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C. KEGAN PAUL & Co., I PATERNOSTER SQUARE.

1878.

AY J40

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are reserved.

INTRODUCTION.

It would be a pain to me that any Memoir of James Hinton should go forth without a word of affectionate regard for his memory from me. It is now near twenty years ago that our acquaintance began. Sympathies in common on the nearest subjects of human interest brought us much together. It was at this time that "Man and his Dwelling - Place" was projected and written. Every page bears witness to the workings of his intensely energetic mind. I recall vividly the earnest manner with which he would submit to me the different chapters of this work. Convinced as he was that the only deadness in nature, the only negative condition, was man's selfishness, his whole life and thought was to excite a reaction against it.

It was his favourite conception that the " phenomenal" was essentially antithetic to the "actual." He would illustrate in a hundred ways how this was equally true in relation to our moral sense. The same error which led man, from limited observation, to suppose the earth the centre and at rest, repeated itself under a new form in supposing himself to be a living centre surrounded by dead things.

Death to him was a purely human idea. All nature is living. The "Physiological Riddles" exemplified his thoughts on this point very fully. In these essays he was abreast of the best physiology of the time, and may be considered as having done good service in combating

the narrow views that still prevail, even in high quarters and which would raise a barrier in nature between organic and inorganic where none exists.

Hinton was not a man of science, but a philosopher. Science was to him the servant of philosophy. He felt himself to be an interpreter of nature; not in the Baconian sense by the collection and arrangement of facts, the sequences of causes and effects, but, like the Hebrew seer of old, penetrating through appearances to their central cause.

I remember one occasion when he came to me full of emotion, with tears in his eyes, at a glimpse he had caught of the universal relation of things to the Divine Cause. "What I see in nature," he said, "is the Divine power acting within an imposed limit. God, self-limited, is the universe. God is not the universe, but it flows from Him and becomes phenomenal by the laws of limitation." I could not at the time but check him by quoting Goethe's words—

"Oh ! glücklich wer noch hoffen kann,

Aus diesem Meer des Irrthums aufzutauchen," laying severe stress upon hope, and urging on him that the poet did not seem to admit the likelihood that we should ever realise it by seeing truth as it is. Hinton would not, however, be brought back to our everyday views and imperfect ways of thinking, but insisted that we voluntarily hindered our vision by the mere scientific relation of facts, as opposed to a true philosophy of them.

How often he would repeat, "It is the sense and the intellect which raise us to a scientific appreciation, to the mechanical relations of things; but it is genius and intuition which enable us to penetrate to their higher meaning." To limit human knowledge to that which is scientific was a capital error against which Hinton com

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