 Another question about Green’s metaphysics and ethics is the relation between individual and collective levels of analysis. Consider the priority of individual and corporate consciousness in Green’s metaphysics. It is clear that the individual is prior in order of discovery. We begin by trying to understand an individual’s conscious experience and knowledge. This leads Green to embrace local idealism, understood as the claim that reality or knowable reality cannot concern things as they are in themselves, independently of how they do or can appear to individual thinkers. Indeed, discussion of an individual’s experience and knowledge occupies the bulk of Book I of the Prolegomena. Green then invokes the supposition that there is a single corporate consciousness of which individual consciousnesses are proper parts to avoid an incommensurable plurality of individual-specific realities and to explain the possibility of objectivity. On one reading, individual idealism remains primary, not just in the order of discovery but also in the order of explanation and justification. Green thinks inquiry supports individual idealism, and absolute idealism is a kind of philosophical speculation about how one might try to ground objectivity for individual consciousness. On another reading, Green might think that though individual idealism is prior in the order of discovery to absolute idealism, reflection about the possibility of objectivity shows that absolute idealism is prior in order of explanation or justification. On this view, corporate or eternal consciousness is the only substance and individual consciousness are accidents of this substance.