Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/416

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404 H. HAVELOCK ELLIS : this type in the 12th century. Diderot, the Pantophile, as Voltaire calls him, the Panurge and Prometheus, as Michelet adds, of the 18th century, held this position in regard to the French Revolution. But they are best seen in the 16th century, in certain men of the middle Renascence, Leo Alberti, and (in their work) Piero della Francesca, Botti- celli, Filippino Lippi. These men in their union of science and devotion and audacious impulse, in their curious ming- ling of Christianity and free thought, belong to the same class as Hinton. One can see something of Hinton's eager, versatile, inquisitive, yet child-like nature in his face. It resembles that of the best type of English labourer, express- ing an immense capacity for work and enjoyment ; with, however, something else superadded which is born neither of his intense and subtle intellectual energy, nor even of his emotional devotion to Nature. For if he has not the strangely keen and complete powers of Leo Alberti or the massive momentum of Diderot's intellectual energy, he has that which is even rarer and which finally distinguishes him from this whole class his profound and pervading ethical instinct. We have seen something of the results which this instinct, guided by the scientific spirit of appeal to fact, and supported by what he believed to be the spirit of Jesus, had to say in face of the social facts of to-day. In reality Hinton. was a product of his age ; his conceptions and methods had a deeper root than he himself probably ever suspected. He was allied to three great influences which will perhaps be found the chief moulding forces of the latter part of this century. Among these Science has every title to be first. Hinton never underrated his debt to Science, although he saw very clearly the danger of a narrow conception of Science, or an exclusive devotion to it. He sought to do in morals what, in an equally remarkable though less clear-sighted manner, "Walt Whitman has sought to do in literature to bring into life the new conceptions of human freedom and development, the new ideals of love and purity, which Science has made possible. He said that all he had seen was simply the working out in ethics of the conservation of force. It is probable, indeed, that this and the Darwinian laws (carefully avoiding the confusion commonly made between these and that philosophical doctrine of evolution from which they are in reality quite distinct) will occupy the same place in the next great movement of the race as Newton's law of gravitation occupied in France at the latter part of the last century. How much Hinton learnt from Art, and how intimately,