been ever since more and more parting company with any form of living and consistent philosophy. But precisely here it is that the Coleridgian philosophy requires correction by his successors; precisely here that the value of fresh interpreters is felt.

Principal Shairp, who has written of Coleridge with truer appreciation and profounder insight than any other known to me, says, after remarking on the absence at the present day of any acknowledged authority speaking from the spiritual side of philosophy: "Whenever such a thinker shall arise, he will have to take up the work which Coleridge left incomplete, and by more patent analysis, and more systematic exposition of the spiritual element which enters into all thought and all objects of thought, to make good as reasoned truth the ground which Coleridge reached only by far-reaching but fragmentary intuition." These words, I think, may be fairly claimed as applicable to James Hinton, although he may not have been himself aware of his intellectual relationship to the elder philosopher, still less have worked in conscious continuation of him. At least, judging from myself, Hinton's work gave me a new, and, I venture to think, a deeper insight into Coleridge's.

Coleridge and Hinton were both of them Christian philosophers; but a change has been wrought in the interval in their common Christian philosophy-a change which consists in this, that the theological vesture which was its predominant feature in Coleridge has in Hinton given place to the emotional body by which it was created, worn, and finally outgrown. What was implicit in Coleridge became explicit in Hinton; there was a "more systematic exposition of the spiritual element;" and

1 Studies in Poetry and Philosophy, p. 236, 2d ed., Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

much of what was explicit in Coleridge fell away in consequence. Eripitur persona, manet res. The emotional nature of man is that by which he is a religious being, that by which, therefore, he is a Christian. Let us hear Mr. Matthew Arnold on this point, who is himself a fellow-labourer in the same direction, and who, if he had not so much of the philosophe malgré lui about him, would stand at the head of philosophy in this country. "The power of Christianity has been in the immense emotion which it has excited, in its engaging, for the government of man's conduct, the mighty forces of love, reverence, gratitude, hope, pity, and awe-all that host of allies which Wordsworth includes under the one name of imagination, when he says that in the uprooting of old thoughts and old rules we must still always ask

'Survives imagination, to the change

Superior? Help to virtue does she give?

If not, O mortals, better cease to live.'"

This, then, is the light by which the papers comprised in the present volume should be read, if we would judge fairly either of their significance or of the results which they achieve. The unity of nature is the thought which underlies them as a whole. The operations which have mind and those which have matter for their field are parts of one system of operations; and just because they are parts of a single whole do they recall and seem to repeat each other when each kind is separately examined. "The Analogy between Organic and Mental Life," at page 91, is an instance of what I mean. Why should "Mind" and "Matter" have been set up as antagonistic powers, and made the watchwords of hostile schools? Surely such antagonism is a relic of the infancy of the race, and destined to pass away under a larger grasp and

co-ordination of facts. For why do we discover analogies in material processes to the workings of thought? Is it not because our minds are themselves dependent upon material processes in the organism, continuous with the material processes in external things? Is it not also and at the same time because external things consist of sense qualities and emotion qualities, that is, consist of the very things which our minds consist of?

Thus the unity in our philosophical conceptions requires unity in the object of those conceptions, requires a single nature, or universe of things, as the objective counterpart of a single self-consistent philosophy. And this is the key to, or logical transition between, those two doctrines of Hinton's, which at first sight seem, if not repugnant, yet at best only superficially resemblant—the doctrine that the material world is not a world of dead or inert matter, but animated, and the doctrine that the moral and emotional nature of man gives us an insight into the real nature and character of the world at large.

That inanimate matter is inanimate in appearance only; that animate matter is a large category, including under it as a case that which we know as living organisms, and as a still more special case that which we know as inanimate matter or inorganic substances ;this seems to be a doctrine belonging in any case, whether it be true or untrue, to the domain of physic and physiology. On the other hand, the doctrine that the emotional nature of man gives us an insight into the nature of the world at large, seems to be one that belongs to ethic, religion, or general philosophy, and to have no bearing on the physical world which the special sciences investigate.

But when we reflect that the unity of philosophical conceptions requires unity in their objective counterpart, the universe of nature, then it becomes evident that if

we start with the latter of the two doctrines, then some such complement as that supplied by the former of them is inevitably required. The dependence of the highest mental perceptions upon physical changes in the nervous organism unifies the two domains of physiology and ethic. The moral world and the physiological are of a piece. But the physiological and the physical, the organic and the inorganic, are of a piece also. The only question is, in what way to interpret this latter unity. For the belonging of them both to a single great whole requires us to find some sense in which the more complex force, the physiological, is a condition upon which the less complex force, the physical, depends, as well as vice versa, whether it be as an efficient or as a final condition, as a condition precedent or a condition subsequent, in order of actual development in time. It requires us to conceive, as possible at least, the converse of that process of evolution with which Mr. Spencer and others have familiarised us; it requires us to conceive life as being, possibly at least, the condition existendi of the merely physical modes of motion, and as itself dependent in turn upon some still more complex forces, the special nature of which we have not faculties to apprehend.

But whether this converse process of evolution is also to be conceived as actual, whether the physical and inorganic forces are a part of an actually existing whole of physiological and organic forces, instead of being the condition upon which and out of which they are subsequently developed, this I apprehend was to Hinton a matter of small importance comparatively to the philosophical doctrine of the unity of nature resulting from a due regard to the emotional nature of man. With him this view carried with it a reversal of the current notion that man was morally greater than nature, the top of

creation, the roof and crown of things." It meant no less than this: What a small and puny creature is man, who, instead of being, as he supposed, the one moral thing in nature, is now becoming aware that nature, not he, is the moral being; having before attributed to himself, to the entity his soul, those moral perceptions which were his by nature's gift, which he held only in right of his being a part of nature, and which were really eyes by which he might see what nature was, means of discovery of nature's majesty, not the foam and froth of sportive fancy. Like all true philosophers, Hinton restores the conception of the whole to its just rights over against the conception of the parts. The two conceptions are correlative, and can never be rightfully dissevered. And the expression, Whole and Parts, is but another way of saying, Final and Efficient Cause. The whole of anything is its final cause, the parts are the chain of conditions which build it up. And the whole or final cause of anything is that which alone enables us to judge of the character of its parts, which alone gives a character to the parts composing it. Some would banish final causes from science, some even from philosophy; but as from the latter at least they can be banished only by mistake of what they really are and mean, so their return is inevitable the moment any man begins to philosophise with genuine insight. And Hinton is marked as a born philosopher by nothing more decisively than by the constant and almost involuntary use which he makes of this conception as a principle of thought-by the way in which it is, if I may say so, ingrained in the texture of his speculations. SHADWORTH H. HODGSON.