Richard Burton's Kasidah - A Lay of the Higher Law
NOTE I
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 has ma tête
Je passe--et refroidi sous ce soleil joyeux,
Je m'en irai bientôt, au milieu de la fete,
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.
This is the Spaniard's:--
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
I 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 Pilgrim's 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 Philister "we know we're free and there's an end on it!" He
prefers Lamarck's, "The will is, in truth, never free." He believes man
to be a co ordinate term of Nature's 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
infinitessimal 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 man's 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 Hâjî's 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 à 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 changed 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 versa, 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 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 d'un
quatrième état de la matière," says a Reviewer, "c'est la porte
ouverte à l'infini de ses transformations; c'est l'homme invisible et
impalpable de même possible sans cesser d'être substantiel; c'est le
monde des esprits entrant sans absurdité dans la domaine des
hypothèses scientifiques; c'est la possibilité pour le matérialiste de
croire à la vie d'outre tombe, sans renoncer au substratum materiel
qu'il croit nécessaire au maintien de l'individualité."
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 men's 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, ever, 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 Pilgrim's 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.
Note.
1. The Eternal Gardener: so the old inscription saying:--
locatus est in
damnatus est in
homo horto
humatus est in
renatus est in
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