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

That we are all members of one body, branches of one vine, is a
matter of faith and of feeling; but with the first use of the weapon
of higher thought the paradox of the one and the many is capable of
so clear and simple a resolution that the sublime idea of human
solidarity is brought down from the nebulous heaven of the mystic to
the earth of every day life. To our ordinary space-thought, men a