HÂJÎ ABDÛ, THE MAN

Hâjî Abdû has been known to me for more years than I care to

record. A native, it is believed, of Darâbghird in the Yezd

Province, he always preferred to style himself El-Hichmakâni, a

facetious “lackab” or surname, meaning “Of No-hall, Nowhere.” He

had travelled far and wide with his eyes open; as appears by his

“couplets.” To a natural facility, a knack of language learning,

he added a store of desultory various reading; scraps of Chinese

and old Egyptian; of Hebrew and Syriac; of Sanskrit and Prakrit;

of Slav, especially Lithuanian; of Latin and Greek, including

Romaic; of Berber, the Nubian dialect, and of Zend and Akkadian,

besides Persian, his mother-tongue, and Arabic, the classic of

the schools. Nor was he ignorant of “the -ologies” and the

triumphs of modern scientific discovery. Briefly, his memory was

well-stored; and he had every talent save that of using his

talents.

But no one thought that he “woo’d the Muse,” to speak in the

style of the last century. Even his intimates were ignorant of

the fact that he had a skeleton in his cupboard, his Kasîdah or

distichs. He confided to me his secret when we last met in

Western India—I am purposely vague in specifying the place. When

so doing he held in hand the long and hoary honours of his chin

with the points toward me, as if to say with the Island-King:

There is a touch of Winter in my beard,

A sign the Gods will guard me from imprudence.

And yet the piercing eye, clear as an onyx, seemed to protest

against the plea of age. The MS. was in the vilest “Shikastah” or

running-hand; and, as I carried it off, the writer declined to

take the trouble of copying out his cacograph.

We, his old friends, had long addressed Hâjî Abdû by the

sobriquet of _Nabbianâ_ (“our Prophet”); and the reader will see

that the Pilgrim has, or believes he has, a message to deliver.

He evidently aspires to preach a faith of his own; an Eastern

Version of Humanitarianism blended with the sceptical or, as we

now say, the scientific habit of mind. The religion, of which

Fetishism, Hinduism and Heathendom; Judæism, Christianity and

Islamism are mere fractions, may, methinks, be accepted by the

Philosopher: it worships with single-minded devotion the Holy

Cause of Truth, of Truth for its own sake, not for the goods it

may bring; and this belief is equally acceptable to honest

ignorance, and to the highest attainments in nature-study.

With Confucius, the Hâjî cultivates what Strauss has called the

“stern common-sense of mankind”; while the reign of order is a

paragraph of his “Higher Law.” He traces from its rudest

beginnings the all but absolute universality of some perception

by man, called “Faith”; that _sensus Numinis_ which, by

inheritance or communication, is now universal except in those

who force themselves to oppose it. And he evidently holds this

general consent of mankind to be so far divine that it primarily

discovered for itself, if it did not create, a divinity. He does

not cry with the Christ of Novalis, “Children, you have no

father”; and perhaps he would join Renan in exclaiming, _Un monde

sans Dieu est horrible!_

But he recognises the incompatibility of the Infinite with the

Definite; of a Being who loves, who thinks, who hates; of an

_Actus purus_ who is called jealous, wrathful and revengeful,

with an “Eternal that makes for righteousness.” In the presence

of the endless contradictions, which spring from the idea of a

Personal Deity, with the Synthesis, the _Begriff_ of Providence,

our Agnostic takes refuge in the sentiment of an unknown and an

unknowable. He objects to the countless variety of forms assumed

by the perception of a _Causa Causans_ (a misnomer), and to that

intellectual adoption of general propositions, capable of

distinct statement but incapable of proofs, which we term Belief.

He looks with impartial eye upon the endless variety of systems,

maintained with equal confidence and self-sufficiency, by men of

equal ability and honesty. He is weary of wandering over the

world, and of finding every petty race wedded to its own

opinions; claiming the monopoly of Truth; holding all others to

be in error, and raising disputes whose violence, acerbity and

virulence are in inverse ratio to the importance of the disputed

matter. A peculiarly active and acute observation taught him that

many of these jarring families, especially those of the same

blood, are par in the intellectual processes of perception and

reflection; that in the business of the visible working world

they are confessedly by no means superior to one another; whereas

in abstruse matters of mere Faith, not admitting direct and

sensual evidence, one in a hundred will claim to be right, and

immodestly charge the other ninety-nine with being wrong.

Thus he seeks to discover a system which will prove them all

right, and all wrong; which will reconcile their differences;

will unite past creeds; will account for the present, and will

anticipate the future with a continuous and uninterrupted

development; this, too, by a process, not negative and

distinctive, but, on the contrary, intensely positive and

constructive. I am not called upon to sit in the seat of

judgment; but I may say that it would be singular if the attempt

succeeded. Such a system would be all-comprehensive, because not

limited by space, time, or race; its principle would be extensive

as Matter itself, and, consequently, eternal. Meanwhile he

satisfies himself,—the main point.

Students of metaphysics have of late years defined the abuse of

their science as “the morphology of common opinion.” Contemporary

investigators, they say, have been too much occupied with

introspection; their labors have become merely

physiologico-biographical, and they have greatly neglected the

study of averages. For, says La Rochefoucauld, _Il est plus aisé

de connoître l’homme en général que de connoître un homme en

particulier_; and on so wide a subject all views must be

one-sided.

But this is not the fashion of Easterns. They have still to treat

great questions _ex analogiâ universi_, instead of _ex analogiâ

hominis_. They must learn the basis of sociology, the philosophic

conviction that mankind should be studied, not as a congeries of

individuals, but as an organic whole. Hence the _Zeitgeist_, or

historical evolution of the collective consciousness of the age,

despises the obsolete opinion that Society, the State, is bound

by the same moral duties as the simple citizen. Hence, too, it

holds that the “spirit of man, being of equal and uniform

substance, doth usually suppose and feign in nature a greater

equality and uniformity than is in Truth.”

Christianity and Islamism have been on their trial for the last

eighteen and twelve centuries. They have been ardent in

proselytizing, yet they embrace only one-tenth and one-twentieth

of the human race. Hâjî Abdû would account for the tardy and

unsatisfactory progress of what their votaries call “pure

truths,” by the innate imperfections of the same. Both propose a

reward for mere belief, and a penalty for simple unbelief;

rewards and punishments being, by the way, very disproportionate.

Thus they reduce everything to the scale of a somewhat unrefined

egotism; and their demoralizing effects become clearer to every

progressive age.

Hâjî Abdû seeks Truth only, truth as far as man, in the present

phase of his development, is able to comprehend it. He disdains

to associate utility, like Bacon (Nov. Org. I. Aph. 124), the

High Priest of the English Creed, _le gros bon sens_, with the

_lumen siccum ac purum notionum verarum_. He seems to see the

injury inflicted upon the sum of thought by the _â posteriori_

superstition, the worship of “facts,” and the deification of

synthesis. Lastly, came the reckless way in which Locke “freed

philosophy from the incubus of innate ideas.” Like Luther and the

leaders of the great French Revolution, he broke with the Past;

and he threw overboard the whole cargo of human tradition. The

result has been an immense movement of the mind which we love to

call Progress, when it has often been retrograde; together with a

mighty development of egotism resulting from the pampered

sentiment of personality.

The Hâjî regrets the excessive importance attached to a possible

future state: he looks upon this as a psychical stimulant, a day

dream, whose revulsion and reaction disorder waking life. The

condition may appear humble and prosaic to those exalted by the

fumes of Fancy, by a spiritual dram-drinking, which, like the

physical, is the pursuit of an ideal happiness. But he is too

wise to affirm or to deny the existence of another world. For

life beyond the grave there is no consensus of mankind, no

Catholic opinion held _semper, et ubique, et ab omnibus_. The

intellectual faculties (perception and reflection) are mute upon

the subject: they bear no testimony to facts; they show no proof.

Even the instinctive sense of our kind is here dumb. We may

believe what we are taught: we can know nothing. He would,

therefore, cultivate that receptive mood which, marching under

the shadow of mighty events, leads to the highest of goals,—the

development of Humanity. With him suspension of judgment is a

system.

Man has done much during the sixty-eight centuries which

represent his history. This assumes the first Egyptian Empire,

following the pre-historic, to begin with B. C. 5000, and to end

with B. C. 3249. It was the Old, as opposed to the Middle, the

New, and the Low: it contained the Dynasties from I. to X., and

it was the age of the Pyramids, at once simple, solid, and grand.

When the praiser of the Past contends that modern civilization

has improved in nothing upon Homer and Herodotus, he is apt to

forget that every schoolboy is a miracle of learning compared

with the Cave-man and the palæolithic race. And, as the Past has

been, so shall the Future be.

The Pilgrim’s view of life is that of the Soofi, with the usual

dash of Buddhistic pessimism. The profound sorrow of existence,

so often sung by the dreamy Eastern poet, has now passed into the

practical European mind. Even the light Frenchman murmurs,—

Moi, moi, chaque jour courbant plus bas ma tête

Je passe—et refroidi sous ce soleil joyeux,

Je m’en irai bientôt, au milieu de la fête,

Sans que rien manque au monde immense et radieux.

But our Hâjî is not Nihilistic in the “no-nothing” sense of

Hood’s poem, or, as the American phrases it, “There is nothing

new, nothing true, and it don’t signify.” His is a healthy wail

over the shortness, and the miseries of life, because he finds

all created things—

Measure the world, with “Me” immense.

He reminds us of St. Augustine (Med. c. 21). “Vita hæc, vita

misera, vita caduca, vita incerta, vita laboriosa, vita immunda,

vita domina malorum, regina superborum, plena miseriis et

erroribus . . . Quam humores tumidant, escæ inflant, jejunia

macerant, joci dissolvunt, tristitiæ consumunt; sollicitudo

coarctat, securitas hebetat, divitiæ inflant et jactant.

Paupertas dejicit, juventus extollit, senectus incurvat,

importunitas frangit, mæror deprimit. Et his malis omnibus mors

furibunda succedit.” But for _furibunda_ the Pilgrim would

perhaps read _benedicta_.

With Cardinal Newman, one of the glories of our age, Hâjî Abdû

finds “the Light of the world nothing else than the Prophet’s

scroll, full of lamentations and mourning and woe.” I cannot

refrain from quoting all this fine passage, if it be only for the

sake of its lame and shallow deduction. “To consider the world in

its length and breadth, its various history and the many races of

men, their starts, their fortunes, their mutual alienation, their

conflicts, and then their ways, habits, governments, forms of

worship; their enterprises, their aimless courses, their random

achievements and acquirements, the impotent conclusion of

long-standing facts, the tokens so faint and broken of a

superintending design, the blind evolution (!) of what turn out

to be great powers or truths, the progress of things as if from

unreasoning elements, not towards final causes; the greatness and

littleness of man, his far-reaching aims and short duration. the

curtain hung over his futurity, the disappointments of life, the

defeat of good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental

anguish, the prevalence and intensity of sin, the pervading

idolatries, the corruptions, the dreary hopeless irreligion, that

condition of the whole race so fearfully yet exactly described in

the Apostle’s words, ‘having no hope and without God in the

world’—_all this is a vision to dizzy and appall, and inflicts

upon the mind the sense of a profound mystery which is absolutely

without human solution_.” Hence that admirable writer postulates

some “terrible original calamity”; and thus the hateful doctrine,

theologically called “original sin,” becomes to him almost as

certain as that “the world exists, and as the existence of God.”

Similarly the “Schedule of Doctrines” of the most liberal

Christian Church insists upon the human depravity, and the

“absolute need of the Holy Spirit’s agency in man’s regeneration

and sanctification.”

But what have we here? The “original calamity” was either caused

by God or arose without leave of God, in either case degrading

God to man. It is the old dilemma whose horns are the

irreconcilable attributes of goodness and omniscience in the

supposed Creator of sin and suffering. If the one quality be

predicable, the other cannot be predicable of the same subject.

Far better and wiser is the essayist’s poetical explanation now

apparently despised because it was the fashionable doctrine of

the sage bard’s day:—

All nature is but art . . .

All discord harmony not understood;

All partial evil universal good.—(Essay 289–292.)

The Pilgrim holds with St. Augustine Absolute Evil is impossible

because it is always rising up into good. He considers the theory

of a beneficent or maleficent deity a purely sentimental fancy,

contradicted by human reason and the aspect of the world. Evil is

often the active form of good; as F. W. Newman says, “so likewise

is Evil the revelation of Good.” With him all existences are

equal: so long as they possess the Hindu Agasa, Life-fluid or

vital force, it matters not they be,—

Fungus or oak or worm or man.

War, he says, brings about countless individual miseries, but it

forwards general progress by raising the stronger upon the ruins

of the weaker races. Earthquakes and cyclones ravage small areas;

but the former builds up earth for man’s habitation, and the

latter renders the atmosphere fit for him to breathe. Hence he

echoes:

—The universal Cause

Acts not by partial but by general laws.

Ancillary to the churchman’s immoral view of “original sin” is

the unscientific theory that evil came into the world with Adam

and his seed. Let us ask what was the state of our globe in the

pre-Adamite days, when the tyrants of the Earth, the huge

Saurians and other monsters, lived in perpetual strife, in a

destructiveness of which we have now only the feeblest examples?

What is the actual state of the world of waters, where the only

object of life is death, where the Law of murder is the Law of

Development?

Some will charge the Hâjî with irreverence, and hold him a

“lieutenant of Satan who sits in the chair of pestilence.” But he

is not intentionally irreverent. Like men of far higher strain,

who deny divinely the divine, he speaks the things that others

think and hide. With the author of “Supernatural Religion,” he

holds that we “gain infinitely more than we lose in abandoning

belief in the reality of revelation”; and he looks forward to the

day when “the old tyranny shall have been broken, and when the

anarchy of transition shall have passed away.” But he is an

Eastern. When he repeats the Greek’s “Remember not to believe,”

he means Strive to learn, to know, for right ideas lead to right

actions. Among the couplets not translated for this eclogue is:—

Of all the safest ways of Life

the safest way is still to doubt,

Men win the future world with Faith,

the present world they win without.