Green, THOMAS HILL

Green, THOMAS HILL, philosopher, was born at Birkin in the West Riding of Yorkshire, where his father was rector, April 7, 1836. At fourteen he was sent to Rugby, then under Goulburn's mastership, and in October 1855 he entered Balliol College, Oxford, where he was profoundly influenced by Jowett, Conington, and C. Parker. In 1859 he took a first-class in the school of litterae humaniores, later a third in law and modern history, and in November 1860 was elected to a fellowship in his college, and re-elected in 1872, becoming also its first lay tutor in 1866. He married a sister of John Addington Symonds in 1871, was appointed in 1877 to be Whyte's professor of Moral Philosophy, and died after an illness of but eleven days, March 26, 1882. By his will he left £1000 to the university for a prize essay in the department of moral philosophy, £1000 to found a scholar- ship at the Oxford High School for boys, and £3500 to Balliol College for the promotion of higher education in large towns. Green's singularly noble character, contagious enthusiasm, and rare union at once of profundity and subtlety in philosophical speculation with strong interest in practical life and in social questions, drew around him a school of disciples that included many of the best men of his time at Oxford. His philosophy grew out of Hegelianism, but was strikingly original and vital in its form, no less than in its applications to the duties of everyday life. Thns, popular education and the spread of temperance were two objects that lay near his heart, and he gave himself with earnestness to the business of the Schools Enquiry Commission of 1864-66, and of the Oxford School-board (1874), and helped to force on the Bribery Commission at Oxford to purge the political conscience of its citizens; because the natural conclusion of his philosophy was towards an association of individuals as homogeneous co-factors in the eternal spirit; the supreme and comprehensive rule of life being the law of love which binds men at once to human society and to God, society itself the necessary condition for the development of personality, and religion but the highest form of citizenship. He had written but little before he contributed in 1874 his masterly introduction to the Clarendon Press edition of Hume's Treatise on Human Nature. His Prolegomena to Ethics, left incomplete at his death, was edited by A. C. Bradley (1883), and two unusually pregnant 'lay-sermons' by Arnold Toynbee in the same year. His scattered essays in Mind and elsewhere were collected and published as the Works, by R. L. Nettleship (3 vols. 1885-88; 2 vols. philosophical; 3d, miscellanies and a memoir). His lectures on The Principles of Political Obligation appeared in 1895. See Fairbrother, The Philosophy of T. H. Green (1896).