Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/405

 HINTON 's LATER THOUGHT. 393 condition of happiness. Such an assertion has in all ages been found the expression of their deepest experience by men born with a genius for conduct. It is to this phase of Hiuton's thought that The Mystery of Pain belongs. The Mystery of Pain starts with the recognition of two great and undoubted truths : (1) the evil in man's life ; (2) the unconscious element in all existence ; and Hinton seeks to connect these tw^o by affirming that the latter explains the former. The coldness of one we love, he argues, gives us pain, but were we to find that that seeming coldness conceals a real affection our pain, would be no longer pain but joy. And if there should exist a cause which would explain all the facts which give us pain, that pain likewise would be no longer pain but joy. There is such a cause, says Hinton, but it is unknown. Therefore all pain, taking the word in its most comprehensive sense, may be looked upon as the working out of the redemption of the world, as martyrdom. It follows from this that the man in whom the enthusiasm of humanity is so strong that he devotes his life to the service of his fellows and also the man who is knocked down and killed by a passing cab are, one and the other, sacrificed for humanity. It is a consequence that may possibly be accepted by some, but it is necessary to point out at what cost we must accept such a conception of sacri- fice, which robs martyrdom of all those elements of enthusiasm and renunciation which are its charm and its power. This vast increase of redemption rests, as Hinton insists, on a gigantic act of faith. It seems indeed that a fundamental misconception underlies Tlie Mystery of Pain. It may be true that there is an unseen fact beneath all that we call consciousness. "We are right, doubtless, in making use of the hypothesis of an unknown fact to explain such a pheno- menon as sensation. But the question arises whether we are justified in bringing it in to explain pain, to explain, not the cause, but the purpose, of pain. For it cannot be said that the origin of pain, and the essential part it plays in the development of the individual and the species, are in need of any such mysterious explanation. It was against such teleological conceptions, as he remarks in Philosophy and Religion, that Hinton was always fighting, and having banished design at every point from the domain of the physical he seems in giving it this emphatic assertion in his psychology to have mistaken the tendency of his own thought. For he was never weary of repeating that the physical and the spiritual are one, and it is strange to find a thinker whose insight was often so penetrative, in his eager-