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Lafcadio Hearn - Kokoro
prodigiously complex, and interwoven with personal experiences of many kinds; but in either case the
deeper wave of feeling is never individual: it is a surging up from that ancestral sea of life out of which
we came. To the same psychological category possibly belongs likewise a peculiar feeling which
troubled men's minds long before the time of Cicero, and troubles them even more betimes in our own
generation, - the feeling of having already seen a place really visited for the first time. Some strange air
of familiarity about the streets of a foreign town, or the forms of a foreign landscape, comes to the mind
with a sort of soft weird shock, and leaves one vainly ransacking memory for interpretations.
Occasionally, beyond question, similar sensations are actually produced by the revival or recombination
of former relations in consciousness; but there would seem to be many which remain wholly mysterious
when we attempt to explain them by individual experience.
Even in the most common of our sensations there are enigmas never to be solved by those holding the
absurd doctrine that all feeling and cognition belong to individual experience, and that the mind of the
child newly-born is a tabula rasa. The pleasure excited by the perfume of a flower, by certain
shades of color, by certain tones of music; the involuntary loathing or fear aroused by the first sight of
dangerous or venomous life; even the nameless terror of dreams, - are all inexplicable upon the
old-fashioned soul-hypothesis. How deeply-reaching into the life of the race some of these sensations
are, such as the pleasure in odors and in colors, Grant Allen has most effectively suggested in his
"Physiological Aesthetics," and in his charming treatise on the Color-Sense. But long before these were
written, his teacher, the greatest of all psychologists, had clearly proven that the experience-hypothesis
was utterly inadequate to account for many classes of psychological phenomena. "If possible," observes
Herbert Spencer, "it is even more at fault in respect to the emotions than to the cognitions. The doctrine
that all the desires, all the sentiments, are generated by the experiences of the individual, is so glaringly
at variance with facts that I cannot but wonder how any one should ever have ventured to entertain it." It
was Mr. Spencer, also, who showed us that words like "instinct," "intuition," have no true signification in
the old sense; they must hereafter be used in a very different one. Instinct, in the language of modern
psychology, means "organized memory," and memory itself is "incipient instinct," - the sum of
impressions to be inherited by the next succeeding individual in the chain of life. Thus science
recognizes inherited memory: not in the ghostly signification of a remembering of the details of former
lives, but as a minute addition to psychological life accompanied by minute changes in the structure of
the inherited nervous system. "The human brain is an organized register of infinitely numerous
experiences received during the evolution of life, or rather, during the evolution of that series of
organisms through which the human organism has been reached. The effects of the most uniform and
frequent of these experiences have been successively bequeathed, principal and interest; and have slowly
amounted to that high intelligence which lies latent in the brain of the infant - which the infant in
after-life exercises and perhaps strengthens or further complicates - and which, with minute additions, it
bequeaths to future generations(1)." Thus we have solid physiological ground for the idea of
pre-existence and the idea of a multiple Ego. It is incontrovertible that in every individual brain is looked
up the inherited memory of the absolutely inconceivable multitude of experiences received by all the
brains of which it is the descendant. But this scientific assurance of self in the past is uttered in no
materialistic sense. Science is the destroyer of materialism: it has proven matter incomprehensible; and it
confesses the mystery of mind insoluble, even while obliged to postulate an ultimate unit of sensation.
Out of the units of simple sensation, older than we by millions of years, have undoubtedly been built up
all the emotions and faculties of man. Here Science, in accord with Buddhism, avows the Ego composite,
and, like Buddhism, explains the psychical riddles of the present by the psychical experiences of the past.
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