Out of these primitive, but--as may now be perceived--not
irrational beliefs about the dead, there have been evolved moral
sentiments unknown to Western civilization. These are well worth
considering, as they will prove in harmony with the most advanced
conception of ethics,--and especially with that immense though
yet indefinite expansion of the sense of duty which has followed
upon the understanding of evolution. I do not know that we have
any reason to congratulate ourselves upon the absence from our
lives of the sentiments in question;--I am even inclined to think
that we may yet find it morally necessary to cultivate sentiments
of the same kind. One of the surprises of our future will
certainly be a return to beliefs and ideas long ago abandoned
upon the mere assumption that they contained no truth,--belief
still called barbarous, pagan, mediaeval, by those who condemn
them out of traditional habit. Year after year the researches of
science afford us new proof that the savage, the barbarian, the
idolater, the monk, each and all have arrived, by different
paths, as near to some one point of eternal truth as any thinker
of the nineteenth century. We are now learning, also, that the
theories of the astrologers and of the alchemists were but
partially, not totally, wrong. We have reason even to suppose
that no dream of the invisible world has ever been dreamed,--that
no hypothesis of the unseen has ever been imagined,--which future
science will not prove to have contained some germ of reality.
Foremost among the moral sentiments of Shinto is that of loving
gratitude to the past,--a sentiment having no real correspondence
in our own emotional life. We know our past better than the
Japanese know theirs;--we have myriads of books recording or
considering its every incident and condition: but we cannot in
any sense be said to love it or to feel grateful to it. Critical
recognitions of its merits and of its defects;--some rare
enthusiasms excited by its beauties; many strong denunciations of
its mistakes: these represent the sum of our thoughts and
feelings about it. The attitude of our scholarship in reviewing
it is necessarily cold; that of our art, often more than
generous; that of our religion, condemnatory for the most part.
Whatever the point of view from which we study it, our attention
is mainly directed to the work of the dead,--either the visible
work that makes our hearts beat a little faster than usual while
looking at it, or the results of their thoughts and deeds in
relation to the society of their time. Of past humanity as
unity,--of the millions long-buried as real kindred,--we either
think not at all, or think only with the same sort of curiosity
that we give to the subject of extinct races. We do indeed find
interest in the record of some individual lives that have left
large marks in history;--our emotions are stirred by the memories
of great captains, statesmen, discoverers, reformers,--but only
because the magnitude of that which they accomplished appeals to
our own ambitions, desires, egotisms, and not at all to our
altruistic sentiments in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred. The
nameless dead to whom we owe most we do not trouble ourselves
about,--we feel no gratitude, no love to them. We even find it
difficult to persuade ourselves that the love of ancestors can
possibly be a real, powerful, penetrating, life-moulding,
religious emotion in any form of human society,--which it
certainly is in Japan. The mere idea is utterly foreign to our
ways of thinking, feeling, acting. A partial reason for this, of
course, is that we have no common faith in the existence of an
active spiritual relation between our ancestors and ourselves. If
we happen to be irreligious, we do not believe in ghosts. If we
are profoundly religious, we think of the dead as removed from us
by judgment,--as absolutely separated from us during the period
of our lives. It is true that among the peasantry of Roman
Catholic countries there still exists a belief that the dead are
permitted to return to earth once a year,--on the night of All
Souls. But even according to this belief they are not considered
as related to the living by any stronger bond than memory; and
they are thought of,--as our collections of folk-lore bear
witness,--rather with fear than love.
In Japan the feeling toward the dead is utterly different. It is
a feeling of grateful and reverential love. It is probably the
most profound and powerful of the emotions of the race,--that
which especially directs national life and shapes national
character. Patriotism belongs to it. Filial piety depends upon
it. Family love is rooted in it. Loyalty is based upon it. The
soldier who, to make a path for his comrades through the battle,
deliberately flings away his life with a shout of "_Teikoku
manzai!_"--the son or daughter who unmurmuring sacrifices all the
happiness of existence for the sake, perhaps, of an undeserving
or even cruel, parent; the partisan who gives up friends, family,
and fortune, rather than break the verbal promise made in other
years to a now poverty-stricken master; the wife who
ceremoniously robes herself in white, utters a prayer, and
thrusts a sword into her throat to atone for a wrong done to
strangers by her husband,--all these obey the will and hear the
approval of invisible witnesses. Even among the skeptical
students of the new generation, this feeling survives many wrecks
of faith, and the old sentiments are still uttered: "Never must
we cause shame to our ancestors;" "it is our duty to give honor
to our ancestors." During my former engagement as a teacher of
English, it happened more than once that ignorance of the real
meaning behind such phrases prompted me to change them in written
composition. I would suggest, for example, that the expression,
"to do honor to the memory of our ancestors," was more correct
than the phrase given. I remember one day even attempting to
explain why we ought not to speak of ancestors exactly as if they
were living parents! Perhaps my pupils suspected me of trying to
meddle with their beliefs; for the Japanese never think of an
ancestor as having become "only a memory": their dead are alive.
Were there suddenly to arise within us the absolute certainty
that our dead are still with us,--seeing every act, knowing our
every thought, hearing each word we utter, able to feel sympathy
with us or anger against us, able to help us and delighted to
receive our help, able to love us and greatly needing our love,--
it is quite certain that our conceptions of life and duty would
be vastly changed. We should have to recognize our obligations to
the past in a very solemn way. Now, with the man of the Far East,
the constant presence of the dead has been a matter of conviction
for thousands of years: he speaks to them daily; he tries to give
them happiness; and, unless a professional criminal he never
quite forgets his duty towards them. No one, says Hirata, who
constantly discharges that duty, will ever be disrespectful to
the gods or to his living parents. "Such a man will also be loyal
to his friends, and kind and gentle with his wife and children;
for the essence of this devotion is in truth filial piety." And
it is in this sentiment that the secret of much strange feeling
in Japanese character must be sought. Far more foreign to our
world of sentiment than the splendid courage with which death is
faced, or the equanimity with which the most trying sacrifices
are made, is the simple deep emotion of the boy who, in the
presence of a Shinto shrine never seen before, suddenly feels the
tears spring to his eyes. He is conscious in that moment of what
we never emotionally recognize,--the prodigious debt of the
present to the past, and the duty of love to the dead.