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HINTON'S LATER THOUGHT. 385 disorder now existing, and of the physical and moral evil which he found bound up with the present notion of " virtue ". In " Ethics," as in his other unpublished writings, there is no attempt at construction either of a literary or logical kind. It consists of passages having, as he put it, an organic rather than an anatomical order. In " Thoughts on Home" Hinton deals with what he regarded as for many reasons a crucial question, the question of marriage ; he endeavours to ascertain what is, in the present condition of society, the true relation between the sexes ; and he also deals with prostitution and other allied questions. Finally, he also wrote an "Autobiography"; which again is not formal in construction, though it is a record of the highest value. It might be compared to the Confessions of Augustine or of Kousseau, but it is unlike either. As a revelation of the soul of genius in its nakedness of absolute passion and sin- cerity it probably stands alone. It will not be possible or advisable within the limits of this paper to discuss these works in detail ; that must be left till they are published. All that can here be attempted is to indicate the chief lines of Hinton's activity and the general nature of the results he attained. In order to do this it will be necessary to touch, however briefly, on Hinton's metaphysics, which was the product of the earlier stages of his thought, and which is already (in Life and Nature, TJte Art of Thinking, Philosophy and Religion) as completely before the public as it is likely to be. When he said that " Positivism bears a new Platonism in. its bosom," Hinton was indicating, as clearly perhaps as can be done in one word, his own position in philosophy, a posi- tion which is perhaps not quite easy to define. For he rises into philosophy, as Mr. Shadworth Hodgson has noted, out of common sense, science and theology. He was less of a pro- fessional philosopher than even Schopenhauer. But even Schopenhauer had a distinct relation to Kant, and Hinton, notwithstanding the more or less unconscious Hegelianisms which formed part of his method, has a no less marked relation to what is vaguely called "Positivism". It is, he says somewhere, the chrysalis of his own philosophy. And if with his affluence of ideas, his unconquerable optimism, he was sometimes eagerly accepted by those who sought support for a weak faith or an escape at any intellectual price from the trammels of the actual, we may say indeed that the fault lay largely with himself, but it must not blind us to the significance of his thought in its chief lines. And in its chief lines Hinton's philosophy was an attempt