Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/398

 386 H. HAVELOCK ELLIS : to make a new synthesis of the discordant elements of modern thought. It was an attempt to show that, when truly seen, nature known by the intellect and nature known by the emotions in other words, science and religion in the largest sense of each show one and the same action or pro- cess. The starting-point of his first serious attempts in philosophy seems to have been a certain conception of the Absolute. Hinton, when he began philosophising, firmly believed in an absolute which might be known ; not indeed known intellectually but through the moral sense. And, so known, it was not a thing but a process of which things were the phenomena, an everlasting action. This process he called indifferently Being, Love, God, Nature. Such was the conception with which Hinton set out, and it seems necessary to devote a few words to it, not only because it engaged so many years of his life, but also because it forms the true starting-point of much that is fruitful in his later thought, more especially his conception of nature and natural law as not merely including but surpassing man and human law, and all that follows from that conception. In later years this " Actualism," as he sometimes called it, to some extent lost its hold upon him (though he never absolutely rejected it), and in the Preface (written in 1874) to the papers which have been published under the title of Philosophy and Religion, he had to confess that, from being what seemed a clear perception, it had become " only a suggestion of far distant things ". He wrote very little on metaphysics after 1870, and in that little there was (as is frequently found in a thinker's final stage) less of individual idiosyncrasy, more assimilation to the thought of other thinkers. But he never ceased to have a vivid sense of a living reality underlying phenomena. This he called sometimes Nature, sometimes God, though it had little connexion with either the scientific Nature or the theological God. This Being, or rather these Beings (for he frequently distinguished them, making Nature the nearer, God the more distant and ultimate), which his instinct for religion had thus created, became the recipients of Hinton's most intimate self-revelations. But they were not, even consciously, philosophical conceptions, and we can best study them in the " Autobiography ". It is in Man and his Dwelling-place, in Life in Nature, but chiefly in Philosophy and Religion (and the four volumes of printed MSS. from which that selection is made), that the early metaphysical stage of Hinton's thought may be most clearly seen. Han and his Dwelling-place (published in 1859) is to the reader of to-day of little interest. It represents an