De las cosas mas seguras, mas seguro es duvidar;
a typically modern sentiment of the Brazen Age of Science
following the Golden Age of Sentiment. But the Pilgrim
continues:
The sages say: I tell thee no!
with equal faith all Faiths receive;
None more, none less, for Doubt is Death:
they live the most who most believe.
Here, again, is an oriental subtlety; a man who believes in
everything equally and generally may be said to believe in
nothing. It is not a simple European view which makes honest
Doubt worth a dozen of the Creeds. And it is in direct opposition
to the noted writer who holds that the man of simple faith is
worth ninety-nine of those who hold only to the egotistic
interests of their own individuality. This dark saying means (if
it mean anything), that the so-called moral faculties of man,
fancy and ideality, must lord it over the perceptive and
reflective powers,a simple absurdity! It produced a
Turricremata, alias Torquemada, who, shedding floods of honest
tears, caused his victims to be burnt alive; and an Anchieta, the
Thaumaturgist of Brazil, who beheaded a converted heretic lest
the latter by lapse from grace lose his immortal soul.
But this vein of speculation, which bigots brand as Doubt,
Denial, and Destruction; this earnest religious scepticism; this
curious inquiry, Has the universal tradition any base of fact?;
this craving after the secrets and mysteries of the future, the
unseen, the unknown, is common to all races and to every age.
Even amongst the Romans, whose model man in Augustus day was
Horace, the philosophic, the epicurean, we find Propertius
asking:
An ficta in miseras descendit fabula gentes
Et timor haud ultra quam rogus esse potest?
To return: the Pilgrims doctrines upon the subject of conscience
and repentance will startle those who do not follow his train of
thought:
Never repent because thy will
with will of Fate be not at one:
Think, an thou please, before thou dost,
but never rue the deed when done.
This again is his modified fatalism. He would not accept the
boisterous mode of cutting the Gordian-knot proposed by the noble
British Philisterwe know were free and theres an end on it!
He prefers Lamarcks, The will is, in truth, never free. He
believes man to be a co-ordinate term of Natures great
progression; a result of the interaction of organism and
environment, working through cosmic sections of time. He views
the human machine, the pipe of flesh, as depending upon the
physical theory of life. Every corporeal fact and phenomenon
which, like the tree, grows from within or without, is a mere
product of organization; living bodies being subject to the
natural law governing the lifeless and the inorganic. Whilst the
religionist assures us that man is not a mere toy of fate, but a
free agent responsible to himself, with work to do and duties to
perform, the Hâjî, with many modern schools, holds Mind to be a
word describing a special operation of matter; the faculties
generally to be manifestations of movements in the central
nervous system; and every idea, even of the Deity, to be a
certain little pulsation of a certain little mass of animal
pap,the brain. Thus he would not object to relationship with a
tailless catarrhine anthropoid ape, descended from a monad or a
primal ascidian.
Hence he virtually says, I came into the world without having
applied for or having obtained permission; nay, more, without my
leave being asked or given. Here I find myself hand-tied by
conditions, and fettered by laws and circumstances, in making
which my voice had no part. While in the womb I was an automaton;
and death will find me a mere machine. Therefore not I, but the
Law, or if, you please, the Lawgiver, is answerable for all my
actions. Let me here observe that to the Western mind Law
postulates a Lawgiver; not so to the Eastern, and especially to
the Soofi, who holds these ideas to be human, unjustifiably
extended to interpreting the non-human, which men call the
Divine.
Further he would say, I am an individual (_qui nil habet
dividui_), a circle touching and intersecting my neighbours at
certain points, but nowhere corresponding, nowhere blending.
Physically I am not identical in all points with other men.
Morally I differ from them: in nothing do the approaches of
knowledge, my five organs of sense (with their Shelleyan
interpretation), exactly resemble those of any other being.
_Ergo_, the effect of the world, of life, of natural objects,
will not in my case be the same as with the beings most
resembling me. Thus I claim the right of creating or modifying
for my own and private use the system which most imports me; and
if the reasonable leave be refused to me, I take it without
leave.
But my individuality, however all-sufficient for myself, is an
infinitesimal point, an atom subject in all things to the Law of
Storms called Life. I feel, I know that Fate _is_. But I cannot
know what is or what is not fated to befall me. Therefore in the
pursuit of perfection as an individual lies my highest, and
indeed my only duty, the I being duly blended with the We. I
object to be a selfless man, which to me denotes an inverted
moral sense. I am bound to take careful thought concerning the
consequences of every word and deed. When, however, the Future
has become the Past, it would be the merest vanity for me to
grieve or to repent over that which was decreed by universal
Law.
The usual objection is that of mans practice. It says, This is
well in theory; but how carry it out? For instance, why would you
kill, or give over to be killed, the man compelled by Fate to
kill your father? Hâjî Abdû replies, I do as others do, not
because the murder was done by him, but because the murderer
should not be allowed another chance of murdering. He is a tiger
who has tasted blood and who should be shot. I am convinced that
he was a tool in the hands of Fate, but that will not prevent my
taking measures, whether predestined or not, in order to prevent
his being similarly used again.
As with repentance so with conscience. Conscience may be a fear
which is the shadow of justice; even as pity is the shadow of
love. Though simply a geographical and chronological accident,
which changes with every age of the world, it may deter men from
seeking and securing the prize of successful villainy. But this
incentive to beneficence must be applied to actions that will be
done, not to deeds that have been done.
The Hâjî, moreover, carefully distinguishes between the working
of fate under a personal God, and under the Reign of Law. In the
former case the contradiction between the foreknowledge of a
Creator, and the free-will of a Creature, is direct, palpable,
absolute. We might as well talk of black-whiteness and of
white-blackness. A hundred generations of divines have never been
able to ree the riddle; a million will fail. The difficulty is
insurmountable to the Theist whose Almighty is perforce
Omniscient, and as Omniscient, Prescient. But it disappears when
we convert the Person into Law, or a settled order of events;
subject, moreover, to certain exceptions fixed and immutable, but
at present unknown to man. The difference is essential as that
between the penal code with its narrow forbiddal, and the broad
commandment which is a guide rather than a task-master.
Thus, too, the belief in fixed Law, versus arbitrary will,
modifies the Hâjîs opinions concerning the pursuit of happiness.
Mankind, _das rastlose Ursachenthier_, is born to be on the whole
equally happy and miserable. The highest organisms, the fine
porcelain of our family, enjoy the most and suffer the most: they
have a capacity for rising to the empyrean of pleasure and for
plunging deep into the swift-flowing river of woe and pain. Thus
Dante (Inf. vi. 106):
tua scienza
Che vuol, quanto la cosa è più perfetta
Più senta l bene, e cosi la doglienza.
So Buddhism declares that existence in itself implies effort,
pain and sorrow; and, the higher the creature, the more it
suffers. The common clay enjoys little and suffers little. Sum up
the whole and distribute the mass: the result will be an average;
and the beggar is, on the whole, happy as the prince. Why, then,
asks the objector, does man ever strive and struggle to change,
to rise; a struggle which involves the idea of improving his
condition? The Hâjî answers, Because such is the Law under which
man is born: it may be fierce as famine, cruel as the grave, but
man must obey it with blind obedience. He does not enter into
the question whether life is worth living, whether man should
elect to be born. Yet his Eastern pessimism, which contrasts so
sharply with the optimism of the West, re-echoes the lines:
a life,
With large results so little rife,
Though bearable seems hardly worth
This pomp of words, this pain of birth.
Life, whatever may be its consequence, is built upon a basis of
sorrow. Literature, the voice of humanity, and the verdict of
mankind proclaim that all existence is a state of sadness. The
physicians of the Soul would save her melancholy from
degenerating into despair by doses of steadfast belief in the
presence of God, in the assurance of Immortality, and in visions
of the final victory of good. Were Hâjî Abdû a mere Theologist,
he would add that Sin, not the possibility of revolt, but the
revolt itself against conscience, is the primary form of evil,
because it produces error, moral and intellectual. This man, who
omits to read the Conscience-law, however it may differ from the
Society-law, is guilty of negligence. That man, who obscures the
light of Nature with sophistries, becomes incapable of discerning
his own truths. In both cases error, deliberately adopted, is
succeeded by suffering which, we are told, comes in justice and
benevolence as a warning, a remedy, and a chastisement.
But the Pilgrim is dissatisfied with the idea that evil
originates in the individual actions of free agents, ourselves
and others. This doctrine fails to account for its
characteristics,essentiality and universality. That creatures
endowed with the mere possibility of liberty should not always
choose the Good appears natural. But that of the milliards of
human beings who have inhabited the Earth, not one should have
been found invariably to choose Good, proves how insufficient is
the solution. Hence no one believes in the existence of the
complete man under the present state of things. The Hâjî rejects
all popular and mythical explanation by the Fall of Adam, the
innate depravity of human nature, and the absolute perfection of
certain Incarnations, which argues their divinity. He can only
wail over the prevalence of evil, assume its foundation to be
error, and purpose to abate it by unrooting that Ignorance which
bears and feeds it.
His eschatology, like that of the Soofis generally, is vague
and shadowy. He may lean towards the doctrine of Marc Aurelius,
The unripe grape, the ripe and the dried: all things are changes
not into nothing, but into that which is not at present. This is
one of the _monstruosa opinionum portenta_ mentioned by the XIXth
General Council, alias the First Council of the Vatican. But he
only accepts it with a limitation. He cleaves to the ethical, not
to the intellectual, worship of Nature, which moderns define to
be an unscientific and imaginary synonym for the sum total of
observed phenomena. Consequently he holds to the dark and
degrading doctrines of the Materialist, the Hylotheist; in
opposition to the spiritualist, a distinction far more marked in
the West than in the East. Europe draws a hard, dry line between
Spirit and Matter: Asia does not.
Among us the Idealist objects to the Materialists that the latter
cannot agree upon fundamental points; that they cannot define
what is an atom; that they cannot account for the transformation
of physical action and molecular motion into consciousness; and
_vice versâ_, that they cannot say what matter is; and, lastly,
that Berkeley and his school have proved the existence of spirit
while denying that of matter.
The Materialists reply that the want of agreement shows only a
study insufficiently advanced; that man cannot describe an atom,
because he is still an infant in science, yet there is no reason
why his mature manhood should not pass through error and
incapacity to truth and knowledge; that consciousness becomes a
property of matter when certain conditions are present; that Hyle
({Greek: hylae}) or Matter may be provisionally defined as
phenomena with a substructure of their own, transcendental and
eternal, subject to the action, direct or indirect, of the five
senses, whilst its properties present themselves in three states,
the solid, the liquid, and the gaseous. To casuistical Berkeley
they prefer the common sense of mankind. They ask the idealist
and the spiritualist why they cannot find names for themselves
without borrowing from a dark and degraded school; why the
former must call himself after his eye (_idein_); the latter
after his breath (_spiritus_)? Thus the Hâjî twits them with
affixing their own limitations to their own Almighty Power, and,
as Socrates said, with bringing down Heaven to the market-place.
Modern thought tends more and more to reject crude idealism and
to support the monistic theory, the double aspect, the
transfigured realism. It discusses the Nature of Things in
Themselves. To the question, is there anything outside of us
which corresponds with our sensations? that is to say, is the
whole world simply I, they reply that obviously there is a
something else; and that this something else produces the
brain-disturbance which is called sensation. Instinct orders us
to do something; Reason (the balance of faculties) directs; and
the strongest motive controls. Modern Science, by the discovery
of Radiant Matter, a fourth condition, seems to conciliate the
two schools. La découverte dun quatrième état de la matière,
says a Reviewer, cest la porte ouverte à linfini de ses
transformations; cest lhomme invisible et impalpable de même
possible sans cesser dêtre substantiel; cest le monde des
esprits entrant sans absurdité dans la domaine des hypothèses
scientifiques; cest la possibilité pour le matérialiste de
croire à la vie doutre tombe, sans renoncer au substratum
matériel quil croit nécessaire au maintien de lindividualité.
With Hâjî Abdû the soul is not material, for that would be a
contradiction of terms. He regards it, with many moderns, as a
state of things, not a thing; a convenient word denoting the
sense of personality, of individual identity. In its ghostly
signification he discovers an artificial dogma which could hardly
belong to the brutal savages of the Stone Age. He finds it in the
funereal books of ancient Egypt, whence probably it passed to the
Zendavesta and the Vedas. In the Hebrew Pentateuch, of which part
is still attributed to Moses, it is unknown, or, rather, it is
deliberately ignored by the author or authors. The early
Christians could not agree upon the subject; Origen advocated the
pre-existence of mens souls, supposing them to have been all
created at one time and successively embodied. Others make Spirit
born with the hour of birth: and so forth.
But the brain-action or, if you so phrase it, the mind, is not
confined to the reasoning faculties; nor can we afford to ignore
the sentiments, the affections which are, perhaps, the most
potent realities of life. Their loud affirmative voice contrasts
strongly with the titubant accents of the intellect. They seem to
demand a future life, even, a state of rewards and punishments
from the Maker of the world, the _Ortolano Eterno_,[1] the Potter
of the East, the Watchmaker of the West. They protest against the
idea of annihilation. They revolt at the notion of eternal
parting from parents, kinsmen and friends. Yet the dogma of a
future life is by no means catholic and universal. The
Anglo-European race apparently cannot exist without it, and we
have lately heard of the Aryan Soul-land. On the other hand
many of the Buddhist and even the Brahman Schools preach Nirwâna
(comparative non-existence) and Parinirwâna (absolute
nothingness). Moreover, the great Turanian family, actually
occupying all Eastern Asia, has ever ignored it; and the
200,000,000 of Chinese Confucians, the mass of the nation,
protest emphatically against the mainstay of the western creeds,
because it unfits men for the business and duty of life by
fixing their speculations on an unknown world. And even its
votaries, in all ages, races and faiths, cannot deny that the
next world is a copy, more or less idealized, of the present; and
that it lacks a single particular savouring of originality. It is
in fact a mere continuation; and the continuation is not
proven.
It is most hard to be a man;
and the Pilgrims sole consolation is in self-cultivation, and in
the pleasures of the affections. This sympathy may be an indirect
self-love, a reflection of the light of egotism: still it is so
transferred as to imply a different system of convictions. It
requires a different name: to call benevolence self-love is to
make the fruit or flower not only depend upon a root for
development (which is true), but the very root itself (which is
false). And, finally, his ideal is of the highest: his praise is
reserved for:
Lives
Lived in obedience to the inner law
Which cannot alter.
[1] The Eternal Gardener: so the old inscription saying:
locatus est in
Homo damnatus est in horto
humatus est in
renatus est in