" Born under post-diluvian
conditions, Mr. Green was of course unable to accomplish his self-
proposed enterprise, but he must be allowed to have attacked his task
with remarkable energy. "Theology, ethics, politics and political
history, ethnology, language, aesthetics, psychology, physics, and the
allied sciences, biology, logic, mathematics, pathology, all these
subjects," declares his biographer, "were thoughtfully studied by him, in
at least their basial principles and metaphysics, and most were
elaborately written of, as though for the divisions of some vast
cyclop'dic work." At an early period of his labours he thought it
convenient to increase his knowledge of Greek; he began to study Hebrew
when more than sixty years old, and still later in life he took up
Sanscrit. It was not until he was approaching his seventieth year and
found his health beginning to fail him that Mr. Green seems to have felt
that his design, in its more ambitious scope, must be abandoned, and
that, in the impossibility of applying the Coleridgian system of
philosophy to all human knowledge, it was his imperative duty under his
literary trust to work out that particular application of it which its
author had most at heart.
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