The Romance of the Milky Way Part 8

[_When by the night-storm is shaken the blood-crowned and ancient tsubaki-tree, then one by one fall the gory heads of the flowers, (with the sound of) hota-hota!_[61]]

[Footnote 61: The word _furu_ in the third line is made to do double duty,--as the adjective, _furu[i]_, "ancient"; and as the verb _furu_, "to shake." The old term _nama-kuhi_ (lit., "raw head") means a human head, freshly-severed, from which the blood is still oozing.]

Kusa mo ki mo Nemureru koro no Sayo kaze ni, Mehana no ugoku Furu-tsubaki kana!

[_When even the gra.s.s and the trees are sleeping under the faint wind of the night,--then do the eyes and the noses of the old tsubaki-tree (or "the buds and the flowers of the old tsubaki-tree") move!_[62]]

[Footnote 62: Two j.a.panese words are written, in _kana_, as "me"--one meaning "a bud;" the other "eye." The syllables "hana" in like fashion, may signify either "flower" or "nose." As a grotesque, this little poem is decidedly successful.]

Tomoshibi no Kage ayashige ni Miyenuru wa Abura shiborishi Furu-tsubaki ka-mo?

[_As for (the reason why) the light of that lamp appears to be a Weirdness,[63]--perhaps the oil was expressed from (the nuts of) the ancient tsu-baki?_]

[Footnote 63: _Ayashige_ is a noun formed from the adjective _ayashi_, "suspicious," "strange," "supernatural," "doubtful." The word _kage_ signifies both "light" and "shadow,"--and is here used with double suggestiveness. The vegetable oil used in the old j.a.panese lamps used to be obtained from the nuts of the _tsubaki_. The reader should remember that the expression "ancient tsubaki" is equivalent to the expression "goblin-tsubaki,"--the tsubaki being supposed to turn into a goblin-tree only when it becomes old.]

--Nearly all the stories and folk-beliefs about which these _ky[=o]ka_ were written seem to have come from China; and most of the j.a.panese tales of tree-spirits appear to have had a Chinese origin. As the flower-spirits and hamadryads of the Far East are as yet little known to Western readers, the following Chinese story may be found interesting.

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

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

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

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

But the shadow moved its lips and eyes, and spoke to him in a whisper, saying:--

"Pardon me that I did not obey your august call!... I am not a mankind-person;--I am only the Soul of a Peony. Because you loved peonies so much, I was able to take human shape, and to serve you.

But now this Teki-Shin-Ketsu has come,--and he is a person of dreadful propriety,--and I dare not keep this form any longer.... I must return to the place from which I came."

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

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

"ULTIMATE QUESTIONS"

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

This experience had been produced by study of the first volume of the Synthetic Philosophy, which an American friend had taught me how to read. I did not find it easy reading; partly because I am a slow thinker, but chiefly because my mind had never been trained to sustained effort in such directions. To learn the "First Principles"

occupied me many months: no other volume of the series gave me equal trouble. I would read one section at a time,--rarely two,--never venturing upon a fresh section until I thought that I had made sure of the preceding. Very cautious and slow my progress was, like that of a man mounting, for the first time, a long series of ladders in darkness. Reaching the light at last, I caught a sudden new vision of things,--a momentary perception of the illusion of surfaces,--and from that time the world never again appeared to me quite the same as it had appeared before.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But for me the supreme value of this last essay is made by the fact that in its pathetic statement of uncertainties and probabilities one can discern something very much resembling a declaration of faith.

Though a.s.sured that we have yet no foundation for any belief in the persistence of consciousness after the death of the brain, we are bidden to remember that the ultimate nature of consciousness remains inscrutable. Though we cannot surmise the relation of consciousness to the unseen, we are reminded that it must be considered as a manifestation of the Infinite Energy, and that its elements, if dissociated by death, will return to the timeless and measureless Source of Life.... Science to-day also a.s.sures us that whatever existence has been--all individual life that ever moved in animal or plant,--all feeling and thought that ever stirred in human consciousness--must have flashed self-record beyond the sphere of sentiency; and though we cannot know, we cannot help imagining that the best of such registration may be destined to perpetuity. On this latter subject, for obvious reasons, Herbert Spencer has remained silent; but the reader may ponder a remarkable paragraph in the final sixth edition of the "First Principles,"--a paragraph dealing with the hypothesis that consciousness may belong to the cosmic ether.

This hypothesis has not been lightly dismissed by him; and even while proving its inadequacy, he seems to intimate that it may represent imperfectly some truth yet inapprehensible by the human mind:--

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

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

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

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

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

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

But Herbert Spencer tells us that, apart from the conception of these geometrical mysteries, the problem of naked s.p.a.ce itself became for him, in the twilight of his age, an obsession and a dismay:--

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

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

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

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