semble the unconscious animal functions, the more do they lend themselves to scientific observation. No doubt there is a thought-life in humanity, whose laws, if we could trace them out, are as invariable as all other laws of nature, but it is not generally possible to observe this life in the individual, in whom self-consciousness, arbitrary determination, or a timid conventionality, interferes with the freedom of the mental operations. Still more rare is a mind that can register its own operations without disturbing their spontaneity, or can commit to writing the utterance of tender and passionate emotion without rendering the fountain of feeling turbid and impure. But it is this that James Hinton has done in four large volumes of printed manuscripts, and an equal mass of written pages.

It is a wealth which his executors feel as a burden of responsibility as long as it is practically locked up from the public. The printed volumes have been placed in the British Museum, and they may be purchased of Messrs. Macmillan & Co., Cambridge, and Mrs. Hinton, 35, Acacia Road, N.W.; but their voluminous nature prevents any, save the few, from exploring them, and many gems of thought and expression are thus hidden. At the request of numerous lovers of James Hinton's writings, I have attempted to extract some of these. As the manuscripts follow no order except that of time, and are as promiscuous as the entries in a diary, the arrangement of them was not an easy task, and it was rendered still more difficult by the habitual parallelism of James Hinton's thinking.

He always saw one thing in and

;

through another. Regarding matter and mind as the phenomena of Spirit, how could he avoid speaking of the one in terms of the other? "Every man who tells us anything worth knowing tells us one thing," he says somewhere; and this is eminently true of himself. Passion controlled, or motion resisted, is the one thing he sees in the moral as in the material world: this is holiness this, too, is physical life. How can they be kept apart ? Everywhere, in the life of the individual body and mind, and in the larger life of humanity, he beholds this double process, nutrition and function, which constitutes the vibration of Life. It is by this that truth is evolved, and that the moral development of the race is effected. To one not familiar with these large generalizations, the symbolic language used for brevity by Mr. Hinton is sometimes enigmatical. He will condense into a single expression a whole series of analogies previously worked out and habitually present to his mind. This kind of shorthand wants deciphering, and in the Preface to the original volumes which follows this, will be found explanations of the chief terms used with special meanings.

It will be readily understood that this altruistic method of James Hinton's thinking made it difficult to classify a series of extracts under any one title. There are many passages which might be equally called metaphysical, physiological, ethical, or religious. From his metaphysics the translation to ethics is easy and inevitable. The central idea of the former is that the "self" is a defect, a "not," or minus quantity: by this conception he transforms the whole field of experience; it

becomes a key in his hand to unlock some of the most intricate mental problems. But removed from that abstract region into the sphere of practical ethics, this truth becomes the very principle of Love. For if the self be a deadness, a negation, self-sacrifice can be nothing but an entering into Life, and all pain, regarded as the instrument and means of sacrifice, changes its character and reveals itself as good. Evil to the self cannot but be good to that Being of which self is the negation. The bearing of this principle upon the conduct of life is obvious. Its application is the very "secret of Jesus," the easy yoke that makes the burden light, the conquest of ills by self-renunciation, humility, and trust. Thus the classification of these selections was rendered difficult by the very characteristic of Mr. Hinton's thinking which gives his work its chief value, that complete interpenetration of heart and intellect which harmonized all his conceptions, and made them converge, as it were, into one focus.

I must disclaim, on behalf of this book, any attempt to set forth a coherent or complete account of the author's metaphysical and ethical system. It may, rather, be looked upon as presenting a transcript of his table talk, bringing back the image of the man as he appeared to those who lived in daily converse with him. James Hinton was, too, by the nature of his genius, emphatically a seer, not a constructor of systems. He simply took the conception, to which he gave the name of Actualism, and flashing it like a torch upon the various dark problems of life and mind, revealed everywhere glimpses of order

and beauty. He offers no other proof than this: "that which doth make manifest is light." That much remained still obscure no one was more aware than himself. "I have not seen that yet," he would frequently say; and it filled him with an amazement-not of admiration-to find most people ready with a "view" of every subject. He used to say that wherein he differed most from other men was in knowing the "feel" of ignorance.

I must call attention to the fact that these extracts are from the earlier series of manuscripts, and represent the growth of the writer's thoughts from 1856 to about 1861. This early date should be borne in mind, because many things in these papers may seem at variance with the later utterances of the writer. No man was ever more indifferent to the charge of inconsistency; not from any disregard of accuracy, still less of allegiance to principles, but because he viewed all thought as a life, the imperfect stages of which must seem to contradict one another until surveyed in their completeness. That a statement was true was no reason why it should not be denied; indeed, that process was needful to its fuller reaffirmation. He was therefore most tolerant of "deniers," and held them to be eminently useful; whilst that any one should rest contented in a negative stage indicated to him a curious sort of paralysis of the mental life. He had, he said, but one advice to learners in the art of thinking: Go on. This habit of his mind should be remembered in reading the religious passages, when his language is sometimes hardly to be distinguished from the crudities of pulpit theology. Those who are accus

tomed to his phraseology know that he often used theology as the allegorical presentation of philosophy. Illustrations of this will be found in the following pages.

I have not, therefore, altogether discarded such passages. To have done so would have been to lose something of the freshness and force with which these thoughts were originally presented, and also of the interest which attaches to them as anticipations of truths afterwards more completely attained. He himself called these anticipations "affirmations of the moral sense," and knew that they could not be held permanently in that form: other intellectual elements would come in and demand recognition, to the temporary exclusion of the truth first discerned. But it was his delight to trace how these suppressed affirmations were restored with fuller evidence at a subsequent stage; and it was this that induced him, on revising the manuscripts, to leave untouched some of those crude expressions.

It is for their suggestiveness that these "thoughts" will be chiefly valued. They must not be compared with the polished sentences of pensée writers such as Joubert or Novalis. They might rather be called "chips," fragments from the workshop of a great builder.

The important later series of manuscripts have not been used in the preparation of this volume. They are chiefly concerned with working out the position which Mr. Hinton latterly adopted in regard to some questions in ethics. To selections from these writings, to which he himself attached greater value than to any other part of his work, I propose to devote a subsequent volume. CAROLINE HADDON.