IV

If we think a little about our position as debtors, and our way

of accepting that position, one striking difference between

Western and Far-Eastern moral sentiment will become manifest.

There is nothing more awful than the mere fact of life as mystery

when that fact first rushes fully into consciousness. Out of

unknown darkness we rise a moment into sun-light, look about us,

rejoice and suffer, pass on the vibration of our being to other

beings, and fall back again into darkness. So a wave rises,

catches the light, transmits its motion, and sinks back into sea.

So a plant ascends from clay, unfolds its leaves to light and

air, flowers, seeds, and becomes clay again. Only, the wave has

no knowledge; the plant has no perceptions. Each human life seems

no more than a parabolic curve of motion out of earth and back to

earth; but in that brief interval of change it perceives the

universe. The awfulness of the phenomenon is that nobody knows

anything about it. No mortal can explain this most common, yet

most incomprehensible of all facts,--life in itself; yet every

mortal who can think has been obliged betimes, to think about it

in relation to self.

I come out of mystery;--I see the sky and the land, men and women

and their works; and I know that I must return to mystery;--and

merely what this means not even the greatest of philosophers--not

even Mr. Herbert Spencer--can tell me. We are all of us riddles

to ourselves and riddles to each other; and space and motion and

time are riddles; and matter is a riddle. About the before and

the after neither the newly-born nor the dead have any message

for us. The child is dumb; the skull only grins. Nature has no

consolation for us. Out of her formlessness issue forms which

return to formlessness,--that is all. The plant becomes clay; the

clay becomes a plant. When the plant turns to clay, what becomes

of the vibration which was its life? Does it go on existing

viewlessly, like the forces that shape spectres of frondage in

the frost upon a window-pane?

Within the horizon-circle of the infinite enigma, countless

lesser enigmas, old as the world, awaited the coming of man.

Oedipus had to face one Sphinx; humanity, thousands of

thousands,--all crouching among bones along the path of Time, and

each with a deeper and a harder riddle. All the sphinxes have not

been satisfied; myriads line the way of the future to devour

lives yet unborn; but millions have been answered. We are now

able to exist without perpetual horror because of the relative

knowledge that guides us, the knowledge won out of the jaws of

destruction.

All our knowledge is bequeathed knowledge. The dead have left us

record of all they were able to learn about themselves and the

world,--about the laws of death and life,--about things to be

acquired and things to be avoided,--about ways of making

existence less painful than Nature willed it,--about right and

wrong and sorrow and happiness,--about the error of selfishness,

the wisdom of kindness, the obligation of sacrifice. They left us

information of everything they could find out concerning climates

and seasons and places,--the sun and moon and stars,--the motions

and the composition of the universe. They bequeathed us also

their delusions which long served the good purpose of saving us

from falling into greater ones. They left us the story of their

errors and efforts, their triumphs and failures, their pains and

joys, their loves and hates,--for warning or example. They

expected our sympathy, because they toiled with the kindest

wishes and hopes for us, and because they made our world. They

cleared the land; they extirpated monsters; they tamed and taught

the animals most useful to us. "_The mother of Kullervo awoke

within her tomb, and from the deeps of the dust she cried to him,

--'I have left thee the Dog, tied to a tree, that thou mayest go

with him to the chase.'_(1)" They domesticated likewise the

useful trees and plants; and they discovered the places and the

powers of the metals. Later they created all that we call

civilization,--trusting us to correct such mistakes as they could

not help making. The sum of their toil is incalculable; and all

that they have given us ought surely to be very sacred, very

precious, if only by reason of the infinite pain and thought

which it cost. Yet what Occidental dreams of saying daily, like

the Shinto believer:--"_Ye forefathers of the generations, and of

our families, and of our kindred,--unto you, the founders of our

homes, we utter the gladness of our thanks_"?

None. It is not only because we think the dead cannot hear, but

because we have not been trained for generations to exercise our

powers of sympathetic mental representation except within a very

narrow circle,--the family circle. The Occidental family circle

is a very small affair indeed compared with the Oriental family

circle. In this nineteenth century the Occidental family is

almost disintegrated;--it practically means little more than

husband, wife, and children well under age. The Oriental family

means not only parents and their blood-kindred, but grandparents

and their kindred, and great-grandparents, and all the dead

behind them, This idea of the family cultivates sympathetic

representation to such a degree that the range of the emotion

belonging to such representation may extend, as in Japan, to many

groups and sub-groups of living families, and even, in time of

national peril, to the whole nation as one great family: a

feeling much deeper than what we call patriotism. As a religious

emotion the feeling is infinitely extended to all the past; the

blended sense of love, of loyalty, and of gratitude is not less

real, though necessarily more vague, than the feeling to living

kindred.

In the West, after the destruction of antique society, no such

feeling could remain. The beliefs that condemned the ancients to

hell, and forbade the praise of their works,--the doctrine that

trained us to return thanks for everything to the God of the

Hebrews,--created habits of thought and habits of

thoughtlessness, both inimical to every feeling of gratitude to

the past. Then, with the decay of theology and the dawn of larger

knowledge, came the teaching that the dead had no choice in their

work,--they had obeyed necessity, and we had only received from

them of necessity the results of necessity. And to-day we still

fail to recognize that the necessity itself ought to compel our

sympathies with those who obeyed it, and that its bequeathed

results are as pathetic as they are precious. Such thoughts

rarely occur to us even in regard to the work of the living who

serve us. We consider the cost of a thing purchased or obtained

to ourselves;--about its cost in effort to the producer we do not

allow ourselves to think: indeed, we should be laughed at for any

exhibition of conscience on the subject. And our equal

insensibility to the pathetic meaning of the work of the past,

and to that of the work of the present, largely explains the

wastefulness of our civilization,--the reckless consumption by

luxury of the labor of years in the pleasure of an hour,--the

inhumanity of the thousands of unthinking rich, each of whom

dissipates yearly in the gratification of totally unnecessary

wants the price of a hundred human lives. The cannibals of

civilization are unconsciously more cruel than those of savagery,

and require much more flesh. The deeper humanity,--the cosmic

emotion of humanity,--is essentially the enemy of useless luxury,

and essentially opposed to any form of society which places no

restraints upon the gratifications of sense or the pleasures of

egotism.

In the Far East, on the other hand, the moral duty of simplicity

of life has been taught from very ancient times, because

ancestor-worship had developed and cultivated this cosmic emotion

of humanity which we lack, but which we shall certainly be

obliged to acquire at a later day, simply to save our selves from

extermination, Two sayings of Iyeyasu exemplify the Oriental

sentiment. When virtually master of the empire, this greatest of

Japanese soldiers and statesmen was seen one day cleaning and

smoothing with his own hands an old dusty pair of silk hakama or

trousers. "What you see me do," he said to a retainer, "I am not

doing because I think of the worth of the garment in itself, but

because I think of what it needed to produce it. It is the result

of the toil of a poor woman; and that is why I value it. _If we

do not think, while using things, of the time and effort required

to make them,--then our want of consideration puts us on a level

with the beasts_." Again, in the days of his greatest wealth, we

hear of him rebuking his wife for wishing to furnish him too

often with new clothing. "When I think," he protested, "of the

multitudes around me, and of the generations to come after me, I

feel it my duty to be very sparing, for their sake, of the goods

in my possession." Nor has this spirit of simplicity yet departed

from Japan. Even the Emperor and Empress, in the privacy of their

own apartments, continue to live as simply as their subjects, and

devote most of their revenue to the alleviation of public

distress.

(1) Kalevala; thirty-sixth Rune.

V

It is through the teachings of evolution that there will

ultimately be developed in the West a moral recognition of duty

to the past like that which ancestor-worship created in the Far

East. For even to-day whoever has mastered the first principles

of the new philosophy cannot look at the commonest product of

man's handiwork without perceiving something of its evolutional

history. The most ordinary utensil will appear to him not the

mere product of individual capacity on the part of carpenter or

potter, smith or cutler, but the product of experiment continued

through thousands of years with methods, with materials, and with

forms. Nor will it be possible for him to consider the vast time

and toil necessitated in the evolution, of any mechanical

appliance, and yet experience no generous sentiment. Coming

generations must think of the material bequests of the past in

relation to dead humanity.

But in the development of this "cosmic emotion" of humanity, a

much more powerful factor than recognition of our material

indebtedness to the past will be the recognition of our psychical

indebtedness. For we owe to the dead our immaterial world

also,--the world that lives within us,--the world of all that is

lovable in impulse, emotion, thought. Whosoever understands

scientifically what human goodness is, and the terrible cost of

making it, can find in the commonest phases of the humblest lives

that beauty, which is divine, and can feel that in one sense our

dead are truly gods.

So long as we supposed the woman soul one in itself,--a something

specially created to fit one particular physical being,--the

beauty and the wonder of mother-love could never be fully

revealed to us. But with deeper knowledge we must perceive that

the inherited love of myriads of millions of dead mothers has

been treasured up in one life;--that only thus can be interpreted

the infinite sweetness of the speech which the infant hears,--the

infinite tenderness of the look of caress which meets its gaze.

Unhappy the mortal who has not known these; yet what mortal can

adequately speak of them! Truly is mother-love divine; for

everything by human recognition called divine is summed up in

that love; and every woman uttering and transmitting its highest

expression is more than the mother of man: she is the _Mater

Dei_.

Needless to speak here about the ghostliness of first love,

sexual love, which is illusion,--because the passion and the

beauty of the dead revive in it, to dazzle, to delude; and to

bewitch. It is very, very wonderful; but it is not all good,

because it is not all true. The real charm of woman in herself is

that which comes later,--when all the illusions fade away to

reveal a reality, lovelier than any illusion, which has been

evolving behind the phantom-curtain of them. What is the divine

magic of the woman thus perceived? Only the affection, the

sweetness, the faith, the unselfishness, the intuitions of

millions of buried hearts. All live again;--all throb anew, in

every fresh warm beat of her own.

Certain amazing faculties exhibited in the highest social life

tell in another way the story of soul structure built up by dead

lives. Wonderful is the man who can really "be all things to all

men," or the woman who can make herself twenty, fifty, a hundred

different women,--comprehending all, penetrating all, unerring to

estimate all others;--seeming to have no individual self, but

only selves innumerable;--able to meet each varying personality

with a soul exactly toned to the tone of that to be encountered.

Rare these characters are, but not so rare that the traveler is

unlikely to meet one or two of them in any cultivated society

which he has a chance of studying. They are essentially multiple

beings,--so visibly multiple that even those who think of the Ego

as single have to describe them as "highly complex." Nevertheless

this manifestation of forty or fifty different characters in the

same person is a phenomenon so remarkable (especially remarkable

because it is commonly manifested in youth long before relative

experience could possibly account for it) that I cannot but

wonder how few persons frankly realize its signification.

So likewise with what have been termed the "intuitions" of some

forms of genius,--particularly those which relate to the

representation of the emotions. A Shakespeare would always remain

incomprehensible on the ancient soul-theory. Taine attempted to

explain him by the phrase, "a perfect imagination;"--and the

phrase reaches far in the truth. But what is the meaning of a

perfect imagination? Enormous multiplicity of

soul-life,--countless past existences revived in one. Nothing

else can explain it.... It is not however, in the world of pure

intellect that the story of psychical complexity is most

admirable: it is in the world which speaks to our simplest

emotions of love honor, sympathy, heroism.

"But by such a theory," some critic may observe, "the source of

impulses to heroism is also the source of the impulses that

people jails. Both are of the dead." This is true. We inherited

evil as well as good. Being composites only,--still evolving,

still becoming,--we inherit imperfections. But the survival of

the fittest in impulses is certainly proven by the average moral

condition of humanity,--using the word "fittest" in its ethical

sense. In spite of all the misery and vice and crime, nowhere so

terribly developed as under our own so-called Christian

civilization, the fact must be patent to any one who has lived

much, traveled much, and thought much, that the mass of humanity

is good, and therefore that the vast majority of impulses

bequeathed us by past humanity is good. Also it is certain that

the more normal a social condition, the better its humanity.

Through all the past the good Kami have always managed to keep

the bad Kami from controlling the world. And with the acceptation

of this truth, our future ideas of wrong and of right must take

immense expansion. Just as a heroism, or any act of pure goodness

for a noble end, must assume a preciousness heretofore

unsuspected,--so a real crime must come to be regarded as a crime

less against the existing individual or society, than against the

sum of human experience, and the whole past struggle of ethical

aspiration. Real goodness will, therefore, be more prized, and

real crime less leniently judged. And the early Shinto teaching,

that no code of ethics is necessary,--that the right rule of

human conduct can always be known by consulting the heart,--is a

teaching which will doubtless be accepted by a more perfect

humanity than that of the present.