The Romance of the Milky Way by Lafcadio Hearn

L >> Lafcadio Hearn >> The Romance of the Milky Way

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8

* * * * *

There was a Chinese scholar--called, in Japanese books, T[=o] no
Busanshi--who was famous for his love of flowers. He was particularly
fond of peonies, and cultivated them with great skill and
patience.[64]

[Footnote 64: The tree-peony (_botan_) is here referred to,--a flower
much esteemed in Japan. It is said to have been introduced from China
during the eighth century; and no less than five hundred varieties of
it are now cultivated by Japanese gardeners.]

One day a very comely girl came to the house of Busanshi, and begged
to be taken into his service. She said that circumstances obliged
her to seek humble employment, but that she had received a literary
education, and therefore wished to enter, if possible, into the
service of a scholar. Busanshi was charmed by her beauty, and took her
into his household without further questioning. She proved to be much
more than a good domestic: indeed, the nature of her accomplishments
made Busanshi suspect that she had been brought up in the court of
some prince, or in the palace of some great lord. She displayed
a perfect knowledge of the etiquette and the polite arts which
are taught only to ladies of the highest rank; and she possessed
astonishing skill in calligraphy, in painting, and in every kind of
poetical composition. Busanshi presently fell in love with her, and
thought only of how to please her. When scholar-friends or other
visitors of importance came to the house, he would send for the new
maid that she might entertain and wait upon his guests; and all who
saw her were amazed by her grace and charm.

One day Busanshi received a visit from the great Teki-Shin-Ketsu, a
famous teacher of moral doctrine; and the maid did not respond to her
master's call. Busanshi went himself to seek her, being desirous that
Teki-Shin-Ketsu should see her and admire her; but she was nowhere to
be found. After having searched the whole house in vain, Busanshi was
returning to the guest-room when he suddenly caught sight of the maid,
gliding soundlessly before him along a corridor. He called to her, and
hurried after her. Then she turned half-round, and flattened herself
against the wall like a spider; and as he reached her she sank
backwards into the wall, so that there remained of her nothing visible
but a colored shadow,--level like a picture painted on the plaster.
But the shadow moved its lips and eyes, and spoke to him in a whisper,
saying:--

"Pardon me that I did not obey your august call!... I am not a
mankind-person;--I am only the Soul of a Peony. Because you loved
peonies so much, I was able to take human shape, and to serve you.
But now this Teki-Shin-Ketsu has come,--and he is a person of dreadful
propriety,--and I dare not keep this form any longer.... I must return
to the place from which I came."

Then she sank back into the wall, and vanished altogether: there was
nothing where she had been except the naked plaster. And Busanshi
never saw her again.

This story is written in a Chinese book which the Japanese call
"Kai-ten-i-ji."

"ULTIMATE QUESTIONS"

A memory of long ago.... I am walking upon a granite pavement that
rings like iron, between buildings of granite bathed in the light of
a cloudless noon. Shadows are short and sharp: there is no stir in
the hot bright air; and the sound of my footsteps, strangely loud, is
the only sound in the street.... Suddenly an odd feeling comes to me,
with a sort of tingling shock,--a feeling, or suspicion, of universal
illusion. The pavement, the bulks of hewn stone, the iron rails,
and all things visible, are dreams! Light, color, form, weight,
solidity--all sensed existences--are but phantoms of being,
manifestations only of one infinite ghostliness for which the language
of man has not any word....

This experience had been produced by study of the first volume of
the Synthetic Philosophy, which an American friend had taught me
how to read. I did not find it easy reading; partly because I am a
slow thinker, but chiefly because my mind had never been trained to
sustained effort in such directions. To learn the "First Principles"
occupied me many months: no other volume of the series gave me equal
trouble. I would read one section at a time,--rarely two,--never
venturing upon a fresh section until I thought that I had made sure
of the preceding. Very cautious and slow my progress was, like that
of a man mounting, for the first time, a long series of ladders in
darkness. Reaching the light at last, I caught a sudden new vision of
things,--a momentary perception of the illusion of surfaces,--and from
that time the world never again appeared to me quite the same as it
had appeared before.

* * * * *

--This memory of more than twenty years ago, and the extraordinary
thrill of the moment, were recently revived for me by the reading of
the essay "Ultimate Questions," in the last and not least precious
volume bequeathed us by the world's greatest thinker. The essay
contains his final utterance about the riddle of life and death,
as that riddle presented itself to his vast mind in the dusk of a
lifetime of intellectual toil. Certainly the substance of what he had
to tell us might have been inferred from the Synthetic Philosophy;
but the particular interest of this last essay is made by the writer's
expression of personal sentiment regarding the problem that troubles
all deep thinkers. Perhaps few of us could have remained satisfied
with his purely scientific position. Even while fully accepting his
declaration of the identity of the power that "wells up in us under
the form of consciousness" with that Power Unknowable which shapes
all things, most disciples of the master must have longed for some
chance to ask him directly, "But how do _you_ feel in regard to
the prospect of personal dissolution?" And this merely emotional
question he has answered as frankly and as fully as any of us could
have desired,--perhaps even more frankly. "Old people," he remarks
apologetically, "must have many reflections in common. Doubtless
one which I have now in mind is very familiar. For years past, when
watching the unfolding buds in the spring, there has arisen the
thought, 'Shall I ever again see the buds unfold? Shall I ever again
be awakened at dawn by the song of the thrush?' Now that the end is
not likely to be long postponed, there results an increasing tendency
to meditate upon ultimate questions."... Then he tells us that these
ultimate questions--"of the How and the Why, of the Whence and the
Whither"--occupy much more space in the minds of those who cannot
accept the creed of Christendom, than the current conception fills
in the minds of the majority of men. The enormity of the problem of
existence becomes manifest only to those who have permitted themselves
to think freely and widely and deeply, with all such aids to thought
as exact science can furnish; and the larger the knowledge of the
thinker, the more pressing and tremendous the problem appears, and the
more hopelessly unanswerable. To Herbert Spencer himself it must have
assumed a vastness beyond the apprehension of the average mind; and
it weighed upon him more and more inexorably the nearer he approached
to death. He could not avoid the conviction--plainly suggested in his
magnificent Psychology and in other volumes of his great work--that
there exists no rational evidence for any belief in the continuance of
conscious personality after death:--

"After studying primitive beliefs, and finding that there is
no origin for the idea of an after-life, save the conclusion
which the savage draws, from the notion suggested by dreams,
of a wandering double which comes back on awaking, and
which goes away for an indefinite time at death;--and after
contemplating the inscrutable relation between brain and
consciousness, and finding that we can get no evidence of the
existence of the last without the activity of the first,--we
seem obliged to relinquish the thought that consciousness
continues after physical organization has become inactive."

In this measured utterance there is no word of hope; but there is
at least a carefully stated doubt, which those who will may try
to develop into the germ of a hope. The guarded phrase, "we _seem_
obliged to relinquish," certainly suggests that, although in the
present state of human knowledge we have no reason to believe in the
perpetuity of consciousness, some larger future knowledge might help
us to a less forlorn prospect. From the prospect as it now appears
even this mightiest of thinkers recoiled:--

... "But it seems a strange and repugnant conclusion that with
the cessation of consciousness at death there ceases to be any
knowledge of having existed. With his last breath it becomes
to each the same thing as though he had never lived.

"And then the consciousness itself--what is it during the time
that it continues? And what becomes of it when it ends? We can
only infer that it is a specialized and individualized form
of that Infinite and Eternal Energy which transcends both our
knowledge and our imagination; and that at death its elements
lapse into that Infinite and Eternal Energy whence they were
derived."

* * * * *

--_With his last breath it becomes to each the same thing as though
he had never lived?_ To the individual, perhaps--surely not to the
humanity made wiser and better by his labors.... But the world must
pass away: will it thereafter be the same for the universe as if
humanity had never existed? That might depend upon the possibilities
of future inter-planetary communication.... But the whole universe
of suns and planets must also perish: thereafter will it be the
same as if no intelligent life had ever toiled and suffered upon
those countless worlds? We have at least the certainty that the
energies of life cannot be destroyed, and the strong probability
that they will help to form another life and thought in universes
yet to be evolved.... Nevertheless, allowing for all imagined
possibilities,--granting even the likelihood of some inapprehensible
relation between all past and all future conditioned-being,--the
tremendous question remains: What signifies the whole of apparitional
existence to the Unconditioned? As flickers of sheet-lightning leave
no record in the night, so in that Darkness a million billion trillion
universes might come and go, and leave no trace of their having been.

* * * * *

To every aspect of the problem Herbert Spencer must have given
thought; but he has plainly declared that the human intellect, as at
present constituted, can offer no solution. The greatest mind that
this world has yet produced--the mind that systematized all human
knowledge, that revolutionized modern science, that dissipated
materialism forever, that revealed to us the ghostly unity of all
existence, that reestablished all ethics upon an immutable and eternal
foundation,--the mind that could expound with equal lucidity, and by
the same universal formula, the history of a gnat or the history of a
sun--confessed itself, before the Riddle of Existence, scarcely less
helpless than the mind of a child.

But for me the supreme value of this last essay is made by the fact
that in its pathetic statement of uncertainties and probabilities one
can discern something very much resembling a declaration of faith.
Though assured that we have yet no foundation for any belief in the
persistence of consciousness after the death of the brain, we are
bidden to remember that the ultimate nature of consciousness remains
inscrutable. Though we cannot surmise the relation of consciousness
to the unseen, we are reminded that it must be considered as a
manifestation of the Infinite Energy, and that its elements, if
dissociated by death, will return to the timeless and measureless
Source of Life.... Science to-day also assures us that whatever
existence has been--all individual life that ever moved in animal
or plant,--all feeling and thought that ever stirred in human
consciousness--must have flashed self-record beyond the sphere of
sentiency; and though we cannot know, we cannot help imagining that
the best of such registration may be destined to perpetuity. On this
latter subject, for obvious reasons, Herbert Spencer has remained
silent; but the reader may ponder a remarkable paragraph in the final
sixth edition of the "First Principles,"--a paragraph dealing with
the hypothesis that consciousness may belong to the cosmic ether.
This hypothesis has not been lightly dismissed by him; and even while
proving its inadequacy, he seems to intimate that it may represent
imperfectly some truth yet inapprehensible by the human mind:--

"The only supposition having consistency is that that in which
consciousness inheres is the all-pervading ether. This we
know can be affected by molecules of matter in motion, and
conversely can affect the motions of molecules;--as witness
the action of light on the retina. In pursuance of this
supposition we may assume that the ether, which pervades not
only all space but all matter, is, under special conditions
in certain parts of the nervous system, capable of being
affected by the nervous changes in such way as to result in
feeling, and is reciprocally capable under these conditions
of affecting the nervous changes. But if we accept this
explanation, we must assume that the potentiality of feeling
is universal, and that the evolution of feeling in the ether
takes place only under the extremely complex conditions
occurring in certain nervous centres. This, however, is but a
semblance of an explanation, since we know not what the ether
is, and since, by confession of those most capable of judging,
no hypothesis that has been framed accounts for all its
powers. Such an explanation may be said to do no more
than symbolize the phenomena by symbols of unknown
natures."--["First Principles," [Section] 71 _c_, definitive
edition of 1900.]

--"Inscrutable is this complex consciousness which has
slowly evolved out of infantine vacuity--consciousness
which, in other shapes, is manifested by animate beings at
large--consciousness which, during the development of every
creature, makes its appearance out of what seems unconscious
matter; _suggesting the thought that consciousness, in some
rudimentary form, is omnipresent._"[65]

[Footnote 65: _Autobiography_, vol. ii, p. 470.]

--Of all modern thinkers, Spencer was perhaps the most careful to
avoid giving encouragement to any hypothesis unsupported by powerful
evidence. Even the simple sum of his own creed is uttered only,
with due reservation, as a statement of three probabilities: that
consciousness represents a specialized and individualized form of the
infinite Energy; that it is dissolved by death; and that its elements
then return to the source of all being. As for our mental attitude
toward the infinite Mystery, his advice is plain. We must resign
ourselves to the eternal law, and endeavor to vanquish our ancient
inheritance of superstitious terrors, remembering that, "merciless as
is the Cosmic process worked out by an Unknown Power, yet vengeance is
nowhere to be found in it."[66]

[Footnote 66: _Facts and Comments_, p. 201.]

* * * * *

In the same brief essay there is another confession of singular
interest,--an acknowledgment of the terror of Space. To even the
ordinary mind, the notion of infinite Space, as forced upon us by
those monstrous facts of astronomy which require no serious study
to apprehend, is terrifying;--I mean the mere vague idea of that
everlasting Night into which the blazing of millions of suns can bring
neither light nor warmth. But to the intellect of Herbert Spencer the
idea of Space must have presented itself after a manner incomparably
more mysterious and stupendous. The mathematician alone will
comprehend the full significance of the paragraph dealing with the
Geometry of Position and the mystery of space-relations,--or the
startling declaration that "even could we penetrate the mysteries of
existence, there would remain still more transcendent mysteries."
But Herbert Spencer tells us that, apart from the conception of these
geometrical mysteries, the problem of naked Space itself became for
him, in the twilight of his age, an obsession and a dismay:--

... "And then comes the thought of this universal matrix
itself, anteceding alike creation or evolution, whichever be
assumed, and infinitely transcending both, alike in extent and
duration; since both, if conceived at all, must be conceived
as having had beginnings, while Space had no beginning. The
thought of this blank form of existence which, explored in
all directions as far as imagination can reach, has, beyond
that, an unexplored region compared with which the part which
imagination has traversed is but infinitesimal,--the thought
of a Space compared with which our immeasurable sidereal
system dwindles to a point is a thought too overwhelming to
be dwelt upon. Of late years the consciousness that without
origin or cause infinite Space has ever existed and must ever
exist, produces in me a feeling from which I shrink."

* * * * *

How the idea of infinite Space may affect a mind incomparably more
powerful than my own, I cannot know;--neither can I divine the nature
of certain problems which the laws of space-relation present to the
geometrician. But when I try to determine the cause of the horror
which that idea evokes within my own feeble imagination, I am able
to distinguish different elements of the emotion,--particular forms
of terror responding to particular ideas (rational and irrational)
suggested by the revelations of science. One feeling--perhaps the
main element of the horror--is made by the thought of being _prisoned_
forever and ever within that unutterable Viewlessness which occupies
infinite Space.

Behind this feeling there is more than the thought of eternal
circumscription;--there is also the idea of being perpetually
penetrated, traversed, thrilled by the Nameless;--there is likewise
the certainty that no least particle of innermost secret Self could
shun the eternal touch of It;--there is furthermore the tremendous
conviction that could the Self of me rush with the swiftness of
light,--with more than the swiftness of light,--beyond all galaxies,
beyond durations of time so vast that Science knows no sign by which
their magnitudes might be indicated,--and still flee onward, onward,
downward, upward,--always, always,--never could that Self of me reach
nearer to any verge, never speed farther from any centre. For, in that
Silence, all vastitude and height and depth and time and direction are
swallowed up: relation therein could have no meaning but for the speck
of my fleeting consciousness,--atom of terror pulsating alone through
atomless, soundless, nameless, illimitable potentiality.

And the idea of that potentiality awakens another quality of
horror,--the horror of infinite Possibility. For this Inscrutable that
pulses through substance as if substance were not at all,--so subtly
that none can feel the flowing of its tides, yet so swiftly that no
life-time would suffice to count the number of the oscillations which
it makes within the fraction of one second,--thrills to us out of
endlessness;--and the force of infinity dwells in its lightest tremor;
the weight of eternity presses behind its faintest shudder. To that
phantom-Touch, the tinting of a blossom or the dissipation of a
universe were equally facile: here it caresses the eye with the charm
and illusion of color; there it bestirs into being a cluster of
giant suns. All that human mind is capable of conceiving as possible
(and how much also that human mind must forever remain incapable of
conceiving?) may be wrought anywhere, everywhere, by a single tremor
of that Abyss....

* * * * *

Is it true, as some would have us believe, that the fear of the
extinction of self is the terror supreme?... For the thought of
personal perpetuity in the infinite vortex is enough to evoke sudden
trepidations that no tongue can utter,--fugitive instants of a horror
too vast to enter wholly into consciousness: a horror that can be
endured in swift black glimpsings only. And the trust that we are one
with the Absolute--dim points of thrilling in the abyss of It--can
prove a consoling faith only to those who find themselves obliged to
think that consciousness dissolves with the crumbling of the brain....
It seems to me that few (or none) dare to utter frankly those
stupendous doubts and fears which force mortal intelligence to
recoil upon itself at every fresh attempt to pass the barrier of the
Knowable. Were that barrier unexpectedly pushed back,--were knowledge
to be suddenly and vastly expanded beyond its present limits,--perhaps
we should find ourselves unable to endure the revelation....

* * * * *

Mr. Percival Lowell's astonishing book, "Mars," sets one to thinking
about the results of being able to hold communication with the
habitants of an older and a wiser world,--some race of beings more
highly evolved than we, both intellectually and morally, and able to
interpret a thousand mysteries that still baffle our science. Perhaps,
in such event, we should not find ourselves able to comprehend the
methods, even could we borrow the results, of wisdom older than all
our civilization by myriads or hundreds of myriads of years. But would
not the sudden advent of larger knowledge from some elder planet prove
for us, by reason, of the present moral condition of mankind, nothing
less than a catastrophe?--might it not even result in the extinction
of the human species?...

The rule seems to be that the dissemination of dangerous higher
knowledge, before the masses of a people are ethically prepared to
receive it, will always be prevented by the conservative instinct; and
we have reason to suppose (allowing for individual exceptions) that
the power to gain higher knowledge is developed only as the moral
ability to profit by such knowledge is evolved. I fancy that if the
power of holding intellectual converse with other worlds could now
serve us, we should presently obtain it. But if, by some astonishing
chance,--as by the discovery, let us suppose, of some method of
ether-telegraphy,--this power were prematurely acquired, its exercise
would in all probability be prohibited.... Imagine, for example, what
would have happened during the Middle Ages to the person guilty of
discovering means to communicate with the people of a neighboring
planet! Assuredly that inventor and his apparatus and his records
would have been burned; every trace and memory of his labors would
have been extirpated. Even to-day the sudden discovery of truths
unsupported by human experience, the sudden revelation of facts
totally opposed to existing convictions, might evoke some frantic
revival of superstitious terrors,--some religious panic-fury that
would strangle science, and replunge the world in mental darkness for
a thousand years.

THE MIRROR MAIDEN

In the period of the Ashikaga Sh[=o]gunate the shrine of
Ogawachi-My[=o]jin, at Minami-Is['e], fell into decay; and the
daimy[=o] of the district, the Lord Kitahatak['e], found himself
unable, by reason of war and other circumstances, to provide for
the reparation of the building. Then the Shint[=o] priest in charge,
Matsumura Hy[=o]go, sought help at Ky[=o]to from the great daimy[=o]
Hosokawa, who was known to have influence with the Sh[=o]gun. The
Lord Hosokawa received the priest kindly, and promised to speak to
the Sh[=o]gun about the condition of Ogawachi-My[=o]jin. But he said
that, in any event, a grant for the restoration of the temple could
not be made without due investigation and considerable delay; and he
advised Matsumura to remain in the capital while the matter was being
arranged. Matsumura therefore brought his family to Ky[=o]to, and
rented a house in the old Ky[=o]goku quarter.

This house, although handsome and spacious, had been long unoccupied.
It was said to be an unlucky house. On the northeast side of it there
was a well; and several former tenants had drowned themselves in
that well, without any known cause. But Matsumura, being a Shint[=o]
priest, had no fear of evil spirits; and he soon made himself very
comfortable in his new home.

* * * * *

In the summer of that year there was a great drought. For months no
rain had fallen in the Five Home-Provinces; the river-beds dried
up, the wells failed; and even in the capital there was a dearth
of water. But the well in Matsumura's garden remained nearly full;
and the water--which was very cold and clear, with a faint bluish
tinge--seemed to be supplied by a spring. During the hot season many
people came from all parts of the city to beg for water; and Matsumura
allowed them to draw as much as they pleased. Nevertheless the supply
did not appear to be diminished.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8