[TO THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOE:1
&a,—In common with, no doubt, a large number of your readers, I have read the "Life and Letters of James Hinton" with pro- found and eager interest, and your article of last Saturday upon "Altruism and Selfishness" thus falls upon a soil—prepared, shall 1 say, or preoccupied? at any rate bristling with reply.
You say expressly that your remarks upon this subject, "though suggested by his words, are not illustrated by his life ;" and it is therefore unnecessary to consider whether either and which of the views you discnss can with fairness be attributed to him. This is fortunate for me, because I confess that to my mind his views serve rather as a means of imbibing a deep draught of his noble, hopeful, enthusiastic spirit, than as in themselves either convincing, or even very explanatory.
But what I wish to suggest is that although the question you discuss of the comparative advantages of devotion to one's own purposes and to the lives of others is one of much speculative and personal interest, the broad, practical question, which comes home to us all, and which appears to me to be the one raised by Hinton's life and aims, is not whether I shall live for my own objects or for somebody else's comfort, but whether (whatever my proper place and business in life) I shall direct my thoughts and hopes exclusively to individual interests (my own or other people's), or shall raise and extend them beyond the limit of any personal interests, to the world's good,—to the service, as some of us would say, of God ; as others would say, of humanity. James Hinton would have said it matters not which you call it, for the service of God is the service of humanity. His own favourite expression was either simply "service," or "the salvation of the world." The question is one not of rival claims, but of eman- cipation; of the possibility of rising to a higher life in which there can be no clashing of interests, because all who share it have but one supreme interest, —the good of all ; and it is in this sense that he and others call his views "transforming." The
41 altruistic" and " self " " bases " (I use the words against the grain) are opposed not as Bent to Surrey, but as space to locality. We cannot pass from one to the other at will,—we emerge from .one into the other, as the chrysalis into the butterfly.
James Hinton's great hope for humanity was that we should barn to adjust our feelings to actual facts ; to see our own lives not as we must all begin by seeing them, as filling the whole field of vision, but as occupying, as they really do, only an infinitesimal fraction of the universe, a very minute portion even of that part of it of which we are able to take cognisance. He constantly insists upon the unavoidableness of the illusion with which we set out, that what we see is the whole, and upon the equally inevitable dispersion of that illusion by advancing experience.
And it is in this way, through this unfolding experience, this :acquired adjustment of feeling to fact, that he believes that "" service" sets us free from the need of "restraint." While we are on the level of choice between mine and thine, we have, of course, to restrain our undue bias towards mine ; but if our minds and affections can be set upon something altogether above personal interests, there will still, indeed, be sacrifice, in the sense .of willing endurance of pain, believed to tend towards ultimate blessing for all; but there can no longer be any rivalry, or grudging, or sense of personal injury, or indeed., of giving up by one to another ; for one who truly cares for the universal good can
scarcely be said to care for anything else, and can certainly not pause to have a choice about the means by which it is to be accomplished.
It does not seem to me that the difference between isolation and subordination—between the life of a solitary student and that of a devoted daughter, to take your own instance—has any necgssary connection with the difference between selfishness and unselfishness ; except, indeed, that devotion, even to one's own parent, implies a certain elementary power of rising one degree beyond one's own individual self, in which we will hope that few even solitary students are wanting. In either way of life, there is room for the purest and loveliest unselfishness, and the presence or lack of this freedom of soul makes all the difference in the quality of the life and work. Would not the character and in- fluence of Gibbon's " History "have been very different, if he him- self had been a man of a very lofty and unselfish spirit ?—such a man for instance, as William Law, a student, I suppose, as solitary as himself. I do not mean to deny that absorption in objects which are, in a certain sense, our own—which we must pursue, that is, in our own way and on our own account—may sometimes tend to produce selfishness; only to point out that the two things are neither identical nor inseparable. As you truly say, few people can ever have had to choose between having noble objects of their own and laying aside their own objects for those of others ; that is, generally speaking, settled for us. But we do have to choose, or at least it depends upon our own moral and spiritual condition, whether the objects we live for, be they pursued at first or at second hand, shall be noble and permanent, and of a kind which tend to the good of all ; or petty and personal, and turning upon ques- tions of immediate pleasure and pain. James Hinton's life and writings may fail to make others see altogether "eye to eye" with him, but they can scarcely fail to shed fresh light and fresh. lustre upon the possibility of rising high enough in spirit to get an outlook beyond our own personal horizon, and upon the sense of rejoicing freedom which is won by those who make such an ascent, however toilsome and painful the steps of it may have
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