KŌBE, March, 1895.
DEAR CHAMBERLAIN,--You will scarcely be able to believe me, I imagine;
but I must confess that your letter on "shall" and "will" is a sort of
revelation in one sense--it convinces me that some people, and I suppose
all people of fine English culture, really feel a sharp distinction
of meaning in the sight and sound of the words "will" and "shall." I
confess, also, that I never have felt such a distinction, and cannot
feel it now. I have been guided chiefly by euphony, and the sensation
of "will" as softer and gentler than "shall." The word "shall" in the
second person especially has for me a queer identification with English
harshness and menace,--memories of school, perhaps. I shall study the
differences by your teaching, and try to avoid mistakes, but I think
I shall never be able to feel the distinction. The tone to me is
everything--the word nothing. For example, the Western cowboy says "Yes,
you will, Mister," in a tone that means something much more terrible
than the angry educated Englishman's "you shall." I know this confession
is horrid--but there's the truth of the matter; and I feel angry with
conventional forms of language of which I cannot understand the real
spirit. I trust the tendency to substitute "will" for "shall" which
you have noticed, and which I have always felt, is going eventually to
render the use of "shall" with the first person obsolete. I am "colour
blind" to the values you assert; and I suspect that the majority of the
English-speaking races--the raw people--are also blind thereunto. It
is the people, after all, who make the language in the end, and in the
direction of least resistance.
You did not quite catch my meaning on the subject of inherited feeling.
I did not hint you denied heredity (though your last letter embodies
several strong denials of it, I think). I believe it is an accepted
general rule, for example, that only a child having parents of different
races can learn even two languages equally well: in other cases, one
language gains at the expense of the other. Creoles exemplify this
rule. Toys are related to the æsthetic faculty, to the play-impulse,
to the imaginative capacity. These differ really in different races;
and represent, not individual education at all, but the sum of racial
experiences under certain conditions. I cannot believe for a moment
that an English child born in Japan could feel the same sensation on
looking at a Japanese picture as the sensation felt by a Japanese child
when looking at the same picture. (With food, the matter is different:
English children in many cases disliking greasy cooking, and in other
cases showing a decided preference for fat. Only a very large number of
instances--many thousand--could really show any general rule in the
case of English children born in Japan. The evidence you cite seems to
me a contradiction, or exception to general tendencies.) The psychical
fact about feelings and emotions is that they are inheritances, just
as much as the colour of hair, or the size of limbs; and tastes--such
as a taste for music or painting--are similarly inherited. They are
outside of the individual experience as much as a birthmark. To explain
fully why, would involve a lot of neurological scribbling,--but it is
sufficient to say that as all feelings are the result of motions in
nervous structure, the volume and character and kind of feeling is
predetermined in each individual by the character of nerve-tissue and
its arrangement and complexity. In no two individuals are the nervous
structures exactly the same; and the differences in races or individuals
are consequent upon the differences in quality, variety, and volume of
ancestral experience shaping each life.
"The experience-hypothesis," says Spencer, "is inadequate to account for
emotional phenomena. It is even more at fault in respect to the emotions
than in respect to the cognitions. The doctrine that all the desires,
all the sentiments, are generated by the experiences of the individual,
is so glaringly at variance with facts that I wonder how any one should
ever have entertained it." And he cites "the multiform passions of the
infant, displayed before there has been any such amount of experience as
could possibly account for them."
In short, there is no possible room for argument as to whether each
particular character--with all its possibilities, intellectual or
emotional--is not predetermined by the character of nervous structure,
slowly evolved by millions of billions of experiences in the past. As
the differences in the ancestral sums of experiences, so the differences
in the psychical life. Varying enormously in races so widely removed
as English and Japanese, it is impossible to believe that any feeling
in one race is exactly parallelled by any feeling in the other. It is
equally impossible to think that the feelings of a Japanese child can be
the same as those of an English child born in Japan. Amazing physical
proof to the contrary would be afforded by a comparative study of the
two nervous structures.
To say, therefore, that the sight of a toy--adjusted exactly by the
experience of the race to the experience of the individual--produces on
the mind of a Japanese child the same impression it would produce on the
mind of an English child born in Japan and brought up by Japanese only,
would be to deny all our modern knowledge of biology, psychology, and
even physiology. The pleasure of the Japanese child in its toy is the
pleasure of the dead.
Ever faithfully,
LAFCADIO HEARN.