Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/403

 HIXTON'S LATER THOUGHT. 391 ties, his analogies, even his absurdities, are admirable for compelling thought. He is to be studied rather than fol- lowed. He seldom recurred to definitions ; it is doubtful whether he ever attempted to formulate what he meant by the " moral emotions " ; and, as every conception he touched was constantly changing and growing beneath his hands, de- finitions would have been valueless. Remarkable as his syn- theses are, he had little of that tendency to logical anal which has generally been held in England to constitute strict thinking. But, as Goethe said to Eckermann, " all the thinking in the world does not bring us to thought ; we must be right by nature, so that good thoughts may come before us like free children of God, and cry ' Here we are '." That was the way in which thoughts came to Hinton, so that altering them was to him, as he said, a kind of sacrilege. We have now caught a few glimpses of Hinton's Platonism. It is scarcely necessary to defend the right to existence of a Platonic synthesis of the world. Like Positivism, Platonism stands for a certain way of envisaging the universe which can at no period quite disappear. Positivism, that view of the world which is born by a kind of parthenogenesis of Science alone, can upon special points always maintain its position; "yet it may be," in the words of Lange, "that the .whole picture of the world which Platonism affords stands nearer to the unknown truth : in any case it has deeper relations to the life of the emotions, to art, to the moral functions of mankind". Hinton sought to vivify Positivism by contact with these things. He held that the Platonic process must be repeated in new relations. I: must be admitted that this new Platonism exists more as a promise than a performance. The brilliant intaf/o has scarcely yet emerged from the chrysalis. Hinton's imagination some- times ran wild in the large liberty of metaphysics ; his vision was not enough circumscribed to produce a good philosophical system ; he saw things in too diffused a light to be able to arrange the shadows of a great and complete synthesis. If he had done no more there are but few to whom his work would appeal. But although one feels compelled to touch first of all on Hinton's philosophical conceptions, 1 he claims our attention more especially as a speculator in the sphere of morals. And it is not perhaps too much to say that as such, as a moral teacher, he is chiefly worth listening to. 1 The reader who is interested in Hinton's philosophical opinions will find some technical appreciations, which are, on the whole, good though fragmentary, in Mr. Shad worth Hodgson's Introduction to The Art of Thinking, and in reviews by the same writer in the Academy, 14th Jan.,