396 H. HAVELOCK ELLIS : never wanting." And that " one thing " is a true regard to facts. While service is the end which must be attained in a true moral action, the natural guide to service is impulse. " What I look to," said George Eliot, " is a time when the impulse to help our fellows shall be as immediate and irresistible as that which I feel to grasp something firm if I am falling." The best action is automatic. Hinton would agree with Mr. H. Spencer that " the sense of duty or moral obligation is transitory," representing but one phase of man's development ; but while Mr. Spencer places such abolition of duty in that remote future when men shall be able to fulfil instinctively laws which are substantially those now accepted, Hinton would mean that a true regard to facts, a response to needs, would be both the natural impulse and itself the only law, to the abrogation of all other laws ; and that this end was more readily attainable than the complex moralisation for which Mr. Spencer looks. But the law of service was not merely easy, it was the natural law. An arbitrary rule, an institution, must be opposed to the fluency, the ever-changing relations, of nature and fact. There is nothing fixed in nature ; there are laws of action or being, but no rules of things. To be rigid means to be dead. It is not possible to say of anything, Hinton argued, that it is always good or always bad. It must change with its relations. It is here that he shows the influence of his scientific training. No one trained in physical science could ever have regarded nature as Mill regarded it. Nature is the Devil, said Schopenhauer ; to Hinton it to a great extent took the place of God. He almost constantly personifies it. It is Hinton's distinction that he is probably the first man of ethical genius who has been deeply and consciously impressed with the methods of science. It is true that Emerson, whose genius was so largely ethical, was singularly sensitive, as Professor Tyndall has so often insisted, to the scientific spirit. And Hinton has recorded his impression that had Emerson been trained in the methods of physiology he would have " inter- preted the world ". But it can scarcely be said that Emerson has opened up any new paths in moral science. It was not till within the last five years of his life that Hinton attained a comparatively final ethical conception. Previously his position had been fairly well described by the word " altruism " which many years previously he had eagerly adopted. Even in the little paper called " Others' Needs," published in The Art of Thinking, this altruism is quite distinct, and he never entirely abandoned the altruistic
