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Rudyard Kipling - "Captains Courageous"

Det Danske Bibelselskab 1931. - "Det Gamle Testamente af 1931:"

Sophocles - "Philoktetes "

J. Munro - "Heroes of the Telegraph"

Project Gutenberg surfs with a modem donated by Supra.

P >> Percival Lowell >> Project Gutenberg surfs with a modem donated by Supra.




That Christianity is a religion of love needs no mention; that
Buddhism is equally such is perhaps not so generally appreciated.
But just as the gospel of the disciple who loved and was loved the
most begins its story by telling us of the Light that came into the
world, so none the less surely could the Light of Asia but be also
its warmth. Half of the teachings of Buddhism are spent in
inculcating charity. Not only to men is man enjoined to show
kindliness, but to all other animals as well. The people practise
what their scriptures preach. The effect indirectly on the
condition of the brutes is almost as marked as its more direct
effect on the character of mankind. In heart, at least, Buddhism
and Christianity are very close.

But here the two paths to a something beyond an earthly life
diverge. Up to this point the two religions are alike, but from
this point on they are so utterly unlike that the very similarity of
all that went before only suffices to make of the second the weird,
life-counterfeiting shadow of the first. As in a silhouette,
externally the contours are all there, but within is one vast blank.
In relation to one's neighbor the two beliefs are kin, but as
regards one's self, as far apart as the West is from the East.
For here, at this idea of self, we are suddenly aware of standing on
the brink of a fathomless abyss, gazing giddily down into that great
gulf which divides Buddhism from Christianity. We cannot see the
bottom. It is a separation more profound than death; it seems to
necessitate annihilation. To cross it we must bury in its depths
all we know as ourselves.

Christianity is a personal religion; Buddhism, an impersonal one.
In this fundamental difference lies the world-wide opposition of the
two beliefs. Christianity tells us to purify ourselves that we may
enjoy countless aeons of that bettered self hereafter; Buddhism
would have us purify ourselves that we may lose all sense of self
for evermore.

For all that it preaches the essential vileness of the natural man,
Christianity is a gospel of optimism. While it affirms that at
present you are bad, it also affirms that this depravity is no
intrinsic part of yourself. It unquestioningly asserts that it is
something foreign to your true being. It even believes that in a
more or less spiritual manner your very body will survive.
It essentially clings to the ego. What it inculcates is really
present endeavor sanctioned by the prospect of future bliss.
It tacitly takes for granted the desirability of personal existence,
and promises the certainty of personal immortality,--a terror to
evildoers, and a sustaining sense of coming unalloyed happiness to
the good. Through and through its teachings runs the feeling of the
fullness of life, that desire which will not die, that wish of the
soul which beats its wings against its earthly casement in its
longing for expansion beyond the narrow confines of threescore years
and ten.

Buddhism, on the contrary, is the cri du coeur of pessimism.
This life, it says, is but a chain of sorrows. To multiply days is
only to multiply evil. These desires that urge us on are really
cause of all our woe. We think they are ourselves. We are
mistaken. They are all illusion, and we are victims of a mirage.
This personality, this sense of self, is a cruel deception and a
snare. Realize once the true soul behind it, devoid of attributes,
therefore without this capacity for suffering, an indivisible part
of the great impersonal soul of nature: then, and then only, will
you have found happiness in the blissful quiescence of Nirvana.

With a certain poetic fitness, misery and impersonality were both
present in the occasion that gave the belief birth. Many have
turned to the consolations of religion by reason of their own
wretchedness; Gautama sought its help touched by the woes of others
whom, in his own happy life journey, he chanced one day to come
across. Shocked by the sight of human disease, old age, and death,
sad facts to which hitherto he had been sedulously kept a stranger,
he renounced the world that he might find for it an escape from its
ills. But bliss, as he conceived it, lay not in wanting to be
something he was not, but in actual want of being. His quest for
mankind was immunity from suffering, not the active enjoyment of
life. In this negative way of looking at happiness, he acted in
strict conformity with the spirit of his world. For the doctrine of
pessimism had already been preached. It underlay the whole Brahman
philosophy, and everybody believed it implicitly. Already the East
looked at this life as an evil, and had affirmed for the individual
spirit extinction to be happier than existence. The wish for an end
to the ego, the hope to be eventually nothing, Gautama accepted for
a truism as undeniably as the Brahmans did. What he pronounced
false was the Brahman prospectus of the way to reach this desirable
impersonal state. Their road, be said, could not possibly land the
traveller where it professed, since it began wrong, and ended
nowhere. The way, he asserted, is within a man. He has but to
realize the truth, and from that moment he will see his goal and the
road that leads there. There is no panacea for human ills, of
external application. The Brahman homoeopathic treatment of sin is
folly. The slaughtering of men and bulls cannot possibly bring life
to the soul. To mortify the body for the sins of the flesh is
palpably futile, for in desire alone lies all the ill. Quench the
desire, and the deeds will die of inanition. Man himself is sole
cause of his own misery. Get rid, then, said the Buddha, of these
passions, these strivings for the sake of self, that hold the true
soul a prisoner. They have to do with things which we know are
transitory: how can they be immortal themselves? We recognize them
as subject to our will; they are, then, not the I.

As a man, he taught, becomes conscious that he himself is something
distinct from his body, so, if he reflect and ponder, he will come
to see that in like manner his appetites, ambitions, hopes, are
really extrinsic to the spirit proper. Neither heart nor head is
truly the man, for he is conscious of something that stands behind
both. Behind desire, behind even the will, lies the soul, the same
for all men, one with the soul of the universe. When he has once
realized this eternal truth, the man has entered Nirvana. For
Nirvana is not an absorption of the individual soul into the soul of
all things, since the one has always been a part of the other.
Still less is it utter annihilation. It is simply the recognition
of the eternal oneness of the two, back through an everlasting past
on through an everlasting future.

Such is the belief which the Japanese adopted, and which they
profess to-day. Such to them is to be the dawn of death's
to-morrow; a blessed impersonal immortality, in which all sense of
self, illusion that it is, shall itself have ceased to be; a long
dreamless sleep, a beatified rest, which no awakening shall ever
disturb.

Among such a people personal Christianity converts but few.
They accept our material civilization, but they reject our creeds.
To preach a prolongation of life appears to them like preaching an
extension of sorrow. At most, Christianity succeeds only in making
them doubters of what lies beyond this life. But though professing
agnosticism while they live, they turn, when the shadows of death's
night come on, to the bosom of that faith which teaches that,
whatever may have been one's earthly share of happiness,
"'tis something better not to be."

Strange it seems at first that those who have looked so long to the
rising sun for inspiration should be they who live only in a sort of
lethargy of life, while those who for so many centuries have turned
their faces steadily to the fading glory of the sunset should be the
ones who have embodied the spirit of progress of the world. Perhaps
the light, by its very rising, checks the desire to pursue; in its
setting it lures one on to follow.

Though this religion of impersonality is not their child, it is
their choice. They embraced it with the rest that India taught
them, centuries ago. But though just as eager to learn of us now as
of India then, Christianity fails to commend itself. This is not
due to the fact that the Buddhist missionaries came by invitation,
and ours do not. Nor is it due to any want of personal character in
these latter, but simply to an excess of it in their doctrines.

For to-day the Far East is even more impersonal in its religion than
are those from whom that religion originally came. India has
returned again to its worship of Brahma, which, though impersonal
enough, is less so than is the gospel of Gautama. For it is
passively instead of actively impersonal.

Buddhism bears to Brahmanism something like the relation that
Protestantism does to Roman Catholicism. Both bishops and Brahmans
undertake to save all who shall blindly commit themselves to
professional guidance, while Buddhists and Protestants alike believe
that a man's salvation must be brought about by the action of the
man himself. The result is, that in the matter of individuality the
two reformed beliefs are further apart than those against which they
severally protested. For by the change the personal became more
personal, and the impersonal more impersonal than before.
The Protestant, from having tamely allowed himself to be led, began
to take a lively interest in his own self-improvement; while the
Buddhist, from a former apathetic acquiescence in the doctrine of
the universally illusive, set to work energetically towards
self-extinction. Curious labor for a mind, that of devoting all its
strength to the thinking itself out of existence! Not content with
being born impersonal, a Far Oriental is constantly striving to make
himself more so.

We have seen, then, how in trying to understand these peoples we are
brought face to face with impersonality in each of those three
expressions of the human soul, speech, thought, yearning. We have
looked at them first from a social standpoint. We have seen how
singularly little regard is paid the individual from his birth to
his death. How he lives his life long the slave of patriarchal
customs of so puerile a tendency as to be practically impossible to
a people really grown up. How he practises a wholesale system of
adoption sufficient of itself to destroy any surviving regard for
the ego his other relations might have left. How in his daily life
he gives the minimum of thought to the bettering himself in any
worldly sense, and the maximum of polite consideration to his
neighbor. How, in short, he acts toward himself as much as possible
as if he were another, and to that other as if he were himself.
Then, not content with standing stranger like upon the threshold,
we have sought to see the soul of their civilization in its intrinsic
manifestations. We have pushed our inquiry, as it were, one step
nearer its home. And the same trait that was apparent
sociologically has been exposed in this our antipodal phase of
psychical research. We have seen how impersonal is his language, the
principal medium of communication between one soul and another; how
impersonal are the communings of his soul with itself. How the man
turns to nature instead of to his fellowman in silent sympathy.
And how, when he speculates upon his coming castles in the air, his
most roseate desire is to be but an indistinguishable particle of
the sunset clouds and vanish invisible as they into the starry
stillness of all-embracing space.

Now what does this strange impersonality betoken? Why are these
peoples so different from us in this most fundamental of
considerations to any people, the consideration of themselves?
The answer leads to some interesting conclusions.


Chapter 8. Imagination.

If, as is the case with the moon, the earth, as she travelled round
her orbit turned always the same face inward, we might expect to
find, between the thoughts of that hemisphere which looked
continually to the sun, and those of the other peering eternally out
at the stars, some such difference as actually exists between
ourselves and our longitudinal antipodes. For our conception of the
cosmos is of a sunlit world throbbing with life, while their Nirvana
finds not unfit expression in the still, cold, fathomless awe of the
midnight sky. That we cannot thus directly account for the
difference in local coloring serves but to make that difference of
more human interest. The dissimilarity between the Western and the
Far Eastern attitude of mind has in it something beyond the effect
of environment. For it points to the importance of the part which
the principle of individuality plays in the great drama daily
enacting before our eyes, and which we know as evolution. It shows,
as I shall hope to prove, that individuality bears the same relation
to the development of mind that the differentiation of species does
to the evolution of organic life: that the degree of individualization
of a people is the self-recorded measure of its place in the great
march of mind.

All life, whether organic or inorganic, consists, as we know, in a
change from a state of simple homogeneity to one of complex
heterogeneity. The process is apparently the same in a nebula or a
brachiopod, although much more intricate in the latter. The
immediate force which works this change, the life principle of
things, is, in the case of organic beings, a subtle something which
we call spontaneous variation. What this mysterious impulse may be
is beyond our present powers of recognition. As yet, the ultimates
of all things lie hidden in the womb of the vast unknown. But just
as in the case of a man we can tell what organs are vital, though we
are ignorant what the vital spark may be, so in our great cosmical
laws we can say in what their power resides, though we know not
really what they are. Whether mind be but a sublimated form of
matter, or, what amounts to the same thing, matter a menial kind of
mind, or whether, which seems less likely, it be a something
incomparable with substance, of one thing we are sure, the same laws
of heredity govern both. In each a like chain of continuity leads
from the present to the dim past, a connecting clue which we can
follow backward in imagination. Now what spontaneous variation is
to the material organism, imagination, apparently, is to the mental
one. Just as spontaneous variation is constantly pushing the animal
or the plant to push out, as a vine its tendrils, in all directions,
while natural conditions are as constantly exercising over it a sort
of unconscious pruning power, so imagination is ever at work urging
man's mind out and on, while the sentiment of the community,
commonly called common sense, which simply means the point already
reached by the average, is as steadily tending to keep it at its own
level. The environment helps, in the one case as in the other,
to the shaping of the development. Purely physical in the first,
it is both physical and psychical in the second, the two reacting on
each other. But in either case it is only a constraining condition,
not the divine impulse itself. Precisely, then, as in the organism,
this subtle spirit checked in one direction finds a way to advance
in another, and produces in consequence among an originally similar
set of bodies a gradual separation into species which grow wider
with time, so in brain evolution a like force for like reasons tends
inevitably to an ever-increasing individualization.

Now what evidence have we that this analogy holds? Let us look at
the facts, first as they present themselves subjectively.

The instinct of self-preservation, that guardian angel so persistent
to appear when needed, owes its summons to another instinct no less
strong, which we may call the instinct of individuality; for with
the same innate tenacity with which we severally cling to life do we
hold to the idea of our own identity. It is not for the philosophic
desire of preserving a very small fraction of humanity at large that
we take such pains to avoid destruction; it is that we insensibly
regard death as threatening to the continuance of the ego, in spite
of the theories of a future life which we have so elaborately
developed. Indeed, the psychical shrinking is really the
quintessence of the physical fear. We cleave to the abstract idea
closer even than to its concrete embodiment. Sooner would we forego
this earthly existence than surrender that something we know as
self. For sufficient cause we can imagine courting death; we cannot
conceive of so much as exchanging our individuality for another's,
still less of abandoning it altogether; for gradually a man, as he
grows older, comes to regard his body as, after all, separable from
himself. It is the soul's covering, rendered indispensable by the
climatic conditions of our present existence, one without which we
could no longer continue to live here. To forego it does not
necessarily negative, so far as we yet know, the possibility of
living elsewhere. Some more congenial tropic may be the wandering
spirit's fate. But to part with the sense of self seems to be like
taking an eternal farewell of the soul. The Western mind shrinks
before the bare idea of such a thought.

The clinging to one's own identity, then, is now an instinct,
whatever it may originally have been. It is a something we
inherited from our ancestors and which we shall transmit more or
less modified to our descendants. How far back this consciousness
has been felt passes the possibilities of history to determine,
since the recording of it necessarily followed the fact. All we
know is that its mention is coeval with chronicle, and its origin
lost in allegory. The Bible, one of the oldest written records in
the world, begins with a bit of mythology of a very significant
kind. When the Jews undertook to trace back their family tree to an
idyllic garden of Eden, they mentioned as growing there beside the
tree of life, another tree called the tree of knowledge. Of what
character this knowledge was is inferable from the sudden
self-consciousness that followed the partaking of it. So that if
we please we may attribute directly to Eve's indiscretion the many
evils of our morbid self-consciousness of the present day.
But without indulging in unchivalrous reflections we may draw
certain morals from it of both immediate and ultimate applicability.

To begin with, it is a most salutary warning to the introspective,
and in the second place it is a striking instance of a myth which is
not a sun myth; for it is essentially of human regard, an attempt on
man's part to explain that most peculiar attribute of his
constitution, the all-possessing sense of self. It looks certainly
as if he was not over-proud of his person that he should have deemed
its recognition occasion for the primal curse, and among early races
the person is for a good deal of the personality. What he lamented
was not life but the unavoidable exertion necessary to getting his
daily bread, for the question whether life were worth while was as
futile then as now, and as inconceivable really as 4-dimensional
space.

We are then conscious of individuality as a force within ourselves.
But our knowledge by no means ends there; for we are aware of it in
the case of others as well.

About certain people there exists a subtle something which leaves
its impress indelibly upon the consciousness of all who come in
contact with them. This something is a power, but a power of so
indefinable a description that we beg definition by calling it
simply the personality of the man. It is not a matter of subsequent
reasoning, but of direct perception. We feel it. Sometimes it
charms us; sometimes it repels. But we can no more be oblivious to
it than we can to the temperature of the air. Its possessor has but
to enter the room, and insensibly we are conscious of a presence.
It is as if we had suddenly been placed in the field of a magnetic
force.

On the other hand there are people who produce no effect upon us
whatever. They come and go with a like indifference. They are as
unimportant psychically as if they were any other portion of the
furniture. They never stir us. We might live with them for fifty
years and be hardly able to tell, for any influence upon ourselves,
whether they existed or not. They remind us of that neutral drab
which certain religious sects assume to show their own irrelevancy
to the world. They are often most estimable folk, but they are no
more capable of inspiring a strong emotion than the other kind are
incapable of doing so. And we say the difference is due to the
personality or want of personality of the man. Now, in what does
this so-called personality consist? Not in bodily presence simply,
for men quite destitute of it possess the force in question; not in
character only, for we often disapprove of a character whose
attraction we are powerless to resist; not in intellect alone, for
men more rational fail of stirring us as these unconsciously do.
In what, then? In life itself; not that modicum of it, indeed,
which suffices simply to keep the machine moving, but in the life
principle, the power which causes psychical change; which makes the
individual something distinct from all other individuals, a being
capable of proving sufficient, if need be, unto himself; which shows
itself, in short, as individuality. This is not a mere restatement
of the case, for individuality is an objective fact capable of being
treated by physical science. And as we know much more at present
about physical facts than we do of psychological problems, we may be
able to arrive the sooner at solution.

Individuality, personality, and the sense of self are only three
different aspects of one and the same thing. They are so many
various views of the soul according as we regard it from an
intrinsic, an altruistic, or an egoistic standpoint. For by
individuality is not meant simply the isolation in a corporeal
casing of a small portion of the universal soul of mankind. So far
as mind goes, this would not be individuality at all, but the
reverse. By individuality we mean that bundle of ideas, thoughts,
and daydreams which constitute our separate identity, and by virtue
of which we feel each one of us at home within himself. Now man in
his mind-development is bound to become more and more distinct from
his neighbor. We can hardly conceive a progress so uniform as not
to necessitate this. It would be contrary to all we know of natural
law, besides contradicting daily experience. For each successive
generation bears unmistakable testimony to the fact. Children of
the same parents are never exactly like either their parents or one
another, and they often differ amazingly from both. In such
instances they revert to type, as we say; but inasmuch as the race
is steadily advancing in development, such reversion must resemble
that of an estate which has been greatly improved since its previous
possession. The appearance of the quality is really the sprouting
of a seed whose original germ was in some sense coeval with the
beginning of things. This mind-seed takes root in some cases and
not in others, according to the soil it finds. And as certain
traits develop and others do not, one man turns out very differently
from his neighbor. Such inevitable distinction implies furthermore
that the man shall be sensible of it. Consciousness is the
necessary attribute of mental action. Not only is it the sole way
we have of knowing mind; without it there would be no mind to know.
Not to be conscious of one's self is, mentally speaking, not to be.
This complex entity, this little cosmos of a world, the "I," has for
its very law of existence self-consciousness, while personality is
the effect it produces upon the consciousness of others.

But we may push our inquiry a step further, and find in imagination
the cause of this strange force. For imagination, or the
image-making faculty, may in a certain sense be said to be the
creator of the world within. The separate senses furnish it with
material, but to it alone is due the building of our castles, on
premises of fact or in the air. For there is no impassable gulf
between the two. Coleridge's distinction that imagination drew
possible pictures and fancy impossible ones, is itself, except as a
classification, an impossible distinction to draw; for it is only
the inconceivable that can never be. All else is purely a matter of
relation. We may instance dreams which are usually considered to
rank among the most fanciful creations of the mind. Who has not in
his dreams fallen repeatedly from giddy heights and invariably
escaped unhurt? If he had attempted the feat in his waking moments
he would assuredly have been dashed to pieces at the bottom. And so
we say the thing is impossible. But is it? Only under the relative
conditions of his mass and the earth's. If the world he happens to
inhabit were not its present size, but the size of one of the tinier
asteroids, no such disastrous results would follow a chance misstep.
He could there walk off precipices when too closely pursued by bears
--if I remember rightly the usual childish cause of the same--
with perfect impunity. The bear could do likewise, unfortunately.
We should have arrived at our conclusion even quicker had we
decreased the size both of the man and his world. He would not then
have had to tumble actually so far, and would therefore have arrived
yet more gently at the foot. This turns out, then, to be a mere
question of size. Decrease the scale of the picture, and the
impossible becomes possible at once. All fancies are not so easily
reducible to actual facts as the one we have taken, but all,
perhaps, eventually may be explicable in the same general way. At
present we certainly cannot affirm that anything may not be thus
explained. For the actual is widening its field every day. Even in
this little world of our own we are daily discovering to be fact
what we should have thought fiction, like the sailor's mother the
tale of the flying fish. Beyond it our ken is widening still more.
Gulliver's travels may turn out truer than we think. Could we
traverse the inter-planetary ocean of ether, we might eventually
find in Jupiter the land of Lilliput or in Ceres some old-time
country of the Brobdignagians. For men constituted muscularly like
ourselves would have to be proportionately small in the big planet
and big in the small one. Still stranger things may exist around
other suns. In those bright particular stars--which the little girl
thought pinholes in the dark canopy of the sky to let the glory
beyond shine through--we are finding conditions of existence like
yet unlike those we already know. To our groping speculations of
the night they almost seem, as we gaze on them in their twinkling,
to be winking us a sort of comprehension. Conditions may exist
there under which our wildest fancies may be commonplace facts.
There may be

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