or our powers, are utterly irrational, and in point of fact untrue. They often co-exist, I believe they especially co-exist, with the best and most successful work, and this for two reasons (among others) which are very evident. First, That such work taxing our powers most, is most apt to induce a morbid reaction and give us feelings which are really due to fatigue and exhaustion; and, secondly, that inasmuch as the feelings themselves mean and express labour, and the striving with difficulty, since they can only arise from the exertion of the strength on obstacles which through that difficulty make their weight felt, therefore, of course, it is only natural that these feelings should be most felt when the exertion (and therefore the work done) has been greatest.

"So much am I convinced (by mere observation and experience) of this fact respecting myself, that I have adopted it as a practical rule to entirely ignore my own feelings in that line. I disregard and put them aside, knowing them to be no test at all, and take what they call in metaphysics a purely objective view, that is, I judge of my work by a critical survey at an after period, or get others to judge of it. And my experience is constantly what I tell you. I am beginning, indeed, to escape from a great hindrance by acting on this plan; for so continual and unvaried was my sense of utter failure and inability, that if I attached importance to it, it would have been a bar to my doing anything, and especially anything in those lines in which, as a matter of fact, I succeed about the best. It is very curious, and there is something I should like uncommonly to understand in this causing of untrue feeling through great exertion; but it is certainly a fact, and you should thoroughly recognise it, for both by your nature and your position you are likely to be a good deal tried by it. It affects reflective natures

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like yours and mine more than some others. It is, besides, especially prone to occur to those whose minds are subject to constant wear and effort-even though it may be but slight-where there is no chance, or but little, of obtaining, at short periods, complete repose and ease, but the thoughts must always be alert—or almost always-to something, even though it be to trifling things-there this sort of feeling is almost sure to arise."

“October 26, 1864.

"Let me advise just once. I don't like being an adviser much, but just this one thing, to be reverent where you are ignorant, and to attach no weight at all to your naturally feeling sure. We almost always naturally feel sure wrong—it is our fate-it is in our very being."

CHAPTER VIII.

IN 1856 Mr. Hinton first began to publish, contributing a few papers on physiological and ethical subjects to the Christian Spectator.

In 1858 he published a paper in the Medico-Chirurgical Review "On Physical Morphology, or the Law of Organic Forms," suggesting that organic growth takes place in the direction of least resistance, a generalisation which Mr. Herbert Spencer has embodied in his First Principles. "It is remarkable," Mr. Hinton writes, "that in the various hypotheses which have been framed to account for the forms of organic bodies, no attention has been paid to the fact that the process of expansion, in which growth consists, takes place under conditions which limit it in a definite way. It must surely have been from overlooking this circumstance that a mode of speaking has established itself among us, as if there were in organic tissue a power of forming itself into peculiar shapes, as if masses of cells, by some power of their own, could mould themselves into complicated structures. . . . So intent have we been in pursuing specific vital tendencies, or the final causes manifested in the uses of the parts [of an organic structure], that it would appear as if we had entirely forgotten that living matter is matter after all. Thus an eminent physiologist informs us, 'the tail of the * First Principles, by Herbert Spencer, pp. 231-233.

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cercaria, which was previously employed for locomotion, is now useless and falls off!'"*

Mr. Hinton proceeds to formulate his proposition thus: "Organic form is the result of motion.

“Motion takes the direction of least resistance.

'Therefore, organic form is the result of motion in the direction of least resistance."

This position he illustrates and enforces by various phenomena of development, and especially from the prevalence of the spiral form in organic nature, motion under resistance taking a spiral direction, the explanation of this fact being very simple: a moving body encountering resistance is deflected, or turned at right angles, and a motion constantly turning at right angles and yet continuing is a spiral. "No theory has seemed capable of accounting for the fact [of organic forms] but that of a peculiar power inherent in each germ. .. But what though the appearance to the eye, or even to the microscope, of all ova be the same, is it not certain that there is a difference of structure which escapes our observation? Nay, does not the ascription to them of different powers involve that very difference of structure or composition which it is supposed to supersede? And what can be simpler than. that germs of different structure should undergo different

* Agassiz and Gould's Comp. Physiology, p. 343. Bacon's warning has not yet lost its bearing. "To say that the hairs of the eyelids are for a quickset and fence about the sight; or that the firmness of the skin and hides of living creatures is to defend them from the extremities of heat and cold; or that the bones are for the columns or beams whereupon the frame of the bodies of living creatures is built; or that the leaves of trees are for the protecting of the fruit, and the like, is well inquired and colleoted in metaphysic; but in physic they are impertinent. I say they are but indeed remoras and hindrances to stay and slug the ship from further sailing, and have brought this to pass, that the search of the physical causes hath been neglected and passed in silence."-Advancement of Learning, Book II.

changes. Add to this that each change of structure in the process of development modifies all the succeeding ones, and it becomes no longer hard to understand how, from even imperceptible incipient diversities, the widest contrasts of form may accrue. Every divergence is continually multiplied.

"But how come the germs to differ? Clearly because formed under differing conditions. They are diverse, because their structure is the result of motion in the direction of least resistance. There is no beginning in a germ.' The paper concludes with a passage of deep general interest:

"Here I should cease. But it would be affectation to ignore that the view I have taken will be felt by some as contravening the design that they delight to recognise in nature as another step towards excluding God from His creation. I do not feel it so. I may not enlarge upon this aspect of the question, but the entire subject has been so mixed up with theological ideas that I may be permitted briefly to indicate my own view. I hold all vital forms to be what we call necessary, but it is the necessity of rightness that I recognise, and no other. God's act in Nature appears to us under the form of physical or merely passive necessity, but that is our infirmity and defect of vision. It is necessary truly, every least fact and part of it, but necessary by a truer, deeper necessity than we perceive, the necessity that Love should do infinitely well and wisely. Welcome to me are all proofs of necessity, all indications of law, all demonstrations that things could not be otherwise than they are.

Never does nature bring us nearer to God than when science excludes from it all arbitrariness, and teaches us to say, This must be as it is. For an intellectual we must learn to substitute a moral conception of creation;