Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/404

 392 H. HAVELOCK ELLIS : He himself felt this, and during the last five years of his life ethical problems held the first almost the sole place in his mind. In his ethical writings we find the dawn of a direct simplicity, a clear grasp of reality, a patient study of facts which were not the most striking characteristics of his earlier metaphysical stage. He could not approach such questions as of purely theoretical nature ; they appeared to him to touch the very life and being of society. To-day, when the interest taken in ethics generally is so great, when ethical problems come before us with an increasingly prac- tical significance, it may be worth while to consider briefly what Hinton had to say on such questions. Two distinct periods may be traced in Hinton' s general position in regard to morals. In the earlier stage his ethical exactly corresponded with his metaphysical conceptions. As he thought that he found the key to the relation of man to the universe in the doctrine of the self as a negation, so in the same doctrine he saw the key to man's relation to man. The " one word " of his earlier ethics was sacrifice. A passage in his MSS. (written about 1858) well illustrates this transition from metaphysics to morals : " How that idea of self-sacrifice (as the source of all life) is involved in the correlation of forces ! ' Each force merging itself as the force it produces becomes developed,' says Grove. This is the very fact of creation, the exact statement of that self- limit which is creative action. And this is the phenomenal, the ' instinctive ' view of Nature. This has an exquisite beauty; the instinctive view of Nature is the exact fact of creation, a force giving up itself that another may be. Well have I said that Nature, ever and in each of her changes, presents to us directly God's creative act ; this chain of cause and effect is an infinite presentment to us of self-sacri- fice. So Nature presents to us physical self-sacrifice, destined to be superseded by, interpreted into, moral self- sacrifice. Through necessity is physical self-sacrifice seen to be moral self-sacrifice." And we shall find that at this period, and indeed always, sacrifice is involved in Hinton's ethical conceptions. All life, he was never tired of saying, is a martyrdom. In the Life and Letters, as well as in Philosophy and Religion, we shall find reiterated with passionate emphasis the assertion that self-sacrifice is the 1882, and especially MIXD, April, 1882. Reference may also be made here to an article entitled " The Hintons : Father and Son," by George Peard, which appeared in the Contemporary Review, May, 1878, and is remarkable for its critical insight, considering the limited nature of the data at the writer's disposal.