like this: take what appear to be the strengths of the Idealist tradition (largely the Kantian epistemology) while reacting against its weaknesses (eternal concepts rejected for those with a history, universalism rejected for pluralism, rationalism rejected for a variant of romanticism, and philosophy of history and social sciences oriented around the belief that we can have ‘maker’s knowledge’ of social reality).

The order of the chapters will be as follows: the first chapter will be a brief synopsis of the British Idealists; the second, an examination of Collingwood and Oakeshott relative to the five themes; the third examines Berlin relative to the first theme (concepts matter); the fourth, Berlin on the variability of concepts and categories over time; the fifth, Berlin on pluralism; the sixth, Berlin on rationalism; and the seventh, Berlin on philosophy of the social sciences.

The final chapter will be a critical appraisal of Berlin with respect to the five themes and the following four questions: (1) What is the strength of the ‘require’ in Berlin’s presumption that being human requires a certain amount of negative liberty? (2) Is Berlin a relativist? (3) Might there be only one concept of liberty? And (4) Is PL more inclined to ‘inversion’ than is NL?

1 • The British Idealists

All moral ideas have their origin in reason, i.e., in the idea of

a possible self-perfection to be attained by the moral agent.¹

I. Introduction: The Nature of Reality and of Humans

‘The central idea in nineteenth century Idealist philosophy is the notion of the concrete universal.’² This appears to be oxymoronic or self-contradictory because, in scientific classification, the concrete (or individual) is usually set in opposition to the universal (or abstract). But for the British Idealists, Milne suggested, the concrete universal is to be understood in the context of rational activity: ‘In rational activity, the universal is rationality. But in rational activity what is real is always an individual achievement of rationality. What is real, that is to say, is always an individualized or concrete universal.’³ Or, as Nicholson put it, a concrete universal is a ‘unity’ of two opposing moments – or sides or factors of a dialectical opposition.⁴ For the British Idealists, the concrete universal was a relatively new concept whose utility was to be explored.⁵

Related to this notion was the belief in the monistic ‘Absolute’, a belief that reality is a comprehensive and coherent system moving progressively toward rationality. The Absolute became an almost spiritual reality that was ever-growing; hence it became tied to the belief that humans are ever-improving beings whose development was an expression of the Absolute. This, in turn, virtually implies their belief in ‘self-realization’.

In a world consisting of Absolute Mind, to be human means to be developing and growing along with the Absolute. As developmental beings, humans possess the potential – and a teleological principle of growth – to become ‘more’ than we are at any given moment. This principle of growth may seem quite in keeping with the Aristotelian notion of the ‘soul’ or anima. To an even higher degree, T. H. Green embodied a strong Christian conviction fully in tune with his philosophy, complete with a conviction that