SELFLESSNESS

Higher-space speculation is an education in selflessness, for it demands the elimination of what Hinton calls self-elements of observation.  The diurnal motion of the sun is an example of a self-element:  it has nothing to do with the sun but everything to do with the observer.  The Ptolemaic system founded on this illusion tyrannized over the human mind for centuries, but who knows of how many other illusions we continue to be victims—­for the worst of a self-element is that its presence is never dreamed of until it is done away with.  The Theory of Relativity presents us with an effort to get rid of the self-element in regard to space and time.  A self-centered man cannot do full justice to this theory:  it requires of the mind a certain detachment, and the idea becomes clear in proportion as this detachment, this selflessness, is attained.

So while it would be too much to claim that higher thought makes men unselfish, it at least cracks the hard shell in which their selfishness abides.  If a man disciplines himself to abdicate his personal point of view in thinking about the world he lives in, it makes easier a similar attitude in relation to his fellow men.

HUMILITY

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.

SOLIDARITY