One of the earliest effects of selfless thought is the exorcism of
all arrogance. The effort to dramatize the relation of an earthworm
to its environment makes us recognize that its predicament is our own,
different only in degree. We are exercising ourselves in humility
and meekness, but of a sort leading to a mastery that may well make
the meek the inheritors of the earth. Hinton was himself so meek a
man that his desire did not rise to the height of expecting or
looking for the beautiful or the good: he simply asked for something
to know. He despaired of knowing anything definitely and certainly
except arrangements in space. We have his testimony as to how
abundantly this hunger and thirst after that right knowledge which
is righteousness was gratified. "All I want to do," he says,
"is to make this humble beginning of knowledge and show how
inevitably, by devotion to it, it leads to marvellous and
far-distant truths, and how, by strange paths, it leads directly
into the presence of some of the highest conceptions which great
minds have given us."
Here speaks the blessed man referred to by the psalmist, "Whose
delight is in the law of the Lord, and in His law doth he meditate
day and night." Abandoning a vain search after abstractions, and
applying his simple formula to life, Hinton found that it enabled
him to express the faith in his heart in terms conformable to reason;
that it led back to, and illumined the teachings of every spiritual
instructor and inspirer of mankind.