Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/399

 HINTON'S LATER THOUGHT. 387 immature stage of Hinton's thought, nor is it perhaps the best presentment of that stage. A remarkable book it un- doubtedly is, characterised by a tone of prolonged and high- strung rhetoric, an insistent earnestness which feared to leave anything to the reader's intelligence characters, how- ever, which scarcely foreshadowed the qualities of flexibility, suggestiveiiess and delicate breadth which his later style frequently attained. The second book dealt with the spiritual life of nature. Perhaps Life in Nature, is, as a completed result, the most satisfactory of Hinton's works ; it is that in which he has most adequately thought out a single pregnant idea. He has well summed it up in the Preface to the second edition, written in the year 1875, the last of his life : " The first part tries to resolve Life into mechanism, and the second tries to prove that mechanism is Life." And he adds: "It must seem to many a foolish task. But all I can say is that I believe both arguments ; and that to me they seem to make a consistent whole ; a whole which it is joyful to think true." The present paper is not concerned with any complete or systematic exposition of Hinton's opinions ; it is rather an attempt towards their elucidation and criticism by the consideration of some points in his philosophy, ethics and religion. It is not therefore neces- sary to analyse Life, in Nature; it is a book to be read. How this view of the relation of the organic to the inor- ganic had fascinated this remarkable thinker there is in all his earlier writings abundant evidence. Hinton, with his fine scientific instincts, who finds fault even with Herbert Spencer for not being scientific enough by endowing his " phy- siological units" with an "inherent tendency" was also a poet. Not a poet who had imported into the regions of strict thought imaginative modes of thinking acquired out- side he had none such but a poet nevertheless who had found through science and religion a vision of Nature which was at once a perfectly adequate emotional and imaginative satisfaction, a perfectly adequate moral satisfaction. This vision of a right moral world and a right physical world, which were yet one, and that the spiritual, the actual, world, never forsook Hinton. The words of Mrs. Browning's sonnet, a favourite of his own, express with well-nigh scien- tific accuracy this vision of a Nature " With dream and thought and feeling interwound, And inly answering all the senses round "With octaves of a mystic depth and height, Which step out grandly to the infinite From the dark edges of the sensual ground."