JAMES HINTON.* JAMES HINTON'S biography has fallen into good bands.
Miss Ellice Hopkins was Hinton's personal friend, and was able, by virtue of thorough congeniality of disposition, to know what he knew, to feel what he felt, to get exactly into his point of view, and to act as interpreter between him and the world. Perhaps it is an advantage to Miss Hopkins, in character of biographer, that she has faith in Mr. Hinton's system, and is actively, and we believe successfully, engaged in works of practical benevolence, with the main idea of that system for impelling principle and in- spiring force. It is a less important, but yet extremely desirable and agreeable, qualification of Miss Hopkins, as a biographer, that she writes well,—not only clearly, but with an eloquence which sometimes rises almost into poetry. Her use of metaphor is remarkably happy, her rhetoric being truly elucidative, and yet good and fresh as literary decoration. Sir William Gull also was the right man to supply the " Introduction " to James Hinton's biography. The life and letters are an illustrative and corroborative comment upon Sir William's estimate of his friend. The book is full of interest, and by no means void of instruction.
We do not value Mr. Hinton's contribution to philosophy so highly as Miss Hopkins and Sir William Gull, but we have the clearest conviction that he was a good man, an exceptionally, illustriously good man. It is soothing to reflect that, how loud soever may be the din of our contending philosophies, we all agree that unselfishness is the practical test of character. Whatever nomenclature we use—whether we are contented with those old terms, good-heartedness, brotherly kindness, charity,
and Letters of James Hinton. Edited by Ellice Hopkins. With an Intro- duction by Sir William Gull. London: C. Began Paul and Co. 1878. humanity, benevolence, beneficence, generosity, which sufficed for the writers and speakers of the New Testament, and were not found lacking by Chaucer and Shakespeare, or whether we must coin ourselves the not very beautiful word " altruism "- we all practically agree that the man who fervently and disinter- restedly works for the benefit of his brother-men is the good man. For our own part, while too busy to fight about words, we disapprove of altruism, word and thing. The mere fact that it requires a learned and philosophical explanation tells against it as a word, and as a thing it is still more objectionable. Turned into the vernacular, it reads " otherism," and we cannot admit that otherism is the basis of social morality. "This, above all, to your own self be true." " Love thy neighbour as thyself." The right and rational start is from the individual, in morals as in all else. Every plant grows from its own root, every man breathes with his own lungs, and otherism is really and truly the doctrine or theorem that a man has more to do with the lungs of other people than with his own. The necessity of starting from the individual becomes evident, if we reflect that thus alone can we reach the true standard of social justice or social compas- sion. The needs of man are common, and the man who has no capacity of self-observation, no sound notion of what is health and well-being for his own body and spirit, is qualified to minister neither to the diseased minds, nor to the diseased bodies of his neighbours. Practically, the grand argument against otherism is that it casts an air of sickly exaggeration, a flush of hectic fire, over philanthropy, and thus offends the instincts of men who are grappling with the problems of the world, instincts which imperatively decree that it is unjust and unreason- able to efface the individual. Reason and justice are entirely satisfied by the Christian rule. You are one ; solemnly and with most deliberate acceptance, take upon you the duties owed to that one ; perform them scrupulously, fully, but do not count yourself more than one. The way of the world is that every one counts himself more than one, more than ten, more than ten thousand. The man who makes even an approach to counting himself rigorously one—the man who dies, like Leonidas, for a nation—is extolled as a hero. There is absolutely no reason to fear, therefore, that the golden rule will not suffice for practical pur- poses, or will not serve as a measure of social virtue. But if we attach a pseudo-infinitude of importance to our neighbour, very serious evils result ; this chiefly, that the supreme and limitless homage which is due to God alone—to the Being that is infinite love and light—is vaguely diffused over a factitious ideal of humanity. Such, we mean, would be the natural and logical re- sult ; but such it was not, or was but very slightly, in the case of Mr. Hinton. In his father's house, under the influence of that Howard Hinton who might have sat for all the finer traits in George Eliot's Rufus Lyon, he became pervaded with the spirit of Christianity, pervaded completely and unalterably, so that though philosophical theory might make sport with the outworks of his faith, remove theological landmarks, and lay low ramparts of dogma, it never approached that citadel of the heart in which his Christianity and his theism lay enshrined.
He was born at Reading in 1822, and in his infancy gave some earnest of what he was to be. In the large garden attached to his father's house he played with his elder brother and sister, Howard and Sarah, who, however, found him, though good-natured and sweet-tempered enough, so given to have obstinacies of his own and to rearrange the game "as it ought to be," that it was sometimes necessary to hide from him. This was Mr. Hinton to the life. He never could take things as they were. He must always try putting the cart before the horse, even though it might turn out, on investi- gation, that the common-place fashion of putting the horse first was to be preferred. When he was sixteen, his father removed with his family to London, and James accepted the situation of cashier at a wholesale woollen-draper's in Whitechapel. "On Saturday nights, in the back streets and crowded courts, he used to hear women screaming under the blows of their drunken hus- bands," and became otherwise acquainted with the sins and miseries of a great city. A sense of the burden and anguish of human life thus settled down upon his heart, and became, says Miss Hopkins, the " unconscious constant " in all his thinking. " It crushed and crushed me," he said, many years afterwards, " till it crushed The Mystery of Pain' out of me." The woollen drapery did not suit him, nor did he do much better as clerk in an insurance office. In his eighteenth year his intel- lectual ambition or passion awoke. He studied with intense application, but in a desultory fashion, " history, metaphysics, Russian, German, Italian, arithmetic, Euclid." In addition to the time he could snatch during the day, he used to devote two whole nights every week to study. At nineteen he fell in love, profoundly and with a constancy which never varied for an hour until he died ; but in love, as in all else, he had a way of his own. " To the girl he loved he rarely spoke, only turning a little white in her presence." He had already become insatiably argumenta- tive. If you heard him for half an hour, and then made good your retreat, in the fond hope that it was all over, you found out your mistake the next time you met him, for he set off again, exactly where he had stopped. His personal appearance at this time suggested " an abstract idea untidily expressed." Miss Margaret Haddon, the lady of his choice, had the wit to feel the depth of his affection, and to return it. A sensible doctor, observing that between love, metaphysics, and the duties of his clerkship, he was pining, remarked, " The lad wants more mental occupation, to keep his mind from feeding on itself ;" and as the hint was accompanied by kind, practical help, he was entered at St. Bartholomew's Hospital a student of medicine, in his twentieth year. In 1847 he took his diploma, " passing his examinations with distinction, and having previously gained several gold medals." He had a true enthusiasm for the art of healing, and though his devotion to his profession was for many years lax and intermittent, he finally attained distinction and made a large income as an aurist.
At thirty, he was married to Miss Haddon. She was to him a sympathetic, long-suffering, entirely devoted wife. She had much to bear, for he lived in a world of ideas, and had very startling views as to the difference, or as to whether there was any differ-
ence, between ideas and facts. It might be a pleasant jest when he followed Mrs. Hinton into the kitchen, where she was concocting a cake, and so bewildered her with his talk about phenomena and noumena, that she put in peppercorns instead of currants ; but when the family exchequer was almost empty, and paterfamilias took to descanting on the seemliness of death by hunger, and the clear advantage he would derive from being driven to desperation, the mother of three or four children might be ex- cused for becoming seriously anxious. All came right in the long-run, and though he formally abandoned philosophical specu- lation when necessity, common-sense, and his wife combined to prove to him that this was the right thing to do, we doubt whether he would, under any circumstances, have added much to what he has left us. In physics, his tracing of the evolution of the organism through the line of least resistance was a true contribution to science, and has been adopted by Mr. Herbert Spencer. The sharpness of his discrimination between matter and spirit is also valuable, though certainly not original, and he obscured rather than elucidated the question, by insisting too much upon the difference between thinking and willing, instead of dwelling upon the fact of agency, which is common to both, and which is to us the revelation of our spiritual personality. His view of the deceptiveness of sense we hold to be incorrect, and doubt whether his favourite idea, "that it is the work of the moral faculties to interpret nature," is anything better than a devout imagination. He died at fifty-three, after a short illness, from heated brain.
Previous page
