Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/261

260 CRITICAL NOTICES : found obscurity. See the two interesting Letters, xii., xiii., con- taining questions by C. H., and the reply by J. H. The second point is, that, in its speculative branch, the philo- sophy is of the Transcendental and Idealistic type, but its Ideal- ism is peculiar. The material world appears to us as material or physical, because we, who are essentially spiritual beings, are to some extent dead. Otherwise, it also would seem to us living, spiritual, immaterial, or at least not consisting of inert matter; " the inertia he [man] is forced to think of as outside is really within" (p. 134). What Hinton means by inertia is not very clear. Newton indeed spoke of matter having a Vis inerti.ce, equi- valent in meaning to Vis inslta, but this is the very opposite of its being inert. It seems as if the conception of matter which Hinton here combats was a popular conception merely, and not a scien- tific one. It is at p. 133, in " A few Notes, &c.," that we first find a state- ment of "the fundamental philosophical doctrine which underlay all his theology " : "Now this fundamental doctrine is, that there is a defect, a negation in man, whereby the active spiritual existence becomes to him passive and material ; and that this condition is what the Bible calls his 'death'." But is this what the Bible calls his death ? That is one ques- tion. Is it true that, in the Bible, the "physical' 1 " is but the way in which the non-perception of the spiritual is expressed " ? And again, is the perception of the Self identical with the percep- tion of the physical? (p. 135). There seems to be a confusion of thought here, which requires working out and reducing to har- mony. It requires to be shown that the perception of a physical world is identical with the perception of self ; that both are iden- tical with a spiritual death ; and that this is the meaning of dcntl in the Bible. That Hinton's philosophy is really based on this triple identifi- cation is clear from passages in a remarkable letter from him, dated May, 1868, Letter ii. in the present volume. "But some lime ago I saw alike in history and in /iv.W/v that this is the course through which thought goes must go, starting with the feel- ing of [the] phenomenal as existing, and yet being, as it must be, really related to and springing from the actual. "The first thought ascribes to the phenomenal (imperfectly) actual qualities. "The next, based on examination of the phenomenal, and on the more or less complete discovery of its qualities, assigns to existence phenomena] qualities. These two stages mu.-t precede the discovery of the nature of our own experience a> fn-ling the- existence of phenomena. i here is the fetish world living, active, but utterly mistaken as applied to tht' physical. Then inert matter and force taken as the exis- tence of lw world, &c." (p. 150). This passage clearly identifies the perception of "inert matter and.force " with a deadness or want of insight in us. The follow-