Another omitted stanza reads:—

How canst thou, Phenomen! pretend

the Noumenon to mete and span?

Say which were easier probed and proved,

Absolute Being or mortal man?

One would think that he had read Kant on the “Knowable and the

Unknowable,” or had heard of the Yankee lady, who could

“differentiate between the Finite and the Infinite.” It is a

common-place of the age, in the West as well as the East, that

Science is confined to phenomena, and cannot reach the Noumena,

the things themselves. This is the scholastic realism, the

“residuum of a bad metaphysic,” which deforms the system of

Comte. With all its pretensions, it simply means that there are,

or can be conceived, things in themselves (_i.e._, unrelated to

thought); that we know them to exist; and, at the same time, that

we cannot know what they are. But who dares say “cannot”? Who can

measure man’s work when he shall be as superior to our present

selves as we are to the Cave-man of past time?

The “Chain of Universe” alludes to the Jain idea that the whole,

consisting of intellectual as well as of natural principles,

existed from all eternity; and that it has been subject to

endless revolutions, whose causes are the inherent powers of

nature, intellectual as well as physical, without the

intervention of a deity. But the Poet ridicules the “non-human,”

_i.e._, the not-ourselves, the negation of ourselves and

consequently a non-existence. Most Easterns confuse the

contradictories, in which one term stands for something, and the

other for nothing (_e.g._, ourselves and not-ourselves), with the

contraries (_e.g._, rich and not-rich = poor), in which both

terms express a something. So the positive-negative “infinite” is

not the complement of “finite,” but its negation. The Western man

derides the process by making “not-horse” the complementary

entity of “horse.” The Pilgrim ends with the favourite Soofi

tenet that the five (six?) senses are the doors of all human

knowledge, and that no form of man, incarnation of the deity,

prophet, apostle or sage, has ever produced an idea not conceived

within his brain by the sole operation of these vulgar material

agents. Evidently he is neither spiritualist nor idealist.

He then proceeds to show that man depicts himself in his God, and

that “God is the racial expression”; a pedagogue on the Nile, an

abstraction in India, and an astrologer in Chaldæa; where

Abraham, says Berosus (Josephus, Ant. I. 7, § 2, and II. 9, § 2)

was “skilful in the celestial science.” He notices the

Akârana-Zamân (endless Time) of the Guebres, and the working

dual, Hormuzd and Ahriman. He brands the God of the Hebrews with

pugnacity and cruelty. He has heard of the beautiful creations of

Greek fancy which, not attributing a moral nature to the deity,

included Theology in Physics; and which, like Professor Tyndall,

seemed to consider all matter everywhere alive. We have adopted a

very different Unitarianism; Theology, with its one Creator;

Pantheism with its “one Spirit’s plastic stress”; and Science

with its one Energy. He is hard upon Christianity and its “trinal

God”: I have not softened his expression ({Arabic} = a riddle),

although it may offend readers. There is nothing more enigmatical

to the Moslem mind than Christian Trinitarianism: all other

objections they can get over, not this. Nor is he any lover of

Islamism, which, like Christianity, has its ascetic Hebraism and

its Hellenic hedonism; with the world of thought moving between

these two extremes. The former, defined as predominant or

exclusive care for the practice of right, is represented by

Semitic and Arab influence, Korânic and Hadîsic. The latter, the

religion of humanity, a passion for life and light, for culture

and intelligence; for art, poetry and science, is represented in

Islamism by the fondly and impiously-cherished memory of the old

Guebre kings and heroes, beauties, bards and sages. Hence the

mention of Zâl and his son Rostam; of Cyrus and of the

Jâm-i-Jamshîd, which may be translated either grail (cup) or

mirror: it showed the whole world within its rim; and hence it

was called Jâm-i-Jehân-numâ (universe-exposing). The contemptuous

expressions about the diet of camel’s milk and the meat of the

Susmâr, or green lizard, are evidently quoted from Firdausi’s

famous lines beginning:—

Arab-râ be-jâî rasîd’est kâr.

The Hâjî is severe upon those who make of the Deity a

Khwân-i-yaghmâ (or tray of plunder) as the Persians phrase it. He

looks upon the shepherds as men,

—Who rob the sheep themselves to clothe.

So Schopenhauer (Leben, etc., by Wilhelm Gewinner) furiously

shows how the “English nation ought to treat that set of

hypocrites, imposters and money-graspers, the clergy, that

annually devours £3,500,000.”

The Hâjî broadly asserts that there is no Good and no Evil in the

absolute sense as man has made them. Here he is one with Pope:—

And spite of pride, in erring nature’s spite

One truth is clear—whatever is, is right.

Unfortunately the converse is just as true:—whatever is, is

wrong. Khizr is the Elijah who puzzled Milman. He represents the

Soofi, the Bâtini, while Musâ (Moses) is the Zâhid, the Zâhiri;

and the strange adventures of the twain, invented by the Jews,

have been appropriated by the Moslems. He derides the Freewill of

man; and, like Diderot, he detects “pantaloon in a prelate, a

satyr in a president, a pig in a priest, an ostrich in a

minister, and a goose in a chief clerk.” He holds to Fortune, the

{Greek: Túxae} of Alcman, which is, {Greek: Eunomías te kaì

Peithoûs adelphà kaì Promatheías thugátaer},—Chance, the sister

of Order and Trust, and the daughter of Forethought. The

Scandinavian Spinners of Fate were Urd (the Was, the Past),

Verdandi (the Becoming, or Present), and Skuld (the To-be, or

Future). He alludes to Plato, who made the Demiourgos create the

worlds by the Logos (the Hebrew Dabar) or Creative Word, through

the Æons. These {Greek: Aìwnes} of the Mystics were spiritual

emanations from {Greek: Aìwn}, lit. a wave of influx, an age,

period, or day; hence the Latin _ævum_, and the Welsh Awen, the

stream of inspiration falling upon a bard. Basilides, the

Egypto-Christian, made the Creator evolve seven Æons or Pteromata

(fulnesses); from two of whom, Wisdom and Power, proceeded the

365 degrees of Angels. All were subject to a Prince of Heaven,

called Abraxas, who was himself under guidance of the chief Æon,

Wisdom. Others represent the first Cause to have produced an Æon

or Pure Intelligence; the first a second, and so forth till the

tenth. This was material enough to affect Hyle, which thereby

assumed a spiritual form. Thus the two incompatibles combined in

the Scheme of Creation.

He denies the three ages of the Buddhists: the wholly happy; the

happy mixed with misery, and the miserable tinged with

happiness,—the present. The Zoroastrians had four, each of 3,000

years. In the first, Hormuzd, the good-god, ruled alone; then

Ahriman, the bad-god, began to rule subserviently: in the third

both ruled equally; and in the last, now current, Ahriman has

gained the day.

Against the popular idea that man has caused the misery of this

world, he cites the ages, when the Old Red Sandstone bred

gigantic cannibal fishes; when the Oolites produced the mighty

reptile tyrants of air, earth, and sea; and when the monsters of

the Eocene and Miocene periods shook the ground with their

ponderous tread. And the world of waters is still a hideous scene

of cruelty, carnage, and destruction.

He declares Conscience to be a geographical and chronological

accident. Thus he answers the modern philosopher whose soul was

overwhelmed by the marvel and the awe of two things, “the starry

heaven above and the moral law within.” He makes the latter sense

a development of the gregarious and social instincts; and so

travellers have observed that the moral is the last step in

mental progress. His Moors are the savage Dankali and other

negroid tribes, who offer a cup of milk with one hand and stab

with the other. He translates literally the Indian word Hâthî (an

elephant), the animal with the Hâth (hand, or trunk). Finally he

alludes to the age of active volcanoes, the present, which is

merely temporary, the shifting of the Pole, and the spectacle to

be seen from Mushtari, or the planet Jupiter.

The Hâjî again asks the old, old question, What is Truth? And he

answers himself, after the fashion of the wise Emperor of China,

“Truth hath not an unchanging name.” A modern English writer

says: “I have long been convinced by the experience of my life,

as a pioneer of various heterodoxies, which are rapidly becoming

orthodoxies, that nearly all truth is temperamental to us, or

given in the affections and intuitions; and that discussion and

inquiry do little more than feed temperament.” Our poet seems to

mean that the Perceptions, when they perceive truly, convey

objective truth, which is universal; whereas the Reflectives and

the Sentiments, the working of the moral region, or the middle

lobe of the phrenologists, supplies only subjective truth,

personal and individual. Thus to one man the axiom, _Opes

irritamenta malorum_, represents a distinct fact; while another

holds wealth to be an incentive for good. Evidently both are

right, according to their lights.

Hâjî Abdû cites Plato and Aristotle, as usual with Eastern

songsters, who delight in Mantik (logic). Here he appears to mean

that a false proposition is as real a proposition as one that is

true. “Faith moves mountains” and “Manet immota fides” are

evidently quotations. He derides the teaching of the “First

Council of the Vatican” (cap. v.), “all the faithful are little

children listening to the voice of Saint Peter,” who is the

“Prince of the Apostles.” He glances at the fancy of certain

modern physicists, “devotion is a definite molecular change in

the convolution of grey pulp.” He notices with contumely the

riddle of which Milton speaks so glibly, where the Dialoguists,

—reasoned high

Of providence, foreknowledge, will and fate,

Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute.

In opposition to the orthodox Mohammedan tenets which make Man’s

soul his percipient Ego, an entity, a unity, the Soofi considers

it a fancy, opposed to body, which is a fact; at most a state of

things, not a thing; a consensus of faculties whereof our frames

are but the phenomena. This is not contrary to Genesitic legend.

The Hebrew Ruach and Arabic Ruh, now perverted to mean soul or

spirit, simply signify wind or breath, the outward and visible

sign of life. Their later schools are even more explicit. “For

that which befalls man befalls beasts; as the one dies, so does

the other; they have all one death; all go unto one place”

(Eccles. iii. 19). But the modern soul, a nothing, a string of

negations, a negative in chief, is thus described in the

Mahâbhârat: “It is indivisible, inconceivable, inconceptible: it

is eternal, universal, permanent, immovable: it is invisible and

unalterable.” Hence the modern spiritualism which, rejecting

materialism, can use only material language.

These, says the Hâjî, are mere sounds. He would not assert “Verba

gignunt verba,” but “Verba gignunt res,” a step further. The idea

is Bacon’s “idola fori, omnium molestissima,” the twofold

illusions of language; either the names of things that have no

existence in fact, or the names of things whose idea is confused

and ill-defined.

He derives the Soul-idea from the “savage ghost” which Dr.

Johnson defined to be a “kind of shadowy being.” He justly

remarks that it arose (perhaps) in Egypt; and was not invented by

the “People of the Book.” By this term Moslems denote Jews and

Christians who have a recognized revelation, while their

ignorance refuses it to Guebres, Hindus, and Confucians.

He evidently holds to the doctrine of progress. With him

protoplasm is the Yliastron, the Prima Materies. Our word matter

is derived from the Sanskrit {Sanskrit} (mâtrâ), which, however,

signifies properly the invisible type of visible matter; in

modern language, the substance distinct from the sum of its

physical and chemical properties. Thus, Mâtrâ exists only in

thought, and is not recognizable by the action of the five

senses. His “Chain of Being” reminds us of Prof. Huxley’s

Pedigree of the Horse, Orohippus, Mesohippus, Meiohippus,

Protohippus, Pleiohippus, and Equus. He has evidently heard of

modern biology, or Hylozoism, which holds its quarter-million

species of living beings, animal and vegetable, to be progressive

modifications of one great fundamental unity, an unity of

so-called “mental faculties” as well as of bodily structure. And

this is the jelly-speck. He scoffs at the popular idea that man

is the great central figure round which all things gyrate like

marionettes; in fact, the anthropocentric era of Draper, which,

strange to say, lives by the side of the telescope and the

microscope. As man is of recent origin, and may end at an early

epoch of the macrocosm, so before his birth all things revolved

round nothing, and may continue to do so after his death.

The Hâjî, who elsewhere denounces “compound ignorance,” holds

that all evil comes from error; and that all knowledge has been

developed by overthrowing error, the ordinary channel of human

thought. He ends this section with a great truth. There are

things which human Reason or Instinct matured, in its undeveloped

state, cannot master; but Reason is a Law to itself. Therefore we

are not bound to believe, or to attempt belief in, any thing

which is contrary or contradictory to Reason. Here he is

diametrically opposed to Rome, who says, “Do not appeal to

History; that is private judgment. Do not appeal to Holy Writ;

that is heresy. Do not appeal to Reason; that is Rationalism.”

He holds with the Patriarchs of Hebrew Holy Writ, that the

present life is all-sufficient for an intellectual (not a

sentimental) being; and, therefore, that there is no want of a

Heaven or a Hell. With far more contradiction the Western poet

sings:—

Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed

In one self-place; but when we are in hell,

And where hell is there must we ever be,

And, to be short, when all this world dissolves,

And every creature shall be purified,

All places shall be hell which are not heaven.

For what want is there of a Hell when all are pure? He enlarges

upon the ancient Buddhist theory, that Happiness and Misery are

equally distributed among men and beasts; some enjoy much and

suffer much; others the reverse. Hence Diderot declares, “Sober

passions produce only the commonplace . . . the man of moderate

passion lives and dies like a brute.” And again we have the half

truth:—

That the mark of rank in nature

Is capacity for pain.

The latter implies an equal capacity for pleasure, and thus the

balance is kept.

Hâjî Abdû then proceeds to show that Faith is an accident of

birth. One of his omitted distichs says:—

Race makes religion; true! but aye

upon the Maker acts the made,

A finite God, and infinite sin,

in lieu of raising man, degrade.

In a manner of dialogue he introduces the various races each

fighting to establish its own belief. The Frank (Christian)

abuses the Hindu, who retorts that he is of Mlenchha, mixed or

impure, blood, a term applied to all non-Hindus. The same is done

by Nazarene and Mohammedan; by the Confucian, who believes in

nothing, and by the Soofi, who naturally has the last word. The

association of the Virgin Mary and St. Joseph with the Trinity,

in the Roman and Greek Churches, makes many Moslems conclude that

Christians believe not in three but in five Persons. So an

Englishman writes of the early Fathers, “They not only said that

3 = 1, and that 1 = 3: they professed to explain how that curious

arithmetical combination had been brought about. The Indivisible

had been divided, and yet was not divided: it was divisible, and

yet it was indivisible; black was white and white was black; and

yet there were not two colours but one colour; and whoever did

not believe it would be damned.” The Arab quotation runs in the

original:—

_Ahsanu ’l-Makâni l’ il-Fat⠒l-Jehannamu_

The best of places for (the generous) youth is Gehenna.

Gehenna, alias Jahim, being the fiery place of eternal

punishment. And the second saying, _Al- nâr wa l⠒l-’Ar_—“Fire

(of Hell) rather than Shame,”—is equally condemned by the

Koranist. The Gustâkhi (insolence) of Fate is the expression of

Umar-i-Khayyam (St. xxx):—

What, without asking hither hurried _whence?_

And, without asking _whither_ hurried hence!

Oh many a cup of this forbidden wine

Must drown the memory of that insolence.

Soofistically, the word means “the coquetry of the beloved one,”

the divinæ particula auræ. And the section ends with Pope’s:—

He can’t be wrong whose life is in the right.