The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn Volume II Part 21

DEAR CHAMBERLAIN,--On re-reading your letter I find it necessary to a.s.sure you positively (pardon me if I am rude) that you have no conception whatever, not the least, of the scientific opinions as to psychological evolution held by Spencer. It is necessary I should say this,--otherwise the mere discussion of details would leave you under the impression that I recognize your understanding of the subject. It is quite obvious that you do not understand evolution at all. You do understand natural selection,--but that is quite another matter.

To comprehend psychological evolution, it is first necessary to banish absolutely from the mind every speck of belief that the individual can be changed in character, or intrinsically added to, by any influence whatever, to any perceptible degree. There may be modifications or increments, just as there may be decrements, but these remain imperceptible. The race is visibly modified in the course of centuries--not the individual, whether by education, environment or anything else. The millions of years required for the development of a body are much more required for the development of a mind. Could the individual be really changed to the degree imagined by the soul-theory, a few generations would suffice to form a perfectly evolved race.

Education and other influences only develop or stimulate the preexisting. There is an unfolding (possibly also a very slight increment of neural structure), but the unfolding is of that formed before birth. There are no changes such as seriously affect character.

The evolution of the race is perceptible,--not that of the individual, except as the individual life is that of the race in epitome.

Besides emotions, pa.s.sions, etc., certain ideas are necessarily inherited. Otherwise mental development in the individual even could not take place. Such is the idea of s.p.a.ce, and other ideas which form the canvas and stage of thought. Simple as they seem, they are complicated enough to have required millions of years to form.

Evolution includes not merely the shaping and modification of existing matter, but the development of visible matter itself out of the invisible. The evidence of chemistry is that all substances we call elements have been evolved by tendencies out of something infinitely simpler and ma.s.sless.

LAFCADIO HEARN.

Precisely for the same reason that the majority of men in all countries live more by feeling than by reason, and that the emotions, which are inheritances, play a greater part in the individual life than the reasoning faculties, which need training and experience for their development and use,--so is the study of heredity of larger importance in the study of emotional life. And therefore your suggestion that one factor should not be dwelt on rather than others would be bad to follow,--first, because all are not equal either in importance or interest, and secondly because the circ.u.mstance related or studied must be considered especially in relation to the princ.i.p.al factor of the psychological state which that circ.u.mstance has evoked.

TO BASIL HALL CHAMBERLAIN

KOBE, April, 1895.

DEAR CHAMBERLAIN,--The factors of evolution are mult.i.tudinous beyond enumeration, and no one with a ghost of knowledge of the modern scientific researches on the subject could hold (as you suggest I do) that heredity is a first cause and "exclusive"(!) Heredity is a result, and the vehicle of transmission, as well as the "Karma" (which Huxley calls it). Degeneration, atrophy, atavism, are quite as much factors in evolution as variation and natural selection and development;--but the flowing of the eternal stream, the river of life, is heredity,--whatever form the ripples take. As I have given some twenty years' study to these subjects, I am not likely to overlook any such thing as environment or climate or diet. You cannot, however, get a grasp of the system by reading only a digest of results--a study of biology and physiology is absolutely necessary before the psychology of the thing can be clearly perceived. Now you say you will accept anything Spencer writes on the subject. Well, he writes that "a child" playing with its "toys" experiences "presentative-representative feelings." What are presentative-representative feelings? They are feelings chiefly "deeper than individual experience." What are feelings deeper than individual experience? Mr. Spencer tells us they are "inherited feelings,"--the sum of ancestral experiences,--the aggregates of race-experience. Therefore when I said the child's delight in its toys was "hereditary-ancestral,"

I said precisely what Spencer says, but what you would never acknowledge so long as "only I" said it.

On this subject of emotions inherited as distinguished from others, and from those changes in states of consciousness generally which we call reasoning or constructive imagination, the definite utterances of Spencer as physiologist are electrically reenforced by the startling theory of Schopenhauer, by the system of Hartmann, and by the views of Janet and his rapidly growing school. Indeed, the mere fact that a child cries at the sight of a frowning face and laughs at a smiling one could be explained in no other manner.

You are not quite correct in saying that Spencer could not obtain a hearing before Darwin. Before Darwin, Spencer had already been recognized by Lewes as the mightiest of all English thinkers, with the remarkable observation that he was too large and near to be justly estimated even in his lifetime. Darwin did much, of course, to illuminate one factor of evolution; but I need hardly say that one factor, though the most commonly identified with evolution, is but one of myriads. Natural selection can explain but a very small part of the thing. The colossal brain which first detected the necessity of evolution as a cosmic law,--governing the growth of a solar system as well as the growth of a gnat,--the brain of Spencer, discerned that law by pure mathematical study of the laws of force. And the work of the Darwins and Huxleys and Tyndalls is but detail--small detail--in that tremendous system which has abolished all preexisting philosophy and transformed all science and education.

I need scarcely say, however, that I should not be able, as a literary dreamer, to derive the inspiration needed from Spencer alone: he is best illuminated, I think, by the aid of Schopenhauer and the new French school which considers the so-called individual as really an infinite multiple. These men have said nothing of value which Spencer has not said much better scientifically,--but they are infinitely suggestive when they happen to coincide with him. So, after a fashion, is the Vedantic philosophy (much more so than Buddhism), and so also some few dreams of the old Greek schools.

Your criticisms also show that you take me as confusing changes of relation of integrated states of consciousness with inherited integrations of emotional feeling. These are absolutely distinct. But don't think that I pretend to be invariably a state of facts: without theory, a very large part of life's poetry could never be adequately uttered.

I knew that the music of the "_Kimi ga yo_" was new,--though I did not know the story of the German bandmaster. But I did not know that the words once had no reference to the Emperor. I was more careful, however, than you give me credit for,--since I wrote only "the syllables made sacred by the reverential love of a century of generations," which, allowing for poetical exaggeration, seems to be all right anyhow, even if the words did not refer to the Emperor. Of course the implication to the foreign reader would, however, be wrong.

Still, on the subject of loyalty, I cannot see that the existence of the feeling as inborn is invalidated by the fact of transference.

The feeling is the thing,--not the object, not the Emperor nor the Daimyo,--which, I imagine, must have survived all the changes.

Trained from the time of the G.o.ds to obedience and loyalty to somebody, the feeling of the military cla.s.ses would not have been instantly dissipated or annihilated by the change of government, but simply transferred. Indeed, that strikes me as having been what the Government worked for. It could not afford to ignore or throw away so enormous a source of power as the inherited feeling of the race offered, and attempted (I think very successfully) to transfer it to the Emperor. The fact in no way affects the truth or falsehood of the sketch "Yuho."

Your criticism is only a re-denial of inherited feeling as a possibility.

Ever very truly, LAFCADIO HEARN.

TO BASIL HALL CHAMBERLAIN

APRIL, 1895.

DEAR CHAMBERLAIN,--Excuse me if I don't reply more fully to your letter, because my eyes are a little tired. I can only say I wish I were sick, somewhere near you: then perhaps you would come and see me, and talk more of these queer things. You would not find the time heavy. For the subject is a romance.

In order to convey by a diagram any picture-idea of what heredity means, one should have to draw a series of inverted cone-figures representing a reticulation of millions of cross-lines. This could only be done well under a microscope, and on a very limited scale. Because the thing goes by arithmetical progression. The individual is the product of 2, the 2 of 4, the 4 of 8, the 8 of 16--well, you know the tale of the smith who offered to shoe a horse with 32 nails, to receive 1 cent on the first nail, and to double the sum upon every nail! The enormity of inheritance is at once apparent. But to produce another individual, another life is needed, which represents the superimposition in the child of another infinitely complex inheritance. The fact is only worth stating as suggesting that under normal circ.u.mstances the child would necessarily represent an increment. He should receive not only the experience of his father's race, but all that of his mother's race superimposed upon it.

The fact that he does very nearly do so is evidenced by the reappearance in his descendants of parental traits always invisible in himself. Mere multiplication ought therefore to account for a larger mental growth and progress than exists or could ever exist.

Why doesn't it? Simply because in the brain the same selective process goes on as in the vegetable world. As out of 10,000,000 seeds scarcely one survives: so out of a million mental impressions scarcely one survives. Indeed, not so many. For the inheritance is of repet.i.tions,--rarely of single impressions. It is only when an impression has been repeated times innumerable that it becomes transmissible,--that it affects the cerebral structure so as to become organic memory. The inheritance is of a very compound nature, therefore,--requiring either enormous time for development, or enormous experience. There is reason to believe, however, that in the case of very highly organized brains,--such as those of the modern musician, linguist, or mathematician,--the multiple experiences of even one lifetime may produce structural modifications capable of transmission.

This is not the case except in men as much larger than common men as Fuji is larger than an ant-hill. And the reason is that such a brain can daily receive billions of impressions that common minds cannot receive in a whole lifetime. The thinking is of the constructive character,--the most highly complex form possible; and the extreme sensitiveness of the structures renders habitual conceptions which represent combinations of conscious states never entered into before. Measured by mere difference of force, the brain of the mathematician is to the brain of the ordinary man as the most powerful dynamo to the muscles of an ant.

Happily for mankind, not only is inheritance something more than repet.i.tion, it is also something less than repet.i.tion. Between these two extremes of plus and minus the physiology of mental activities in any lifetime represents a fierce struggle for the survival of the best or worst. Here is where the environment comes in,--determining which of a million tendencies shall have freest play or least play. According to circ.u.mstances the impulses of the dead are used or neglected. The more used, the more powerful their active potentialities, and the more apt to increase by transmission. But their vitality is racial--measurable only by millions of years. They may lie dormant for twenty centuries, and be suddenly called into being again--sinister and monstrous-seeming, because no longer in harmony with the age. (Here is the point of the selective process.)

Here comes in the consideration of a very terrible possibility. Suppose we use integers instead of quintillions or centillions, and say that an individual represents by inheritance a total of 10--5 of impulses favourable to social life, 5 of the reverse. (Such a balance would really occur in many cases.) The child inherits, under favourable conditions, the father's balance plus the maternal balance of 9,--four of the number being favourable. We have then a total which becomes odd, and the single odd number gives preponderance to an acc.u.mulation of ancestral impulse incalculable for evil. It would be like a pair of scales, each holding a ma.s.s as large as Fuji. If the balance were absolutely perfect, the weight of one hair would be enough to move a ma.s.s of millions of tons. Here is your antique Nemesis awfully magnified. Let the individual descend below a certain level, and countless dead suddenly seize and destroy him,--like the Furies.

In all cases, however, except those of the very highest forms of mental activity, the psychological life consists of repet.i.tions,--not of originalities. And environment, chance, etc., simply influence the extent and volume of the repet.i.tions. In the case of constructive imagination, on the other hand, there are totally new combinations made independently of environment or circ.u.mstances: there is almost creation, and in certain cases absolute faculty of prediction. Instance the case of the mathematician who, without having ever seen the Iceland Spar, but knowing its qualities, said: "Cut it at such an angle, and you will see a coloured circle." They cut it, and the circle was seen for the first time by human eyes.

Properly, however, there is no such thing as an individual, but only a combination,--one balance of an infinite sum. The charm of a very superior man or woman is the ghostliest of all conceivable experiences.

For the man or woman in question can in a single evening become fifty, a hundred, two hundred different people--not in fancy, but in actual fact.

Here the character of the ancestral experience has been so high and rare that a different part of the race's mental life is instantly resurrected at will to welcome and charm, or to master and repel, the various sorts of character encountered, haphazard, in the salon of the aristocratic milieu.

It would be natural to ask: If the emotions and pa.s.sions are inheritances, why are not these higher faculties inherited en ma.s.se as well? Because feeling is infinitely older than thinking, developed millions of years before thinking. Also because the reasoning powers have been grown out of the feelings--as trees from soil. Those forms of consciousness most connected with the animal life of the race are, of course, the first to develop, and the first to become transmissible.

But the time may come when higher faculties will be also similarly transmissible.

Taking the highest possible form of human thought,--a mathematical concept,--and a.n.a.lyzing it, we find a whole volume is required for the mere statement of the a.n.a.lysis. The flash of the thought took less than a second; to write all the thinking it involved requires years. We take it to pieces by bundles of concepts and bundles of experiences,--which are changes in relations of compound states of consciousness. The relations of those states of consciousness are resolvable into simpler ones, and those into simpler, and at last we come down to mere perceptions, and the perceptions are separated into ideas, and the ideas into compound sensations, and the compound sensations into sensations simple as those of the amba, or the humblest protozoa.

Thus we can also trace up the history of any thought from the state of mere animalcular sensation. The highest thought is resolvable into infinite compounds of such sensations. Beyond that we cannot go. The Universe may be sentient, but we don't know it. All we know is sensation and combinations of sensations in the brain. The highest spiritual sentiment is based upon the lowest animal sensations. But what is sensation? No one can tell. On this subject very awful discoveries are perhaps awaiting us.

Now heredity is the most wonderful thing of all things, because it is utterly incomprehensible.

A mathematical calculation has established beyond all question the fact that the number of ultimate units in a sperm-cell and germ-cell combined is totally insufficient to account for the number of impressions and tendencies transmitted--supposing a change in the ultimate units possible. Therefore in order to have a working theory, we are obliged to use the term polarity,--which only means physical tendency to relationships. But the mystery of the transmission of the impulse remains just as far away as ever.

Of course I can't agree with you as to the statement of culture from outside, except in the poetical sense. Scientifically the culture movement is internal,--the responses of innumerable dead to exterior influence,--the weirdest resurrections of buried faculties.

As for evolution being caused by outer influences, I think the idea leads to misconception of an intelligent power working and watching things. We have no need of such a theory. Pain is the chief mental factor. The elements of life are remarkable in being chemically unstable,--astonishingly unstable, and the mere working of the universal forces on such elements quite sufficiently accounts for all changes. But the fact that there is no line between life and not-life, no line between the animal and vegetable world, no line between the visible and invisible, no a.s.surance that matter has any existence in itself--that is a very awful truth. It is otherwise incorrect to think of evolution being caused by outer influences, because the inner forces are the really direct ones,--answering to the outer. Moreover, the thing evolved, and the power evolving, and the forces internal and external,--the visible and the non-visible,--are (so far as human reason permits us to judge) all one and the same. We know only phenomena; and modern thought recognizes more and more the Indian thought that the Supreme Brahma is only playing a chess game with himself. Absolutely we know only forces--pure ghostliness. The individual substance is but a force combination,--its changes are force combinations,--the powers outside are but force combinations,--the universe is a force combination--and we can know nothing more than vibrations.

Ever, LAFCADIO HEARN.

P. S. I forgot to notice your statement--"not through the physical fact of nerve-tissue," etc.

All thinking--all, without exception--is alteration of nerve-substance; either temporary motion or motion making by countless repet.i.tion alterations that are permanent. Physiologically, "thought" is a very complex vibration in nerve-tissue. There is no other meaning whatever in science for "thought." For "thought" is a perception of relations in preexisting states of consciousness, and those are bundles of sensations. What "sensation" is, no man knows. That is the dark spot in the retina of consciousness. But there is no proof that sensation exists apart from cell-substance.

To speak of an "ideal process" outside of vibration in nervous substance is therefore like saying that 5 times 5 = 918. It is a total denial of all science on the subject. An idea is a bundle of sensations, and a sensation is coincident with a movement in cerebral cells. Without the movement there is no sensation,--not at least in the brain. We do not know the ultimate of sensation, but thoughts and ideas only mean complex combinations of sensations impossible outside of nerve-substance so far as we know.

Of course if you mean by culture from outside the transmission of civilization from one race to another,--then there has been enormous alteration of cerebral structure. Such alteration is even now going on in j.a.pan, and causes yearly hundreds of deaths.

The brain of the civilized man is 30 p.c. heavier than that of the savage; and the brain of the 19th century much larger than that of the 16th (see Broca). A striking fact of evolution is brain-growth. The early mammals were remarkable for the smallness of their brains. Man's nervous structure is, of course, the most powerful of all. Cut out of the body, it is found to weigh, as a total, double that of a horse. For mind signifies motion, force,--the more powerful the mind the greater the forces evolved. Perhaps the nervous system of a whale might weigh more than that of a man as a total ma.s.s, but not nearly so much in parts corresponding with mental differences. Nevertheless the changes effected by progress in the brain are chiefly visible in the direction of increasing complexity rather than in bulk. The study of brain-casts promises to develop some interesting facts.

TO BASIL HALL CHAMBERLAIN

KOBE, April, 1895.

DEAR CHAMBERLAIN,--In one of your recent letters, which charmed me by its kindness,--though I did not dwell on the pleasure given me, because I was so immediately occupied in discussing my psychical hobby,--you asked me: "How could I expect to hit the public more than I have done?"

Well, not with a book on j.a.pan, perhaps; but I must do better some day with something, or acknowledge myself a dead failure. I really think I have stored away in me somewhere powers larger than those I have yet been able to use. Of course I don't mean that I have any hidden wisdom, or anything of that sort; but I believe I have some power to reach the public emotionally, if conditions allow.