Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/406

 394 H. HAVELOCK ELLIS: ness to gain what he thought a greater religious consolation, bringing this discord into his conception of the world. He has himself supplied what is at once probably a truer and a nobler conception of sacrifice : " Sacrifice is good, but only when it is for service," traceable service, as latterly he always insisted. Criticism, however, seems almost out of place in speaking of a book which, although it appeals to argument as much as to faith, is touched throughout by the glow of emotion, and finds its home, if anywhere, in the heart. One would not rob the gentle and sorrowful souls to whom it has brought comfort of such consolation as it may be able to yield. Earnestness, sympathy, suasion, it has unquestion- ably, and such qualities are good. Nevertheless, Hinton himself in after-days very well described what he has here done. " If w r e shut our eyes on that which is," he wrote, " and construct for ourselves some ideal heaven to satisfy the craving of our moral nature, we are making impossible to ourselves all true interpretation of the facts of human life." It was not till some years later that Hinton modified his ethical conception. It would be more correct to say that he enlarged and completed it. The impulse to self-sacrifice, the renunciation of the individual desires to a something outside them which is greater, a something which, describ- ing it by a word which denoted what they thought highest in themselves, they called a Will, men have always felt ; and they have felt that that Will could be nothing less than Divine. But it is obvious that such a thought cannot become more than a very faint approximation to a guide to conduct ; and even to that extent a guide as likely to lead in a false as in a true direction. The conception by which Hinton sought to supplement it may be described, like the earlier one, in a single word, and that word, service. By sacrifice he had meant the willing acceptance of pain, all thought of self being cast out ; by service he now meant the acceptance of pleasure also, the thought being still not on the self ; that is to say the acceptance of all things, either pleasure or pain, that served. Hinton did not claim, nor could it be claimed for him, that such a conception was new. But in many of its bearings it assumed in his hands a fresh significance. 1 When so venerable and familiar a word is 1 It is obvious that he thus escaped at once the debates which centre around the word "happiness". Happiness must always be found, as Mr. Herbert Spencer has pointed out, in every ultimate analysis of the ethical end ; but it does not therefore necessarily enter into the ethical aim. In