CHAPTER XIII

RELIGION AND SCIENCE

"For the Buddha of the deeper Buddhism is not Gautama, nor yet any one Tathagata, but simply the divine in man. Chrysalides of the infinite we all are: each contains a ghostly Buddha, and the millions are but one. All humanity is potentially the Buddha-to-come, dreaming through the ages in Illusion; and the teacher's smile will make beautiful the world again when selfishness shall die. Every noble sacrifice brings the hour of his awakening; and who may justly doubt--remembering the myriads of the centuries of man--that even now there does not remain one place on earth where life has not been freely given for love or duty?"

Though some years were yet to elapse before Hearn received his definite marching orders, each halt was but a bivouac nearer the field of operations where effective work and fame awaited him.

"Have wild theories about Japan," he writes prophetically to Mr. Watkin. "Splendid field in Japan--a climate just like England--perhaps a little milder. Plenty of European and English newspapers...." And again, "I have half a mind to study medicine in practical earnest, for as a doctor I may do well in Japan."

When the New Orleans Exposition was opened in 1885, Harpers, the publishers--who had already sent Hearn on a tour in Florida with an artist of their staff--now made an arrangement with him, by which he was to supply descriptive articles, varied by sketches and drawings, copied from photographs, of the principal exhibits.

On January 3rd, Hearn's first article appeared in _Harper's Weekly_. In it he describes the fans, the _kakemonos_, the screens in the Japanese department. Long lines of cranes flying against a vermilion sky, a flight of gulls sweeping through the golden light of a summer morning; the heavy, eccentric, velvety flight of bats under the moon; the fairy hovering of moths, of splendid butterflies; the modelling and painting of animal forms, the bronzed tortoises, crabs, storks, frogs, not mere copies of nature, but exquisite idealisations stirred his artistic sense as did also the representations of the matchless mountain Fuji-no-yama--of which the artist, Hokusai, alone drew one hundred different views, on fans, behind rains of gold, athwart a furnace of sunset, or against an immaculate blue burnished by some wizard dawn, exhaling from its mimic crater a pillar of incense smoke, towering above stretches of vineyards and city-speckled plains, or perchance begirdled by a rich cloud of silky shifting tints, like some beauty of Yoshiwara.

It seems almost as if he already saw the light of the distant dreamy world and the fairy vapours of morning, and the marvellous wreathing of clouds, and heard the pilgrims' clapping of hands, saluting the mighty day in Shinto prayer, as a decade later he saw, and heard, when he ascended Fuji-no-yama.

* * * * *

A year after the exposition, Hearn made the acquaintance of a young Lieutenant Crosby. Young Crosby was a native of Louisiana, educated at West Point, stationed at the time with his regiment at New Orleans. He was a person, apparently, of considerable culture. He and Hearn frequented the same literary circles. Interest in science and philosophy was as wide-spread in America as in Europe during the course of last century.

One day Crosby lent his new acquaintance Herbert Spencer's "First Principles." In his usual vehement, impressionable way Hearn immediately accepted all the tenets, all the conclusions arrived at. And from that day began what only can be called an intellectual idolatry for the colourless analytic English philosopher that lasted till his death.

The terms in which he alludes to him are superexaggerated: "the greatest mind that this world has yet produced--the mind that systematised all human knowledge, that revolutionised modern science, that dissipated materialism forever ... 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."

Always excitable in argument, he would not be gainsaid, and indeed at various periods of his life, when people ventured to doubt the soundness of some of Spencer's conclusions, Hearn would not only refuse to discuss the subject, but henceforth abstained from holding communication with the offending individual.

"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.... 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, colour, 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, he says, by the study of the first volume of Spencer's "Synthetic Philosophy," which an American friend had taught him how to read. Very cautious and slow his progress was, like that of a man mounting for the first time a long series of ladders in darkness. Reaching the light at last, he caught a sudden new view of things--a momentary perception of the illusion of surfaces,--and from that time the world never again appeared to him quite the same as it had appeared before.

It is a noteworthy fact that, though the mid-Victorian scientists and philosophers were in the zenith of their influence when Hearn was in London, twenty years before these New Orleans days, he never seems to have taken an interest in their speculations or theories. We, of the present generation, can hardly realise the excitement created by the new survey of the Cosmos put forth by Darwin and his adherents. Old forms of thought crumbled; the continuity of life was declared to have been proved; lower forms were raised and their kinship with the higher demonstrated; man was deposed and put back into the sequence of nature. Hardly a decade elapsed before the enthusiasm began to wane. Some of Darwin's adherents endeavoured to initiate what they called a scientific philosophy, attempting to prove more than he did. Herbert Spencer, in his "Principles of Ethics," when dealing with the inception of moral consciousness, appealed to the "Time Process," to the enormous passage of the years, to explain the generation of sentiency, and ultimately, moral consciousness. "Out of the units of single sensations, older than we by millions of years, have been built up all the emotions and faculties of man," echoes his disciple, Lafcadio Hearn. Spencer also put forward the view, from which he ultimately withdrew, that natural selection tended towards higher conditions, or, as he termed it, "Equilibration,"--a state in which all struggle had ceased, and from which all disturbing influences, passion, love, happiness and fear were eliminated.

These statements were contested by Darwin and Huxley, both declaring that evolution manifested a sublime indifference to the pains or pleasures of man; evil was as natural as good and had been as efficacious a factor in helping forward the progress of the world.

In his celebrated Romanes lecture of 1893 on the subject of "Nature and Evolution," Huxley turned the searchlight of his analytical intellect on Buddha's theories with regard to Karma and the ultimate progress of man towards the perfect life, and effectually, so far as his opinion was concerned, demolished any possible reconciliation between Buddhism and science. "The end of life's dream is Nirvana. What Nirvana is, the learned do not agree, but since the best original authorities tell us there is neither desire, nor activity, nor any possibility of phenomenal re-appearance, for the sage who has entered Nirvana, it may be safely said of this acme of Buddhist philosophy--'the rest is silence!'"

It is plain, therefore, that the two points of contact upon which Hearn, in his attempted reconciliation between Buddhism and modern science laid most stress, were disproved by leading scientists even before he had read Spencer's "First Principles" at New Orleans in 1886, and it is disconcerting to find him using his deftness in the manipulation of words, to reconcile statements of Huxley's and Darwin's with his own wishes. His statement, indeed, that the right of a faith to live is only to be proved by its possible reconciliation with natural and scientific facts, proves how little fitted he was to expound natural science.

Long before he went to Japan, he had been interested in oriental religion and ethics. But his Buddhism was really only a vague, poetical theory, as was his Christianity. "When I write God, of course I mean only the World-Soul, the mighty and sweetest life of Nature, the great Blue Ghost, the Holy Ghost which fills planets and hearts with beauty." The deeper Buddhism, he affirmed, was only the divine in man.

Bruised and buffeted in the struggle for existence, it is easy to imagine the attraction that the Buddhist ideal of discipline and self-effacement would exercise over a mind such as his. Shortly after his arrival in Japan, standing opposite the great Dai Batsu with its picturesque surroundings in the garden at Kamakura, he was carried away by the ideal of calm, of selflessness that it embodied.

It has generally been taken for granted that he died a Buddhist; he emphatically declared, during the last year of his life, that he subscribed to no Buddhistical tenets.

Invariably the best critic of his own nature--"Truly we have no permanent opinions," he writes, "until our mental growth is done. The opinions we have are simply lent us for awhile by the gods--at compound interest!"

There is a characteristic anecdote told of him by a cousin who went to visit him when a boy at Ushaw. He asked her to bow to the figure of the Virgin Mary, which stood upon the stairway. She refused, upon which he earnestly repeated his request. Shortly after this incident he volunteered the statement to one of the college tutors, who found him lying on his back in the grass, looking up at the sky, that he was a pantheist.

After he had been reading some of the Russian novelists, though he confessed to a world of romance in old Romanism, the Greek Church, he thought, had a better chance of life. Russia seemed the coming race, a Russian Mass would one day be sung in St. Peter's, and Cossack soldiers would wait at Stamboul in the reconsecrated Basilica of Justinian for the apparition of that phantom priest destined to finish the Mass, interrupted by the swords of the Janizaries of Mahomet II.

In spite of frequently declaring himself a radical, the trend of Hearn's mind was distinctly conservative. Old beliefs handed down from century to century, old temples sanctified for generations, old emotions that had moulded the life of the people, had for him supreme attraction. When he arrived at Matsue and found an Arcadian state of things, a happy, contented, industrious people, and an artistic development of a remarkable kind, the girl he married, also, Setsu Koizumi, having been brought up in the tenets of the ancient faith, it was a foregone conclusion that he should endeavour to harmonise Shintoism and Buddhism with the philosophy propounded by his high-priest, Herbert Spencer. Following the lead of his master, he committed himself to the statement that "ancestor worship was the root of all religion." Cut off from communication with outside opinion, he did not know how hotly this idea had been contested, Frederic Harrison, amongst others, asserting that the worship of natural objects--not spirit or ancestor worship--was the beginning of the religious sentiment in man.

It was of the nature of Hearn's mind that he should have taken up and clung to this Spencerian idea of ghost-cult, the religion of the dead. From his earliest childhood the "ghostly" had always haunted him. Even the name of the Holy Ghost as taught him in his childish catechism was invested with a vague reverential feeling of uncanny, ghostly influences. When therefore in the "Synthetic Philosophy" he found Spencer declaring that ancestor worship, the influence of spirits or ghosts, was the foundation of all religion, he subscribed to the same idea. "The real religion of Japan," he says in his essay on the ancient cult, "the religion still professed in one form or other by the entire nation, is that cult which has been the foundation of all civilised religion and of all civilised society, 'Ancestor worship.' Patriotism belongs to it, filial power depends upon it, family love is rooted in it, loyalty is based upon it. The soldier who, to make a path for his comrades through the battle, deliberately flings away his life with a shout of 'Teikoku manzai' (Empire, good-bye), obeys the will and fears the approval of ghostly witnesses."

Mr. Robert Young, editor of the _Japan Chronicle_, and Mr. W. B. Mason, who both of them have lived in Japan for many years, keen observers of Japanese characteristics and tendencies, in discussing the value of Hearn's books as expositions of the country, were unanimous in declaring that he greatly overestimated the influence of ancestor worship.

The Japanese, like all gallant people, foster a deep reverence for their heroic ancestors. Secluded from the rest of the world for centuries, all their hero-worship had been devoted to their own nationality; but practical, hard-headed, material-minded, pushing forward in every direction, grasping the necessities that the competitive struggle of modern civilisation has forced upon them, keeping in the van by every means inculcated by cleverness and shrewdness--arguing by analogy, it is not likely that a people, living intensely in the present, clutching at every opportunity as it passes, would nourish a feeling such as Hearn describes for "millions long buried"--for "the nameless dead."

Nature worship, the worship of the sun, that gave its name to the ancient kingdom, the natural phenomena of their volcanic mountains Fuji-no-yama or Asama-yama, inspired feelings of reverence in the ancient Japanese far more potent than any idea connected with their "ancestral spirits."

In Shinto there is no belief in the passage of "mind essence" from form to form, as in Buddhism; the spirits of the dead, according to the most ancient Japanese religion, continue to exist in the world, they mingle with the viewless forces of Nature and act through them, still surrounding the living, expecting daily offerings and prayers. What a charm and mysticism is imparted to all the literary work done by Hearn in Japan by the Shinto idea of ancestral ghosts, which he really seems for a time to have adopted, woven into the Buddhist belief in pre-existence, the continuity of mind connected again with the scientific theory of evolution.

"He stands and proclaims his mysteries," says an American critic, "at the meeting of Three Ways. To the religious instinct of India,--Buddhism in particular,--which history has engrafted on the aesthetic heart of Japan, Hearn brings the interpreting spirit of Occidental science; and these three traditions are fused by the peculiar sympathies of his mind into one rich and novel compound,--a compound so rare as to have introduced into literature a psychological sensation unknown before. More than any other living author he has added a new thrill to our intellectual experience."

When at Tokyo, if you find your way into the street called Naka-dori, where ancient curios and embroideries are to be bought--you will perchance be shown a wonderful fabric minutely intersected with delicate traceries on a dark-coloured texture. If you are accompanied by any one who is acquainted with ancient Japanese embroidery, they will show you that these traceries are fine Japanese ideographs; poems, proverbs, legends, embroidered by the laying on of thread by thread all over the tissue, producing a most harmonious and beautiful effect. Thus did Hearn, like these ancient artificers, weave ancient theories of pre-existence and Karma into spiritual fantasies and imaginations. Ever in consonance with wider interests his work opened up strange regions of dreamland, touched trains of thought that run far beyond the boundaries of men's ordinary mental horizon. In his sketch, for instance, called the "Mountain of Skulls,"[17] how weirdly does he make use of the idea of pre-existence. A young man and his guide are pictured climbing up a mountain, where was no beaten path, the way lying over an endless heaping of tumbled fragments.

[17] "In Ghostly Japan," Little, Brown & Co.

Under the stars they climbed, aided by some superhuman power, and as they climbed the fragments under their feet yielded with soft dull crashings.... And once the pilgrim youth laid hand on something smooth that was not stone--and lifted it--and was startled by the cheekless gibe of death.

In his inimitable way, Hearn tells how the dawn breaks, casting a light on the monstrous measureless height round them. "All of these skulls and dust of bones, my son, are your own!" says his guide. "Each has at some time been the nest of your dreams and delusions and desires."

The Buddhist idea of pre-existence has been believed in by orientals from time immemorial; in the Sacontala the Indian poet, Calidas, says: "Perhaps the sadness of men, in seeing beautiful forms and hearing sweet music, arises from some remembrance of past joys, and the traces of connections in a former state of existence." The idea has been re-echoed by many in our own time, but by none more exquisitely and fancifully than by Lafcadio Hearn.

In one of his sketches, entitled, "A Serenade," his prose is the essence of music, weird and pathetic as a nocturne by Chopin; setting thrilling a host of memories and dreams, suggesting hints and echoes of ineffable things. You feel the violet gloom, the warm air, and see the fire-flies, the plumes of the palms, and the haunting circle of the sea beyond, the silence only broken by the playing of flutes and mandolines.

"The music hushed, and left me dreaming and vainly trying to explain the emotion that it had made. Of one thing only I felt assured,--that the mystery was of other existences than mine."[18]

[18] "Exotics and Retrospectives," Little, Brown & Co.

Then he brings forward the favourite theme, that our living present is the whole dead past. Our pleasures and our pains alike are but products of evolution--created by experiences of vanished being more countless than the sands of a myriad seas.... Echoing into his own past, he imagines the music startling from their sleep of ages countless buried loves, the elfish ecstasy of their thronging awakening endless remembrance, and with that awakening the delight passed, and in the dark the sadness only lingered--unutterable--profound.