The interpretative power of Buddhism, and the singular accord of
its theories with the facts of modern science, appear especially
in that domain of psychology whereof Herbert Spencer has been the
greatest of all explorers. No small part of our psychological
life is composed of feelings which Western theology never could
explain. Such are those which cause the still speechless infant
to cry at the sight of certain faces, or to smile at the sight of
others. Such are those instantaneous likes or dislikes
experienced on meeting strangers, those repulsions or attractions
called "first impressions," which intelligent children are prone
to announce with alarming frankness, despite all assurance that
"people must not be judged by appearances": a doctrine no child
in his heart believes. To call these feelings instinctive or
intuitive, in the theological meaning of instinct or intuition,
explains nothing at all--merely cuts off inquiry into the mystery
of life, just like the special creation hypothesis. The idea that
a personal impulse or emotion might be more than individual,
except through demoniacal possession, still seems to
old-fashioned orthodoxy a monstrous heresy. Yet it is now certain
that most of our deeper feelings are superindividual,--both those
which we classify as passional, and those which we call sublime.
The individuality of the amatory passion is absolutely denied by
science; and what is true of love at first sight is also true of
hate: both are superindividual. So likewise are those vague
impulses to wander which come and go with spring, and those vague
depressions experienced in autumn,--survivals, perhaps, from an
epoch in which human migration followed the course of the
seasons, or even from an era preceding the apparition of man.
Superindividual also those emotions felt by one who, after having
passed the greater part of a life on plain or prairies, first
looks upon a range of snow-capped peaks; or the sensations of
some dweller in the interior of a continent when he first beholds
the ocean, and hears its eternal thunder. The delight, always
toned with awe, which the sight of a stupendous landscape evokes;
Or that speechless admiration, mingled with melancholy
inexpressible, which the splendor of a tropical sunset
creates,--never can be interpreted by individual experience.
Psychological analysis has indeed shown these emotions to be
prodigiously complex, and interwoven with personal experiences of
many kinds; but in either case the deeper wave of feeling is
never individual: it is a surging up from that ancestral sea of
life out of which we came. To the same psychological category
possibly belongs likewise a peculiar feeling which troubled men's
minds long before the time of Cicero, and troubles them even more
betimes in our own generation,--the feeling of having already
seen a place really visited for the first time. Some strange air
of familiarity about the streets of a foreign town, or the forms
of a foreign landscape, comes to the mind with a sort of soft
weird shock, and leaves one vainly ransacking memory for
interpretations. Occasionally, beyond question, similar
sensations are actually produced by the revival or recombination
of former relations in consciousness; but there would seem to be
many which remain wholly mysterious when we attempt to explain
them by individual experience.
Even in the most common of our sensations there are enigmas never
to be solved by those holding the absurd doctrine that all
feeling and cognition belong to individual experience, and that
the mind of the child newly-born is a _tabula rasa_. The pleasure
excited by the perfume of a flower, by certain shades of color,
by certain tones of music; the involuntary loathing or fear
aroused by the first sight of dangerous or venomous life; even
the nameless terror of dreams,--are all inexplicable upon the
old-fashioned soul-hypothesis. How deeply-reaching into the life
of the race some of these sensations are, such as the pleasure in
odors and in colors, Grant Allen has most effectively suggested
in his "Physiological Aesthetics," and in his charming treatise
on the Color-Sense. But long before these were written, his
teacher, the greatest of all psychologists, had clearly proven
that the experience-hypothesis was utterly inadequate to account
for many classes of psychological phenomena. "If possible,"
observes Herbert Spencer, "it is even more at fault in respect to
the emotions than to the cognitions. The doctrine that all the
desires, all the sentiments, are generated by the experiences of
the individual, is so glaringly at variance with facts that I
cannot but wonder how any one should ever have ventured to
entertain it." It was Mr. Spencer, also, who showed us that words
like "instinct," "intuition," have no true signification in the
old sense; they must hereafter be used in a very different one.
Instinct, in the language of modern psychology, means "organized
memory," and memory itself is "incipient instinct,"--the sum of
impressions to be inherited by the next succeeding individual in
the chain of life. Thus science recognizes inherited memory: not
in the ghostly signification of a remembering of the details of
former lives, but as a minute addition to psychological life
accompanied by minute changes in the structure of the inherited
nervous system. "The human brain is an organized register of
infinitely numerous experiences received during the evolution of
life, or rather, during the evolution of that series of organisms
through which the human organism has been reached. The effects of
the most uniform and frequent of these experiences have been
successively bequeathed, principal and interest; and have slowly
amounted to that high intelligence which lies latent in the brain
of the infant--which the infant in after-life exercises and
perhaps strengthens or further complicates--and which, with
minute additions, it bequeaths to future generations(1)." Thus we
have solid physiological ground for the idea of pre-existence and
the idea of a multiple Ego. It is incontrovertible that in every
individual brain is looked up the inherited memory of the
absolutely inconceivable multitude of experiences received by all
the brains of which it is the descendant. But this scientific
assurance of self in the past is uttered in no materialistic
sense. Science is the destroyer of materialism: it has proven
matter incomprehensible; and it confesses the mystery of mind
insoluble, even while obliged to postulate an ultimate unit of
sensation. Out of the units of simple sensation, older than we by
millions of years, have undoubtedly been built up all the
emotions and faculties of man. Here Science, in accord with
Buddhism, avows the Ego composite, and, like Buddhism, explains
the psychical riddles of the present by the psychical experiences
of the past.
(1) Principles of Psychology: "The Feelings."