Joseph Henry Green’s Spiritual Philosophy
GREEN was the most philosophically cultured and the most devoted of Coleridge’s disciples. Educated for the medical profession and becoming a distinguished member of it, he held successively the Professorship of Anatomy at the Royal College of Surgeons and that of Surgery, first at St. Thomas’s Hospital, afterwards (on its foundation) at King’s College. He was twice President of the Royal College of Surgeons, and twice delivered the Hunterian Oration (in 1840 and again in 1847). At what precise time he became acquainted with Coleridge is not known ; but it seems certain that it must have been as early as 1817, the year in which the German poet and critic Ludwig Tieck paid a visit to England and met Coleridge more than once at Green’s house. Green had been appointed Demonstrator in Anatomy at St. Thomas’s the year before, but with his medical studies he combined a keen interest in German philosophy, and was fired by Tieck’s reports of Solger’s lectures in Berlin to pay a visit to Germany, before taking up his professional duties, and obtain first-hand knowledge of what was being there taught. Solger was much taken with him, and in a letter to Tieck describes the French philosopher, Cousin, who visited him subsequently, as “a sore change from our gallant Green”.1 The manner in which on his return from Germany his friendship with Coleridge ripened is familiar matter of the poet’s biography.
Left as literary executor, at his friend’s death, in possession of all his manuscripts, and with complete discretion as to publication, and at about the same time, by the death of his father, and the inheritance of his property, finding himself free from the necessity of continuing practice as a doctor, Green decided to devote himself thenceforth to his task, as philosophical trustee, conceived with truly Coleridgean amplitude. “Theology, Ethics, Politics and Political History, Ethnology, Language, Aesthetics, Psychology, Physics and the allied sciences, Biology, Logic, Mathematics, Pathology”—his biographer tells us, “were all thoughtfully studied by him, at least in their basial principles and metaphysics, and most were elaborately written of, as though for the divisions of some vast cyclopaedic work”. Meanwhile, having been born, as Traill wittily puts it, “under postdiluvian conditions”,2 lest his master’s main object of the vindication of religious doctrine should remain un-fulfilled, he wrote, under the title of Religio Laici, a first sketch of what was subsequently recast under the title Spiritual Being, finally again recast to form the second volume of Spiritual Philosophy, in the Appendix to which Dr. Simon has printed long extracts from the earlier manuscripts.
The circumstances under which this work was finally produced have been already referred to.3 The book has suffered undeserved neglect for the reasons there mentioned, and, where it has received particular notice, as in Traill’s Coleridge, has been treated with still more undeserved cynicism. It is not a great work, and suffers from the same kind of conservativism that we have noted in Coleridge himself, and (with less excuse) from the same neglect to put himself in direct touch with post-Fichtean philosophy in Germany.4 Of the “School of Hegel”, he has nothing better to say than that it denies the transcendence of Deity. But he was a man of real philosophical ability, and his training in physiology gave him a method of approach to philosophical problems which lent a certain freshness to much that he wrote.5 The two Hunterian Orations on Vital Dynamics and Mental Dynamics respectively, in which he seeks to combine Coleridgean with Hunterian ideas, witness to the breadth of his culture and his power as a writer on non-theological subjects. In his chief work we do him wrong in giving the prominence, that Traill does, to the second and more theological part. Its editor is nearer the mark in saying that the space the Author devotes to it is disproportionate to its importance, as only one of a series of deductive applications of the principles, which he had made his own; and that, had Green been longer spared, he would probably have expanded the compendious statements of the first volume “with infinitely greater amplitude”.
It is at any rate to the first volume, and particularly to the second part of it, that the student to-day will turn for light upon these principles, and the development of which they were capable at the hands of a particularly clear-minded writer. Yet even in the second volume readers interested in the interpretation of the Christian tradition in the light of Neo-Kantian thought will find a striking resemblance between its teaching and that of the author’s greater namesake Thomas Hill Green, as we have it in his “Lectures on the New Testament”, and in his Sermons on “Faith”, and “The Witness of God” (Works, vol. iii). The book in this respect may be said to represent the last stage in the story of the Theological Idealism which was first planted in England by Scotus Erigena, took vigorous root and flourished in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Platonism, was revived by Coleridge, and loaded with a luxuriance of fruit that went near to bringing it to the ground, and is here reset in a form, which the writer trusted would enable it to renew its youth in the more critical atmosphere of his own time.
1 Coleridge, in English Men of Letters Series, p. 185.
2 P. 256 above.
3 His knowledge of Hegel seems to have been derived at a bad second hand from Morell’s History of Philosophy (see Spiritual Philosophy, vol. ii. p. 407 n.).
4 See above, p. 130. For other excerpts, see Snyder, op. cit., pp. 75–7, and 153 n.
5 I have elsewhere remarked on the debt which Philosophy owes to the medical profession (Mind, N.S. 36, p. 439).