Chapter Chapter 14 · SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT ANCESTOR-WORSHIP

. SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT ANCESTOR-WORSHIP

"For twelve leagues, Ananda, around the Sala-Grove, there is no

spot in size even as the pricking of the point of the tip of a

hair, which is not pervaded by powerful spirits."

--The Book Of the Great Decease.

I

The truth that ancestor-worship, in various unobtrusive forms,

still survives in some of the most highly civilized countries of

Europe, is not so widely known as to preclude the idea that any

non-Aryan race actually practicing so primitive a cult must

necessarily remain in the primitive stage of religious thought.

Critics of Japan have pronounced this hasty judgment; and have

professed themselves unable to reconcile the facts of her

scientific progress, and the success of her advanced educational

system, with the continuance of her ancestor-worship. How can the

beliefs of Shinto coexist with the knowledge of modern science?

How can the men who win distinction as scientific specialists

still respect the household shrine or do reverence before the

Shinto parish-temple? Can all this mean more than the ordered

conservation of forms after the departure of faith? Is it not

certain that with the further progress of education, Shinto, even

as ceremonialism, must cease to exist?

Those who put such questions appear to forget that similar

questions might be asked about the continuance of any Western

faith, and similar doubts expressed as to the possibility of its

survival for another century. Really the doctrines of Shinto are

not in the least degree more irreconcilable with modern science

than are the doctrines of Orthodox Christianity. Examined with

perfect impartiality, I would even venture to say that they are

less irreconcilable in more respects than one. They conflict less

with our human ideas of justice; and, like the Buddhist doctrine

of karma, they offer some very striking analogies with the

scientific facts of heredity,--analogies which prove Shinto to

contain an element of truth as profound as any single element of

truth in any of the world's great religions. Stated in the

simplest possible form, the peculiar element of truth in Shinto

is the belief that the world of the living is directly governed

by the world of the dead.

That every impulse or act of man is the work of a god, and that

all the dead become gods, are the basic ideas of the cult. It

must be remembered, however, that the term Kami, although

translated by the term deity, divinity, or god, has really no

such meaning as that which belongs to the English words: it has

not even the meaning of those words as referring to the antique

beliefs of Greece and Rome. It signifies that which is "above,"

"superior," "upper," "eminent," in the non-religious sense; in

the religious sense it signifies a human spirit having obtained

supernatural power after death. The dead are the "powers above,"

the "upper ones,"--the Kami. We have here a conception resembling

very strongly the modern Spiritualistic notion of ghosts, only

that the Shinto idea is in no true sense democratic. The Kami are

ghosts of greatly varying dignity and power,--belonging to

spiritual hierarchies like the hierarchies of ancient Japanese

society. Although essentially superior to the living in certain

respects, the living are, nevertheless, able to give them

pleasure or displeasure, to gratify or to offend them,--even

sometimes to ameliorate their spiritual condition. Wherefore

posthumous honors are never mockeries, but realities, to the

Japanese mind. During the present year(1), for example, several

distinguished statesmen and soldiers were raised to higher rank

immediately after their death; and I read only the other day, in

the official gazette, that "His Majesty has been pleased to

posthumously confer the Second Class of the Order of the Rising

Sun upon Major-General Baron Yamane, who lately died in Formosa."

Such imperial acts must not be regarded only as formalities

intended to honor the memory of brave and patriotic men; neither

should they be thought of as intended merely to confer

distinction upon the family of the dead. They are essentially of

Shinto, and exemplify that intimate sense of relation between the

visible and invisible worlds which is the special religious

characteristic of Japan among all civilized countries. To

Japanese thought the dead are not less real than the living. They

take part in the daily life of the people,--sharing the humblest

sorrows and the humblest joys. They attend the family repasts,

watch over the well-being of the household, assist and rejoice in

the prosperity of their descendants. They are present at the

public pageants, at all the sacred festivals of Shinto, at the

military games, and at all the entertainments especially provided

for them. And they are universally thought of as finding pleasure

in the offerings made to them or the honors conferred upon them.

For the purpose of this little essay, it will be sufficient to

consider the Kami as the spirits of the dead,--without making any

attempt to distinguish such Kami from those primal deities

believed to have created the land. With this general

interpretation of the term Kami, we return, then, to the great

Shinto idea that all the dead still dwell in the world and rule

it; influencing not only the thoughts and the acts of men, but

the conditions of nature. "They direct," wrote Motowori, "the

changes of the seasons, the wind and the rain, the good and the

bad fortunes of states and of individual men." They are, in

short, the viewless forces behind all phenomena.

(1) Written in September, 1896.

II

The most interesting sub-theory of this ancient spiritualism is

that which explains the impulses and acts of men as due to the

influence of the dead. This hypothesis no modern thinker can

declare irrational, since it can claim justification from the

scientific doctrine of psychological evolution, according to

which each living brain represents the structural work of

innumerable dead lives,--each character a more or less

imperfectly balanced sum of countless dead experiences with good

and evil. Unless we deny psychological heredity, we cannot

honestly deny that our impulses and feelings, and the higher

capacities evolved through the feelings, have literally been

shaped by the dead, and bequeathed to us by the dead; and even

that the general direction of our mental activities has been

determined by the power of the special tendencies bequeathed to

us. In such a sense the dead are indeed our Kami and all our

actions are truly influenced by them. Figuratively we may say

that every mind is a world of ghosts,--ghosts incomparably more

numerous than the acknowledged millions of the higher Shinto Kami

and that the spectral population of one grain of brain-matter

more than realizes the wildest fancies of the medieval schoolmen

about the number of angels able to stand on the point of a

needle. Scientifically we know that within one tiny living cell

may be stored up the whole life of a race,--the sum of all the

past sensation of millions of years; perhaps even (who knows?) of

millions of dead planets.

But devils would not be inferior to angels in the mere power of

congregating upon the point of a needle. What, of bad men and of

bad acts in this theory of Shinto? Motowori made answer;

"Whenever anything goes wrong in the world, it is to be

attributed to the action of the evil gods called the Gods of

Crookedness, whose power is so great that the Sun-Goddess and the

Creator-God are sometimes powerless to restrain them; much less

are human beings always able to resist their influence. The

prosperity of the wicked, and the misfortunes of the good, which

seem opposed to ordinary justice, are thus explained." All bad

acts are due to the influence of evil deities; and evil men may

become evil Kami. There are no self-contradictions in this

simplest of cults(1),--nothing complicated or hard to be

understood. It is not certain that all men guilty of bad actions

necessarily become "gods of crookedness," for reasons hereafter

to be seen; but all men, good or bad, become Kami, or influences.

And all evil acts are the results of evil influences.

Now this teaching is in accord with certain facts of heredity.

Our best faculties are certainly bequests from the best of our

ancestors; our evil qualities are inherited from natures in which

evil, or that which we now call evil, once predominated. The

ethical knowledge evolved within us by civilization demands that

we strengthen the high powers bequeathed us by the best

experience of our dead, and diminish the force of the baser

tendencies we inherit. We are under obligation to reverence and

to obey our good Kami, and to strive against our gods of

crookedness. The knowledge of the existence of both is old as

human reason. In some form or other, the doctrine of evil and of

good spirits in personal attendance upon every soul is common to

most of the great religions. Our own mediaeval faith developed

the idea to a degree which must leave an impress on our language

for all time; yet the faith in guardian angels and tempting

demons evolutionarily represents only the development of a cult

once simple as the religion of the Kami. And this theory of

mediaeval faith is likewise pregnant with truth. The white-winged

form that whispered good into the right ear, the black shape that

murmured evil into the left, do not indeed walk beside the man of

the nineteenth century, but they dwell within his brain; and he

knows their voices and feels their urging as well and as often as

did his ancestors of the Middle Ages.

The modern ethical objection to Shinto is that both good and evil

Kami are to be respected. "Just as the Mikado worshiped the gods

of heaven and of earth, so his people prayed to the good gods in

order to obtain blessings, and performed rites in honor of the

bad gods to avert their displeasure.... As there are bad as well

as good gods, it is necessary to propitiate them with offerings

of agreeable food, with the playing of harps and the blowing of

flutes, with singing and dancing, and with whatever else is

likely to put them in good-humor(2)." As a matter of fact, in

modern Japan, the evil Kami appear to receive few offerings or

honors, notwithstanding this express declaration that they are to

be propitiated. But it will now be obvious why the early

missionaries characterized such a cult as devil-worship,

--although, to Shinto imagination, the idea of a devil, in the

Western meaning of the word, never took shape. The seeming

weakness of the doctrine is in the teaching that evil spirits are

not to be warred upon,--a teaching essentially

repellent to Roman Catholic feeling. But between the evil spirits

of Christian and of Shinto belief there is a vast difference. The

evil Kami is only the ghost of a dead man, and is not believed to

be altogether evil,--since propitiation is possible. The

conception of absolute, unmixed evil is not of the Far East.

Absolute evil is certainly foreign to human nature, and therefore

impossible in human ghosts. The evil Kami are not devils. They

are simply ghosts, who influence the passions of men; and only in

this sense the deities of the passions. Now Shinto is of all

religions the most natural, and therefore in certain respects the

most rational. It does not consider the passions necessarily evil

in themselves, but evil only according to cause, conditions, and

degrees of their indulgence. Being ghosts, the gods are

altogether human,--having the various good and bad qualities of

men in varying proportions. The majority are good, and the sum of

the influence of all is toward good rather than evil. To

appreciate the rationality of this view requires a tolerably high

opinion of mankind,--such an opinion as the conditions of the old

society of Japan might have justified. No pessimist could profess

pure Shintoism. The doctrine is optimistic; and whoever has a

generous faith in humanity will have no fault to find with the

absence of the idea of implacable evil from its teaching.

Now it is just in the recognition of the necessity for

propitiating the evil ghosts that the ethically rational

character of Shinto reveals itself. Ancient experience and modern

knowledge unite in warning us against the deadly error of trying

to extirpate or to paralyze certain tendencies in human

nature,--tendencies which, if morbidly cultivated or freed from

all restraint, lead to folly, to crime, and to countless social

evils. The animal passions, the ape-and-tiger impulses, antedate

human society, and are the accessories to nearly all crimes

committed against it. But they cannot be killed; and they cannot

be safely starved. Any attempt to extirpate them would signify

also an effort to destroy some of the very highest emotional

faculties with which they remain inseparably blended. The

primitive impulses cannot even be numbed save at the cost of

intellectual and emotional powers which give to human life all

its beauty and all its tenderness, but which are, nevertheless,

deeply rooted in the archaic soil of passion. The highest in us

had its beginnings in the lowest. Asceticism, by warring against

the natural feelings, has created monsters. Theological

legislation, irrationally directed against human weaknesses, has

only aggravated social disorders; and laws against pleasure have

only provoked debaucheries. The history of morals teaches very

plainly indeed that our bad Kami require some propitiation. The

passions still remain more powerful than the reason in man,

because they are incomparably older,--because they were once

all-essential to self-preservation,--because they made that primal

stratum of consciousness, out of which the nobler sentiments have

slowly grown. Never can they be suffered to rule; but woe to

whosoever would deny their immemorial rights!

(1) I am considering only the pure Shinto belief as expounded by

Shinto scholars. But it may be necessary to remind the reader

that both Buddhism and Shintoism are blended in Japan, not only

with each other, but with Chinese ideas of various kinds. It is

doubtful whether the pure Shinto ideas now exist in their

original form in popular belief. We are not quite clear as to the

doctrine of multiple souls in Shinto,--whether the psychical

combination was originally thought of as dissolved by death. My

own opinion, the result of investigation in different parts of

Japan, is that the multiple soul was formerly believed to remain

multiple after death.

(2) Motowori, translated by Satow.

III

Out of these primitive, but--as may now be perceived--not

irrational beliefs about the dead, there have been evolved moral

sentiments unknown to Western civilization. These are well worth

considering, as they will prove in harmony with the most advanced

conception of ethics,--and especially with that immense though

yet indefinite expansion of the sense of duty which has followed

upon the understanding of evolution. I do not know that we have

any reason to congratulate ourselves upon the absence from our

lives of the sentiments in question;--I am even inclined to think

that we may yet find it morally necessary to cultivate sentiments

of the same kind. One of the surprises of our future will

certainly be a return to beliefs and ideas long ago abandoned

upon the mere assumption that they contained no truth,--belief

still called barbarous, pagan, mediaeval, by those who condemn

them out of traditional habit. Year after year the researches of

science afford us new proof that the savage, the barbarian, the

idolater, the monk, each and all have arrived, by different

paths, as near to some one point of eternal truth as any thinker

of the nineteenth century. We are now learning, also, that the

theories of the astrologers and of the alchemists were but

partially, not totally, wrong. We have reason even to suppose

that no dream of the invisible world has ever been dreamed,--that

no hypothesis of the unseen has ever been imagined,--which future

science will not prove to have contained some germ of reality.

Foremost among the moral sentiments of Shinto is that of loving

gratitude to the past,--a sentiment having no real correspondence

in our own emotional life. We know our past better than the

Japanese know theirs;--we have myriads of books recording or

considering its every incident and condition: but we cannot in

any sense be said to love it or to feel grateful to it. Critical

recognitions of its merits and of its defects;--some rare

enthusiasms excited by its beauties; many strong denunciations of

its mistakes: these represent the sum of our thoughts and

feelings about it. The attitude of our scholarship in reviewing

it is necessarily cold; that of our art, often more than

generous; that of our religion, condemnatory for the most part.

Whatever the point of view from which we study it, our attention

is mainly directed to the work of the dead,--either the visible

work that makes our hearts beat a little faster than usual while

looking at it, or the results of their thoughts and deeds in

relation to the society of their time. Of past humanity as

unity,--of the millions long-buried as real kindred,--we either

think not at all, or think only with the same sort of curiosity

that we give to the subject of extinct races. We do indeed find

interest in the record of some individual lives that have left

large marks in history;--our emotions are stirred by the memories

of great captains, statesmen, discoverers, reformers,--but only

because the magnitude of that which they accomplished appeals to

our own ambitions, desires, egotisms, and not at all to our

altruistic sentiments in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred. The

nameless dead to whom we owe most we do not trouble ourselves

about,--we feel no gratitude, no love to them. We even find it

difficult to persuade ourselves that the love of ancestors can

possibly be a real, powerful, penetrating, life-moulding,

religious emotion in any form of human society,--which it

certainly is in Japan. The mere idea is utterly foreign to our

ways of thinking, feeling, acting. A partial reason for this, of

course, is that we have no common faith in the existence of an

active spiritual relation between our ancestors and ourselves. If

we happen to be irreligious, we do not believe in ghosts. If we

are profoundly religious, we think of the dead as removed from us

by judgment,--as absolutely separated from us during the period

of our lives. It is true that among the peasantry of Roman

Catholic countries there still exists a belief that the dead are

permitted to return to earth once a year,--on the night of All

Souls. But even according to this belief they are not considered

as related to the living by any stronger bond than memory; and

they are thought of,--as our collections of folk-lore bear

witness,--rather with fear than love.

In Japan the feeling toward the dead is utterly different. It is

a feeling of grateful and reverential love. It is probably the

most profound and powerful of the emotions of the race,--that

which especially directs national life and shapes national

character. Patriotism belongs to it. Filial piety 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!_"--the son or daughter who unmurmuring sacrifices all the

happiness of existence for the sake, perhaps, of an undeserving

or even cruel, parent; the partisan who gives up friends, family,

and fortune, rather than break the verbal promise made in other

years to a now poverty-stricken master; the wife who

ceremoniously robes herself in white, utters a prayer, and

thrusts a sword into her throat to atone for a wrong done to

strangers by her husband,--all these obey the will and hear the

approval of invisible witnesses. Even among the skeptical

students of the new generation, this feeling survives many wrecks

of faith, and the old sentiments are still uttered: "Never must

we cause shame to our ancestors;" "it is our duty to give honor

to our ancestors." During my former engagement as a teacher of

English, it happened more than once that ignorance of the real

meaning behind such phrases prompted me to change them in written

composition. I would suggest, for example, that the expression,

"to do honor to the memory of our ancestors," was more correct

than the phrase given. I remember one day even attempting to

explain why we ought not to speak of ancestors exactly as if they

were living parents! Perhaps my pupils suspected me of trying to

meddle with their beliefs; for the Japanese never think of an

ancestor as having become "only a memory": their dead are alive.

Were there suddenly to arise within us the absolute certainty

that our dead are still with us,--seeing every act, knowing our

every thought, hearing each word we utter, able to feel sympathy

with us or anger against us, able to help us and delighted to

receive our help, able to love us and greatly needing our love,--

it is quite certain that our conceptions of life and duty would

be vastly changed. We should have to recognize our obligations to

the past in a very solemn way. Now, with the man of the Far East,

the constant presence of the dead has been a matter of conviction

for thousands of years: he speaks to them daily; he tries to give

them happiness; and, unless a professional criminal he never

quite forgets his duty towards them. No one, says Hirata, who

constantly discharges that duty, will ever be disrespectful to

the gods or to his living parents. "Such a man will also be loyal

to his friends, and kind and gentle with his wife and children;

for the essence of this devotion is in truth filial piety." And

it is in this sentiment that the secret of much strange feeling

in Japanese character must be sought. Far more foreign to our

world of sentiment than the splendid courage with which death is

faced, or the equanimity with which the most trying sacrifices

are made, is the simple deep emotion of the boy who, in the

presence of a Shinto shrine never seen before, suddenly feels the

tears spring to his eyes. He is conscious in that moment of what

we never emotionally recognize,--the prodigious debt of the

present to the past, and the duty of love to the dead.

IV

If we think a little about our position as debtors, and our way

of accepting that position, one striking difference between

Western and Far-Eastern moral sentiment will become manifest.

There is nothing more awful than the mere fact of life as mystery

when that fact first rushes fully into consciousness. Out of

unknown darkness we rise a moment into sun-light, look about us,

rejoice and suffer, pass on the vibration of our being to other

beings, and fall back again into darkness. So a wave rises,

catches the light, transmits its motion, and sinks back into sea.

So a plant ascends from clay, unfolds its leaves to light and

air, flowers, seeds, and becomes clay again. Only, the wave has

no knowledge; the plant has no perceptions. Each human life seems

no more than a parabolic curve of motion out of earth and back to

earth; but in that brief interval of change it perceives the

universe. The awfulness of the phenomenon is that nobody knows

anything about it. No mortal can explain this most common, yet

most incomprehensible of all facts,--life in itself; yet every

mortal who can think has been obliged betimes, to think about it

in relation to self.

I come out of mystery;--I see the sky and the land, men and women

and their works; and I know that I must return to mystery;--and

merely what this means not even the greatest of philosophers--not

even Mr. Herbert Spencer--can tell me. We are all of us riddles

to ourselves and riddles to each other; and space and motion and

time are riddles; and matter is a riddle. About the before and

the after neither the newly-born nor the dead have any message

for us. The child is dumb; the skull only grins. Nature has no

consolation for us. Out of her formlessness issue forms which

return to formlessness,--that is all. The plant becomes clay; the

clay becomes a plant. When the plant turns to clay, what becomes

of the vibration which was its life? Does it go on existing

viewlessly, like the forces that shape spectres of frondage in

the frost upon a window-pane?

Within the horizon-circle of the infinite enigma, countless

lesser enigmas, old as the world, awaited the coming of man.

Oedipus had to face one Sphinx; humanity, thousands of

thousands,--all crouching among bones along the path of Time, and

each with a deeper and a harder riddle. All the sphinxes have not

been satisfied; myriads line the way of the future to devour

lives yet unborn; but millions have been answered. We are now

able to exist without perpetual horror because of the relative

knowledge that guides us, the knowledge won out of the jaws of

destruction.

All our knowledge is bequeathed knowledge. The dead have left us

record of all they were able to learn about themselves and the

world,--about the laws of death and life,--about things to be

acquired and things to be avoided,--about ways of making

existence less painful than Nature willed it,--about right and

wrong and sorrow and happiness,--about the error of selfishness,

the wisdom of kindness, the obligation of sacrifice. They left us

information of everything they could find out concerning climates

and seasons and places,--the sun and moon and stars,--the motions

and the composition of the universe. They bequeathed us also

their delusions which long served the good purpose of saving us

from falling into greater ones. They left us the story of their

errors and efforts, their triumphs and failures, their pains and

joys, their loves and hates,--for warning or example. They

expected our sympathy, because they toiled with the kindest

wishes and hopes for us, and because they made our world. They

cleared the land; they extirpated monsters; they tamed and taught

the animals most useful to us. "_The mother of Kullervo awoke

within her tomb, and from the deeps of the dust she cried to him,

--'I have left thee the Dog, tied to a tree, that thou mayest go

with him to the chase.'_(1)" They domesticated likewise the

useful trees and plants; and they discovered the places and the

powers of the metals. Later they created all that we call

civilization,--trusting us to correct such mistakes as they could

not help making. The sum of their toil is incalculable; and all

that they have given us ought surely to be very sacred, very

precious, if only by reason of the infinite pain and thought

which it cost. Yet what Occidental dreams of saying daily, like

the Shinto believer:--"_Ye forefathers of the generations, and of

our families, and of our kindred,--unto you, the founders of our

homes, we utter the gladness of our thanks_"?

None. It is not only because we think the dead cannot hear, but

because we have not been trained for generations to exercise our

powers of sympathetic mental representation except within a very

narrow circle,--the family circle. The Occidental family circle

is a very small affair indeed compared with the Oriental family

circle. In this nineteenth century the Occidental family is

almost disintegrated;--it practically means little more than

husband, wife, and children well under age. The Oriental family

means not only parents and their blood-kindred, but grandparents

and their kindred, and great-grandparents, and all the dead

behind them, This idea of the family cultivates sympathetic

representation to such a degree that the range of the emotion

belonging to such representation may extend, as in Japan, to many

groups and sub-groups of living families, and even, in time of

national peril, to the whole nation as one great family: a

feeling much deeper than what we call patriotism. As a religious

emotion the feeling is infinitely extended to all the past; the

blended sense of love, of loyalty, and of gratitude is not less

real, though necessarily more vague, than the feeling to living

kindred.

In the West, after the destruction of antique society, no such

feeling could remain. The beliefs that condemned the ancients to

hell, and forbade the praise of their works,--the doctrine that

trained us to return thanks for everything to the God of the

Hebrews,--created habits of thought and habits of

thoughtlessness, both inimical to every feeling of gratitude to

the past. Then, with the decay of theology and the dawn of larger

knowledge, came the teaching that the dead had no choice in their

work,--they had obeyed necessity, and we had only received from

them of necessity the results of necessity. And to-day we still

fail to recognize that the necessity itself ought to compel our

sympathies with those who obeyed it, and that its bequeathed

results are as pathetic as they are precious. Such thoughts

rarely occur to us even in regard to the work of the living who

serve us. We consider the cost of a thing purchased or obtained

to ourselves;--about its cost in effort to the producer we do not

allow ourselves to think: indeed, we should be laughed at for any

exhibition of conscience on the subject. And our equal

insensibility to the pathetic meaning of the work of the past,

and to that of the work of the present, largely explains the

wastefulness of our civilization,--the reckless consumption by

luxury of the labor of years in the pleasure of an hour,--the

inhumanity of the thousands of unthinking rich, each of whom

dissipates yearly in the gratification of totally unnecessary

wants the price of a hundred human lives. The cannibals of

civilization are unconsciously more cruel than those of savagery,

and require much more flesh. The deeper humanity,--the cosmic

emotion of humanity,--is essentially the enemy of useless luxury,

and essentially opposed to any form of society which places no

restraints upon the gratifications of sense or the pleasures of

egotism.

In the Far East, on the other hand, the moral duty of simplicity

of life has been taught from very ancient times, because

ancestor-worship had developed and cultivated this cosmic emotion

of humanity which we lack, but which we shall certainly be

obliged to acquire at a later day, simply to save our selves from

extermination, Two sayings of Iyeyasu exemplify the Oriental

sentiment. When virtually master of the empire, this greatest of

Japanese soldiers and statesmen was seen one day cleaning and

smoothing with his own hands an old dusty pair of silk hakama or

trousers. "What you see me do," he said to a retainer, "I am not

doing because I think of the worth of the garment in itself, but

because I think of what it needed to produce it. It is the result

of the toil of a poor woman; and that is why I value it. _If we

do not think, while using things, of the time and effort required

to make them,--then our want of consideration puts us on a level

with the beasts_." Again, in the days of his greatest wealth, we

hear of him rebuking his wife for wishing to furnish him too

often with new clothing. "When I think," he protested, "of the

multitudes around me, and of the generations to come after me, I

feel it my duty to be very sparing, for their sake, of the goods

in my possession." Nor has this spirit of simplicity yet departed

from Japan. Even the Emperor and Empress, in the privacy of their

own apartments, continue to live as simply as their subjects, and

devote most of their revenue to the alleviation of public

distress.

(1) Kalevala; thirty-sixth Rune.

V

It is through the teachings of evolution that there will

ultimately be developed in the West a moral recognition of duty

to the past like that which ancestor-worship created in the Far

East. For even to-day whoever has mastered the first principles

of the new philosophy cannot look at the commonest product of

man's handiwork without perceiving something of its evolutional

history. The most ordinary utensil will appear to him not the

mere product of individual capacity on the part of carpenter or

potter, smith or cutler, but the product of experiment continued

through thousands of years with methods, with materials, and with

forms. Nor will it be possible for him to consider the vast time

and toil necessitated in the evolution, of any mechanical

appliance, and yet experience no generous sentiment. Coming

generations must think of the material bequests of the past in

relation to dead humanity.

But in the development of this "cosmic emotion" of humanity, a

much more powerful factor than recognition of our material

indebtedness to the past will be the recognition of our psychical

indebtedness. For we owe to the dead our immaterial world

also,--the world that lives within us,--the world of all that is

lovable in impulse, emotion, thought. Whosoever understands

scientifically what human goodness is, and the terrible cost of

making it, can find in the commonest phases of the humblest lives

that beauty, which is divine, and can feel that in one sense our

dead are truly gods.

So long as we supposed the woman soul one in itself,--a something

specially created to fit one particular physical being,--the

beauty and the wonder of mother-love could never be fully

revealed to us. But with deeper knowledge we must perceive that

the inherited love of myriads of millions of dead mothers has

been treasured up in one life;--that only thus can be interpreted

the infinite sweetness of the speech which the infant hears,--the

infinite tenderness of the look of caress which meets its gaze.

Unhappy the mortal who has not known these; yet what mortal can

adequately speak of them! Truly is mother-love divine; for

everything by human recognition called divine is summed up in

that love; and every woman uttering and transmitting its highest

expression is more than the mother of man: she is the _Mater

Dei_.

Needless to speak here about the ghostliness of first love,

sexual love, which is illusion,--because the passion and the

beauty of the dead revive in it, to dazzle, to delude; and to

bewitch. It is very, very wonderful; but it is not all good,

because it is not all true. The real charm of woman in herself is

that which comes later,--when all the illusions fade away to

reveal a reality, lovelier than any illusion, which has been

evolving behind the phantom-curtain of them. What is the divine

magic of the woman thus perceived? Only the affection, the

sweetness, the faith, the unselfishness, the intuitions of

millions of buried hearts. All live again;--all throb anew, in

every fresh warm beat of her own.

Certain amazing faculties exhibited in the highest social life

tell in another way the story of soul structure built up by dead

lives. Wonderful is the man who can really "be all things to all

men," or the woman who can make herself twenty, fifty, a hundred

different women,--comprehending all, penetrating all, unerring to

estimate all others;--seeming to have no individual self, but

only selves innumerable;--able to meet each varying personality

with a soul exactly toned to the tone of that to be encountered.

Rare these characters are, but not so rare that the traveler is

unlikely to meet one or two of them in any cultivated society

which he has a chance of studying. They are essentially multiple

beings,--so visibly multiple that even those who think of the Ego

as single have to describe them as "highly complex." Nevertheless

this manifestation of forty or fifty different characters in the

same person is a phenomenon so remarkable (especially remarkable

because it is commonly manifested in youth long before relative

experience could possibly account for it) that I cannot but

wonder how few persons frankly realize its signification.

So likewise with what have been termed the "intuitions" of some

forms of genius,--particularly those which relate to the

representation of the emotions. A Shakespeare would always remain

incomprehensible on the ancient soul-theory. Taine attempted to

explain him by the phrase, "a perfect imagination;"--and the

phrase reaches far in the truth. But what is the meaning of a

perfect imagination? Enormous multiplicity of

soul-life,--countless past existences revived in one. Nothing

else can explain it.... It is not however, in the world of pure

intellect that the story of psychical complexity is most

admirable: it is in the world which speaks to our simplest

emotions of love honor, sympathy, heroism.

"But by such a theory," some critic may observe, "the source of

impulses to heroism is also the source of the impulses that

people jails. Both are of the dead." This is true. We inherited

evil as well as good. Being composites only,--still evolving,

still becoming,--we inherit imperfections. But the survival of

the fittest in impulses is certainly proven by the average moral

condition of humanity,--using the word "fittest" in its ethical

sense. In spite of all the misery and vice and crime, nowhere so

terribly developed as under our own so-called Christian

civilization, the fact must be patent to any one who has lived

much, traveled much, and thought much, that the mass of humanity

is good, and therefore that the vast majority of impulses

bequeathed us by past humanity is good. Also it is certain that

the more normal a social condition, the better its humanity.

Through all the past the good Kami have always managed to keep

the bad Kami from controlling the world. And with the acceptation

of this truth, our future ideas of wrong and of right must take

immense expansion. Just as a heroism, or any act of pure goodness

for a noble end, must assume a preciousness heretofore

unsuspected,--so a real crime must come to be regarded as a crime

less against the existing individual or society, than against the

sum of human experience, and the whole past struggle of ethical

aspiration. Real goodness will, therefore, be more prized, and

real crime less leniently judged. And the early Shinto teaching,

that no code of ethics is necessary,--that the right rule of

human conduct can always be known by consulting the heart,--is a

teaching which will doubtless be accepted by a more perfect

humanity than that of the present.

VI

"Evolution" the reader may say, "does indeed show through its

doctrine of heredity that the living are in one sense really

controlled by the dead. But it also shows that the dead are

within us, not without us. They are part of us;--there is no

proof that they have any existence which is not our own.

Gratitude to the past would, therefore, be gratitude to

ourselves; love of the dead would be self-love. So that your

attempt at analogy ends in the absurd."

No. Ancestor-worship in its primitive form may be a symbol only

of truth. It may be an index or foreshadowing only of the new

moral duty which larger knowledge must force upon as the duty of

reverence and obedience to the sacrificial past of human ethical

experience. But it may also be much more. The facts of heredity

can never afford but half an explanation of the facts of

psychology. A plant produces ten, twenty, a hundred plants

without yielding up its own life in the process. An animal gives

birth to many young, yet lives on with all its physical

capacities and its small powers of thought undiminished. Children

are born; and the parents survive them. Inherited the mental life

certainly is, not less than the physical; yet the reproductive

cells, the least specialized of all cells, whether in plant or in

animal, never take away, but only repeat the parental being.

Continually multiplying, each conveys and transmits the whole

experience of a race; yet leaves the whole experience of the race

behind it. Here is the marvel inexplicable: the

self-multiplication of physical and psychical being,--life after

life thrown off from the parent life, each to become complete and

reproductive. Were all the parental life given to the offspring,

heredity might be said to favor the doctrine of materialism. But

like the deities of Hindoo legend, the Self multiplies and still

remains the same, with full capacities for continued

multiplication. Shinto has its doctrine of souls multiplying by

fission; but the facts of psychological emanation are infinitely

more wonderful than any theory.

The great religions have recognized that heredity could not

explain the whole question of self,--could not account for the

fate of the original residual self. So they have generally united

in holding the inner independent of the outer being. Science can

no more fully decide the issues they have raised than it can

decide the nature of Reality-in-itself. Again we may vainly ask,

What becomes of the forces which constituted the vitality of a

dead plant? Much more difficult the question, What becomes of the

sensations which formed the psychical life of a dead man?--since

nobody can explain the simplest sensation. We know only that

during life certain active forces within the body of the plant or

the body of the man adjusted themselves continually to outer

forces; and that after the interior forces could no longer

respond to the pressure of the exterior forces,--then the body in

which the former were stored was dissolved into the elements out

of which it had been built up. We know nothing more of the

ultimate nature of those elements than we know of the ultimate

nature of the tendencies which united them. But we have more

right to believe the ultimates of life persist after the

dissolution of the forms they created, than to believe they

cease. The theory of spontaneous generation (misnamed, for only

in a qualified sense can the term "spontaneous" be applied to the

theory of the beginnings of mundane life) is a theory which the

evolutionist must accept, and which can frighten none aware of

the evidence of chemistry that matter itself is in evolution. The

real theory (not the theory of organized life beginning in

bottled infusions, but of the life primordial arising upon a

planetary surface) has enormous--nay, infinite--spiritual

significance. It requires the belief that all potentialities of

life and thought and emotion pass from nebula to universe, from

system to system, from star to planet or moon, and again back to

cyclonic storms of atomicity; it means that tendencies survive

sunburnings,--survive all cosmic evolutions and disintegrations.

The elements are evolutionary products only; and the difference

of universe from universe must be the creation of tendencies,--of

a form of heredity too vast and complex for imagination. There is

no chance. There is only law. Each fresh evolution must be

influenced by previous evolutions,--just as each individual human

life is influenced by the experience of all the lives in its

ancestral chain. Must not the tendencies even of the ancestral

forms of matter be inherited by the forms of matter to come; and

may not the acts and thoughts of men even now be helping to shape

the character of future worlds? No longer is it possible to say

that the dreams of the Alchemists were absurdities. And no longer

can we even assert that all material phenomena are not

determined, as in the thought of the ancient East, by

soul-polarities.

Whether our dead do or do not continue to dwell without us as

well as within us,--a question not to be decided in our present

undeveloped state of comparative blindness,--certain it is that

the testimony of cosmic facts accords with one weird belief of

Shinto: the belief that all things are determined by the

dead,--whether by ghosts of men or ghosts of worlds. Even as our

personal lives are ruled by the now viewless lives of the past,

so doubtless the life of our Earth, and of the system to which it

belongs, is ruled by ghosts of spheres innumerable: dead

universes,--dead suns and planets and moons,--as forms long since

dissolved into the night, but as forces immortal and eternally

working.

Back to the Sun, indeed, like the Shintoist, we can trace our

descent; yet we know that even there the beginning of us was not.

Infinitely more remote in time than a million sun-lives was that

beginning,--if it can truly be said there was a beginning.

The teaching of Evolution is that we are one with that unknown

Ultimate, of which matter and human mind are but ever-changing

manifestations. The teaching of Evolution is also that each of us

is many, yet that all of us are still one with each other and

with the cosmos;--that we must know all past humanity not only in

ourselves, but likewise in the preciousness and beauty of every

fellow-life;--that we can best love ourselves in others;--that we

shall best serve ourselves in others;--that forms are but veils

and phantoms;--and that to the formless Infinite alone really

belong all human emotions, whether of the living or the dead.

XV