HINTON'S LATEE THOUGHT. 403 experience has taught them to know it ; it is his insight into the conditions of a moral law which is service and only service these are the things that make Hinton's work significant. They are not less interesting from a something of paradox about them. He was a man of fine scientific sense with a joyous acceptance of all scientific advance, and there are accents in him which have the ring of Antoninus and the Catholic Mystics. He was brought up a Calvinist ; there was an element of Puritanism, a thirst for martyrdom, ingrained in his nature ; and, with passionate gaze set on the future, he saw, enfolded in the dynamical relations of modern society, the vision of a moral life which was at once perfect freedom and perfect good. Hiiiton represents, as one individual is rarely permitted to represent, a process of complete transition. It is a process that goes on, one way or the other, in all ages of intellectual activity ; we may see it in our own age. But in Hinton the process is epitomised. He illustrates the pro- gress between two antithetical principles, between law and morality on the one hand, and freedom and impulse on the other. He began with saying that life is self-sacrifice and martyrdom man's destiny ; he ended by also asserting the gospel of genius ; " Pleasure is free ; passion need not be restrained ". This process of thought, the passage between these two principles, and their mutual reactions, produce a resultant which is an attempt towards the harmony of both and adds a charm to Hinton that is seldom found in any thinker. It is a process less frequently presented in think- ing the " art of thinking," as Hinton called it than in art. In art, indeed, the transition from law to freedom is often traceable ; in Turner, who was specially attractive for Hinton, it is very distinct. He found in art a clearer revela- tion of that new birth of freedom and impulse which was taking place within his own soul. Hinton has been called a mystic ; and if mysticism may be regarded psychologically as the union of new thought with emotion, or indistinct ancestral thought, probably he was a mystic. Whenever a sudden influx of intellectual life intrudes upon the more slowly growing spiritual life of humanity, men endowed with the immense enthusiasm, the free wide-ranging speculation, the power of fusing the incongruous elements of thought and feeling which Hinton possessed, are certain to arise. Such men may be in appear- ance widely separated. Joachim of Flora, who was so widely read at the Renaissance, and some of whose gnomic sayings are curiously like Hinton's, was probably a man of
