From the London Eclectic. SOME NEW VIEWS WE are thankful to every man who in sincerity and earnest-heartedness helps to demonstrate the real life of man, and who causes more light to break forth from God's word; to any man who, realizing the awfulness of the mystery "in which we live, and move, and have our being;" to any man who makes us more really ac quainted with "The Power, the Beauty, and the Majesty." Mr. Hinton deserves our thanks; for, in a spirit of great earnestness, he has attempted to do this. He, indeed, says little more than what all ministers are supposed to preach; he only interprets the word of God literally; and, as to our apprehension, we have always conceived it. Yet, Mr. Hinton's seems a very fresh book, and we dare to say that multitudes of those who may read it, if multitudes read it, will regard it as new as if his theory had not been succinctly stated a hundred times in the New Testament. In the matter of the interpretation of scriptural difficulties, many people have no doubt felt as poor old Tiff felt about the preacher: "Dey talks 'bout going in de gate, and knocking at de do', and 'bout marching on de road, and 'bout fighting and being soldiers of de cross; and de Lord knows, now, I'd be glad to get de chil'en through any gate; and I could take 'em on my back and travel all day, if dere was any road: and if dere was a do', bless me, if dey wouldn't hear old Tiff a rapping! I 'spects de Lord would have fur to open it would so. But, arter all, when de preaching is done, dere don't 'pear to be nothing to it. Dere an't no gate, dere an't no do', nor no way; and dere an't no fighting, 'cept when Ben Dakin and Jim Stokes get jawing about der dogs; and everybody comes back eating der dinner quite comf'table, and 'pears like dere wan't no such thing dey's been preaching 'bout. Dat ar troubles me-does so. *Man and His Dwelling Place. An Essay to wards the Interpretation of Nature. By JAMES HINTON Second Edition. London: Smith, Elder & Co, Even so, Mr. Hinton would say, people talk about death and life-spiritual death and life; do they believe what they say? Is there a death, and is there a life? Scripture speaks of men "dead in trespasses and sins." Scripture addresses men and says: "Ye are dead." It speaks of "filthy lusts which drown men in perdition." Moreover, it addresses others, and says, "You hath he quickened ;" and it speaks of experiences, and says: "We know that we have passed from death to life." Is this all a matter of imagery, and to be dismissed for any real purposes of life and consolation? Are we to say, when the preacher has ended, there is no death, and there is no life? Mr. Hinton does not think so. The reader will find him self as he reads, unless we are mistaken, in the vice of a logic as clinching, on the point of a paradox as impaling, as that of Bishop Berkeley. The reading of this volume a second time, produced in our mind feelings very similar to those we experienced when many, many years since, we for the first time followed the Bishop in his analysis of " the principles of human knowledge." In the same way, Mr. Hinton breaks down the fence of mere appearances, and advances beyond the phenomenal: the apparatus of astronomic science, and the illusions of the stereoscope are pressed into the service of our teacher to show how the senses are imposed upon. He maintains that it is in consequence of our fall and our sinfulness that we do not see the universe as it is. That is not true, which seems to us, that only man is alive, and the universe is dead. No, man is dead, and the universe is alive. "Do we ask: How should man be in an in ert world? Let us ask: How should he be in a revolving universe? These two questions admit of one reply. He is not so. The universe can not be revolving. Let the universe, therefore, stand fast, and man revolve. So shall be to him day and night, rising and setting suns. noonday brightness for his work, and solemn revelations of the stars to lead him up to God. The universe can not be dead. Let the uni verse be living, therefore, and man be dead. | Hinton has attempted the task very braveSo to him there shall be a world of passive laws ly; others, also, have attempted. and lifeless uniformity, a world subject to his control, invitant to his energy, full of deep lessons to his heart." Again he says: lends all her treasures to adorn whatever she which Every reader of Plato's Republic will remember a famous passage in the seventh book, in which he compares our natural condition, so far as our education or ig norance are concerned, to a number of "Analogies help us more, and they are never men living in a vast subterranean cave, in wanting to any thing that is true, for nature what Philip Bailey would call the fireacknowledges. What we feel so strange is, crypt of the world, among the marble and that we should perceive around us so definite granite monuments and tombstones of and substantial a habitation as this earth, if antediluvian generations. Plato conceived the physical does not exist absolutely, but is some such world beneath the earth, where merely the phenomenon to us of some other night and day are all as one; and strange existence. But look at the sky at night. Con- grotesque shapes are seen in all parts of sider the firmament. Is it not stretched as a the vaulted chamber; and the torchlight canopy folding in the earth, of definite circumference, and solid look? Do not say no; for brings out the phantoms and the shadows humanity would testify against you. History go creeping up and down among proves that it appears so to man's natural eye. the petrifactions and the stalacmitic colIs there any such canopy around the earth? umns; and, whisper as we may, echoes Is there any thing like it? Man dwells, to his will creep after us, which make us start consciousness, in an encircling heaven which and wonder who repeated our words. is not. A habitation, bright with gems and Plato conceived some such world; in stretched on everlasting pillars, has been pre- Greece it was not difficult to conceive pared for him-by what? By his presence to such. Corridors and galleries, dizzy and infinity bestrewn with lavish worlds. And why? Because it is the nature of his sight. fretted crags, or fantastic horrors breakWhy should not man's presence to the spiritual ing forth in forms like afrites blackly infinitude of being place him, to his conscious-looming in torchlight-shadow from the ness, in a home like earth, amid a universe of unexpected waters of some subterranean stars? Do we ask why? Because it is the lake; and Plato thought he saw in such nature of his present state to feel as dead that a place the parable of a human soul capwhich is living; because the phenomenon which tive to its senses and its ignorance. he perceives is different from the truth of things, and by his defect of being, the phenomenon is his reality." These extracts will no doubt plainly show to our readers that no exposition of ours can make this strong and yet very interesting book so clear to the mind as the author himself. And we believe he does his best to separate man from his shadow; or, perhaps we should say he does his best to show that a shadow can not be that it is not a being, but the phenomenon of being that the being is wholly independent of it. "Nature is living, holy as the life to which man shall be raised; the finger pressed no more on her mute lips-once mute, but vocal now with heaven's own music. The secret uttered, the sole secret, only to man unknown: that life is holiness, that holiness is freedom, that freedom is necessity, that necessity is love, God's secret, the secret of being, which, not to know, is death." Many centuries and ages have passed away since the first attempts were made to solve the mystery of our being. Mr. Plato imagines such a cave, the entrance open to the light, but the men bound by their necks and legs, shackled, and compelled to sit still and look straight forward. The prisoners in the cave would be, therefore, unable to turn their heads or necks to gaze behind them. Above and behind them Plato conceived a fire burning, and an elevated gallery passing between the fire and the prisoners; and along this gallery a number of persons moving, throwing their shadows upon that part of the cavern facing the prisoners; some of them passing along would move in silence, while others would speak, and speaking would awaken echoes in the cave, adding the mystery of sound to the mystery of sight in the senses of the captive men. Plato conceives the amazement of one of these captives when liberated-when able to turn his eyes toward the light, to ascend toward it, to interrogate the objects of which he formerly beheld only the shadows; and when dragged up the painful and steep ascent, how dazzled would his eyes be by the glare of the sun. Amazing would be the change iu his mind, when compelled to find the shadows he had regarded as realities only phenomena, and to behold in the newly discovered objects the real facts and beings to which the phenomena owed their existence. Thus man is every where hemmed in by the actual. This has been with most of us too frequently the cause of self-depreciation and complaint. Man, every where, feels this to be the misery of his condition. Our being is not inappropriately represented by a story, or rather a little piece of anecdotal biography, recorded in Lord Lindsay's Letters; the story of Wellee Kiashef. Wellee Kiashef was the Turkish governor of the country between the Cataracts. He was resting for a little time on one of his progresses through his little vice-royalty, and he sent to offer a visit to Lord Lindsay's party. He desired to gain knowledge frem Englishmen wherever he could meet with them. He had obtained a little treatise on geography; he had picked up a number of crude notions from Europeans, and a few books; he had learnt enough to give to him profound discontent. Lord Lindsay says: "It was interesting, but painful, to see a man, evidently of talent, born and bred in intellectual darkness, and aware of his deficiencies, struggling and catching at every ray of light. He entered at once on his inquiries, never doubting our willingness to afford him what aid we could; the conversation seldom flagged a moment, and in his eagerness, the pipe was often neglected. On paying us another visit on our return (to which I alluded at the commencement of this long epistle,) he told us very feelingly that, since he had become acquainted with Europeans about three years ago, he had disrelished the society of other Turks; all their conversation ran on women or dress, never on subjects of real interest. 'Now,' said he, 'I like to know how the sun shines, how the world was created, who inhabit it, etc.; and because I do so, and seek the society of those who can instruct me, my countrymen call me proud, and I am quite alone among them; solo, solo, solo!' as Abdallah translated it it went to my heart-poor fellow! he must indeed be lonely, and so must every one be who outstrips his fellows, while they are still as unenlightened as the Turks, even by the very insignificant distance that Wellee Kiashef has got before them." Thus the first thought of every man upon his awakening to the world, is the feeling of the close, confining, cavernous darkness around him; all things speak of the cave. "What am I?" Where am 66 I?" are the natural questions he puts to himself, and even to others. We are like the half-drunk Scotchman wending his way home in a whisky mist at six o'clock in the morning, who came across a decent servant-girl cleaning the door-step. "My girl," said he, can ye tell me where Mr. John Clerk lives ?" Sir," " said the lass, "I'm thinking ye'r Mr. John Clerk yersel'." "Ay, ay, my lass," said he, "I ken that vary weel; I ken I'm Mr. John Clerk, but I dinna ken where I live." So with all of us, we have some idea of our individual consciousness, but what is this world we are in ? When Aladdin descended into the vault, he found the trees of golden fruit and the wonderful lamp. We must first retire into ourselves, sink into the vault of our own being, before we shall be able accurately to learn the limits and the dimensions of our own being. Few persons are able to retire from the knowledge which the senses impart, to a knowledge and learning which the senses will not bestow. What is this cave which hems us in? Every where we are told we are the creatures of sense, and that our sensuous consciousness we can not transcend; and this is the skeptic's frequently too powerful plea and cry. Many, indeed, have denied the existence of the man in the cave at all; they have declared that life itself is only a phenomenon of being, and thus that the phenomena themselves constitute the only real being. That all things visible are as much alive as we are. Mr. Hinton, on the contrary, remarks, that which is a phenomenon can not exist; it has a relative existence only; it is to us, it is felt by us, as existing; that which truly exists being different. And in harmony with this, a recently published, most invaluable, and hitherto unrepublished little book of Bishop Berkeley's, finds a special providence and distinct action of divine agency in every sensation we can know; and this is far more reasonable, for as we walk through the streets, we are conscious of two beings. Indeed that which we call knowledge, is the consciousness of two beings in one consciousness, for knowledge is the image of the thing known in the understanding of him who knows it; is it not a most amazing thing that we, sitting in one omnibus, have a knowledge of another omnibus, and all the people in it? Is it not a most amazing thing that we, with our wholly independent beings, take in -'s nose, and -'s, and Pro see it the shapes and actions of other beings al- | noses. You have wiped together separated from us? Here we -'s nose, and Lord are hard, tough, scaly teguments, and our fessor's, and it is so absurd; do neighbors a number of hard, tough, scaly go to an oculist's, or an optician's, and teguments-is it not a most marvelous get your eyes put to rights; and then thing that we have this knowledge of you'll find that the spot is wiped from cach other's persons-knowledge of all every body's nose, and that, if any the outer world? Scepticism lifts up its where, it is in your own eye." "Yes," cock-a-doodle-do, and says: "Oh! I can said the gifted seer-" yes, yes, I explain all these-it's just an affair of the must be so, and I'll take that advice of refracting medium. I can explain it all-yours; but, pardon me," and out came objects reflected on the air, and re-reflected on the retina of the eye." Yes, dear old pundit, we have in a sort of dim way heard that before: but that scientific solution of thine only involves us in more mystery; for the image on the retina of the eye is turned topsy-turvy, really upside down, and we do not see houses, and horses, and omnibuses upside-down; but really standing straight and upright, and going along properly in their usual sort of way; and beside, what relation is there between the seeing eye, which, after all, is as dead as a piece of glass-quite as intelligent and no more than the stopper of a decanter-what connection is there between this and the thing seen? Why, the fact is, the man in the cave must expound it all-it is the man in the cave who also has another retina, altogether invisible-beyond the touch of the oculist's lancet, but assuredly there. It is the man in the cave. The body is the cave of the mind. "After all," says the skeptic," the man is in the cave. You can not transcend the limits of your consciousness. You are limited by thought-forms when you are not environed by the senses." Well, after all, this much vaunted phraseology is only a learned way of saying, we only know what we know-true, but let us lay our fingers there, we do know certainly, what we do know. And light will do much. And, moreover, whence do our ideas some, and what are our ideas? A man, we believe in Cambridge, had a very curious thought-form; he insisted on seeing a black spot upon the nose of every person with whom he conversed, and, worst of all, he took out, invariably, his pocket-handkerchief, not for the anthropological purpose of wiping his own, but for the benevolent purpose of wiping his neighbor's nose. At last one took him to task. "My dear fellow," said the one, you are a perfect nuisance. You go on through the whole city, wiping peoples' 66 the handkerchief, "you have a black spot on your nose." Now, how did he get possession of that thought-form? Suppose the Crystal Palace instead of being a transparent opening and view, were covered, as we can conceive it covered, with dank and dark trees, and herbage, or clothed by some vail which shut out the light, how dark would be that place-the thing of crystal would be a cave; remove the covering, and you have the crystal again-albeit its thick though transparent medium still makes nothing clear, while all within is suffused from the golden or rosy hue from without. Such is the Cave of Plato-such is man, and the world beneath-a pagan and a Christian-instinct and teaching. While we admit the thorough propriety of the image of Plato, we should prefer to call the cave a diaphanous medium. "Your consciousness exists in a cave," say the metaphysicians-" you are subject to, you are the creatures of, time, and space, and personality- these are inexorable walls they hem and environ you every where.” And they not only are the absolute forms of things around us, but they are also the thought-forms through which all things of the understanding are known. As we sit in Plato's cave, and see the phantoms creeping along the walls, we know them only by their relation to time, to space, and to personality. These, it is said, are the great conditions which lock us in the cave, and it is true; but what if true? It is clear that even within the cave itself they become altogether different conditions to that which mere sensation regards them as being; they are, in fact, the conditions divinely imposed upon us to keep our nature in order; to the free mind how plastic they become. It is true that in imagination and thought all things do and must exist in time, and can be known only so; but the mind is able to look forth from the solemn tickings of the household clock, or watch, and can rise to the solemn periods of rolling epochs or ages. Or it can step into the antediluvian years, or even to the vast mensurations of astronomic cycles and epicyclesthe pendulous beat and throb of palpitating planets in their orbits, or the mighty adjustments of the celestial mechanics; and it is still in time. The spirit can make its own time; it is conditioned, but it creates new conditions. It is true, also, that we can not in thought escape from space. We may shut our eyes and think, but we must still behold space, and all that we see we must see as existent in space. But even to sense itself, how vast the amplitude, so to speak; how infinite the dimension is over which the eye is able to dilate. We too are able to "take the wings of the morning, and to dwell in the uttermost part of the earth." We too are able to wing our flight from star to star, and are sometimes, and often, not conscious of the tether or the chain. And if it is true that we are met by another thought-form, namely, that of substance, or, to speak more popularly, of personality -if we know things only by their personality, by the me and the not-me, the Ego and the non-Ego-it, however we may wander, and whatever we may see, we are compelled to give a shape and a reality to what we see so that we can frame no poem, but it takes vesture and shape in characters, and dream no dream but it is around us in embodiment; still the spirit is free to move, actively to move, and even to create and to rearrange, and to re-shape things from other forms. Thus the man in the cave finds himself conscious of powers which can only find their appropriate complement outside his cave. We spoke of the lamp found in the vault, and its revelations; even so indeed; but the cave becomes not merely diaphanous but plastic. The man within the cave touches the walls of his cell, and they recede from him. He turns the laws of his being into the lifters of his being; and what seem to be imposed upon him as conditions become the aids of develop ment. We look sometimes at the conditions of our being, and we seem to be the mere slaves and pack-horses of the sense, as it has been said: 66 Things are in the saddle, And they ride mankind." times say in spleen and disappointment, What do we know? We can not tell the relation of will to action-we can not tell the relation of spiritual force to the limb of the body. Solve us the mystery of the toothache. Why should a piece of bone be so troublesome a companion? What is life, and what is love? We are told, when hands join hands, or when lips join lips, a process many of our readers wot of. We are told, when eyes dart into eyes their lustre and their lightning, and when thereupon something happens-We are told it is electricity. Even our friend, Dr. Von Knowallaboutit, assures us that he has clearly demonstrated that it is electricity and nothing more. "Simply this, and nothing more." And we said to our dear Dr. Von Knowallaboutit, that does not at all explain the little mystery in which our friends are just now involved. What is sympathy? What is freedom? What is gravitation ? Weight of bodies. What is heat?Friction of bodies. Light?-A very subtle fluid. Will?-Spiritual force. Why do two and two make four? We know all that is said, but the very definition is a chink to reveal our ignorance. And yet, is it not amazing to know what this man in the cave can do with his conditions? How much easier we think would it be to construct a being whose powers were in his instincts. It is not so with man; we exist more by knowledge than by instinct; and yet more by sympathy, which is instinct made divine, even than by knowledge. Man, even in the rudest state, before he is adorned by civilization-the savage man-how he copes with and conquers nature-watches her ways with subtle and crafty eye; imitates her, and takes her captive and subjects her; the wild eagle feather on his head, the chain of shells, show how native grace, even in him, asserts itself. The discovery of fire, the structure of language, law, and society; and the fabrication of the javelin and the dart-how they speak of the effort of the man to escape from the cave. But see how man creates new conditions for himself: he has not wings, but he voyages the air in a balloon; he has not fins, nor the respiration of a fish, but he walks at the bottom of the sea in a diving-bell; he takes captive, light, and he says, "Paint me that face;" and lightning We can answer nothing-What, we some- and he says, "Carry me that message;" |