[10] In 1879, Green sat on the committee formed to create an Oxford women's college "in which no distinction will be made between students on the ground of their belonging to different religious denominations."

Most of his major works were published posthumously, including his lay sermons on Faith and The Witness of God, the essay "On the Different Senses of 'Freedom' as Applied to Will and the Moral Progress of Man", Prolegomena to Ethics, Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation, and the "Lecture on Liberal Legislation and Freedom of Contract".

Hume's empiricism and biological evolution (including Herbert Spencer) were chief features in English thought during the third quarter of the 19th century.

Green argued that when these doctrines were carried to their logical conclusion, they not only "rendered all philosophy futile", but were fatal to practical life.

By reducing the human mind to a series of unrelated atomic sensations, these related teachings destroyed the possibility of knowledge, he argued.

Green tried to deflate the pretensions of psychologists who had claimed that their young field would provide a scientific replacement for traditional epistemology and metaphysics.

In the light of this knowledge, we shall be able to formulate the moral code, which, in turn, will serve as a criterion of actual civic and social institutions.

In other words, the whole mental structure we call knowledge consists, in its simplest equally with its most complex constituents, of the "work of the mind."

[7] Carrying on the same method into the area of moral philosophy, Green argued that ethics applies to the conditions of social life—that investigation into human nature which metaphysics began.

[7] This good consists in the realisation of personal character; hence the final good, i.e. the moral ideal, as a whole, can be realised only in some society of persons who, while remaining ends to themselves in the sense that their individuality is not lost but rendered more perfect, find this perfection attainable only when the separate individualities are integrated as part of a social whole.

[7] It is obvious that the final moral ideal is not realised in any body of civic institutions actually existing, but the same analysis that demonstrates this deficiency points out the direction that a true development will take.

Its basis is can be conceived as coercive authority imposed upon the citizens from without or it can be seen as a necessary restriction of individual liberty in light of a social contract, but this consists in the spiritual recognition or metaphysics, on the part of the citizens, of what constitutes their true nature, some conceptions and complicating factors are elaborating questions concerning: "Will, not force, is the basis of the state.

Green believed that the state should foster and protect the social, political and economic environments in which individuals will have the best chance of acting according to their consciences.

Over-enthusiastic or clumsy state intervention could easily close down opportunities for conscientious action thereby stifling the moral development of the individual.

Green argued that the ultimate power to decide on the allocation of such tasks should rest with the national state (in Britain, for instance, embodied in Parliament).

The national state itself is legitimate for Green to the extent that it upholds a system of rights and obligations that is most likely to foster individual self-realisation.

Green's teaching was, directly and indirectly, the most potent philosophical influence in England during the last quarter of the 19th century, while his enthusiasm for a common citizenship, and his personal example in practical municipal life, inspired much of the effort made in the years succeeding his death to bring the universities more into touch with the people, and to break down the rigour of class distinctions.

[7] His ideas spread to the University of St Andrews through the influence of David George Ritchie, a former student of his, who eventually helped found the Aristotelian Society.

John Dewey wrote a number of early essays on Green's thought, including Self-Realization as the Moral Ideal.

[14] Green's most important treatise—the Prolegomena to Ethics Archived 9 August 2020 at the Wayback Machine, practically complete in manuscript at his death—was published in the year following, under the editorship of A. C. Bradley (4th ed., 1899).