ABSTRACT
The “Greats” school at Oxford, in its application of classical scholarship to the study of ancient history and philosophy, made continual reference to modern philosophical developments and to the social and political problems of contemporary England. T. H. Green cites the Edinburgh Hegelian dictum that God without the world would be no God at all – thought is nothing without its externalization. Aristotle’s idea of potentiality and actuality is one of the principal constituents in the Hegelian idea that the world is the unfolding of a single concept from bare abstraction to full concretion. Hegel himself maintained that earlier philosophies were partial expressions of the truth which his own system completed. The Hegelian “succession of moments in the unity of the Idea” Jowett considered the nearest approach in modern philosophy to the universal science of Plato.
