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Lafcadio Hearn - Kokoro
evil tendencies, - a compound doomed to disintegration not only by the very fact of its being a
compound, but also by the eternal law of spiritual progress.
IV
That the idea, which has been for thousands of years so vast a factor in Oriental thought-life, should have
failed to develop itself in the West till within, our own day, is sufficiently explained by Western
theology. Still, it would not be correct to say that theology succeeded in rendering the notion of
pre-existence absolutely repellent to Occidental minds. Though Christian doctrine, holding each soul
specially created out of nothing to fit each new body, permitted no avowed beliefs in pre-existence,
popular common-sense recognized a contradiction of dogma in the phenomena of heredity. In the same
way, while theology decided animals to be mere automata, moved by a sort of incomprehensible
machinery called instinct, the people generally recognized that animals had reasoning powers. The
theories of instinct and of intuition held even a generation ago seem utterly barbarous to-day. They were
commonly felt to be useless as interpretations; but as dogmas they served to check speculation and to
prevent heresy. Wordsworth's "Fidelity" and his marvelously overrated "Intimations of Immortality" bear
witness to the extreme timidity and crudeness of Western notions on these subjects even at the beginning
of the century. The love of the dog for his master is indeed "great beyond all human estimate," but for
reasons Wordsworth never dreamed about; and although the fresh sensations of childhood are certainly
intimations of something much more wonderful than Wordsworth's denominational idea of immortality,
his famous stanza concerning them has been very justly condemned by Mr. John Morley as nonsense.
Before the decay of theology, no rational ideas of psychological inheritance, of the true nature of instinct,
or of the unity of life, could possibly have forced their way to general recognition.
But with the acceptance of the doctrine of evolution, old forms of thought crumbled; new ideas
everywhere arose to take the place of worn-out dogmas; and we now have the spectacle of a general
intellectual movement in directions strangely parallel with Oriental philosophy. The unprecedented
rapidity and multiformity of scientific progress during the last fifty years could not have failed to
provoke an equally unprecedented intellectual quickening among the non-scientific. That the highest and
most complex organisms have been developed from the lowest and simplest; that a single physical basis
of life is the substance of the whole living world; that no line of separation can be drawn between the
animal and vegetable; that the difference between life and non-life is only a difference of degree, not of
kind; that matter is not less incomprehensible than mind, while both are but varying manifestations of
one and the same unknown reality, - these have already become the commonplaces of the new
philosophy. After the first recognition even by theology of physical evolution, it was easy to predict that
the recognition of psychical evolution could not be indefinitely delayed; for the barrier erected by old
dogma to keep men from looking backward had been broken down. And to-day for the student of
scientific psychology the idea of pre-existence passes out of the realm of theory into the realm of fact,
proving the Buddhist explanation of the universal mystery quite as plausible as any other. "None but very
hasty thinkers," wrote the late Professor Huxley, "will reject it on the ground of inherent absurdity. Like
the doc-trine of evolution itself, that of transmigration has its roots in the world of reality; and it may
claim such support as the great argument from analogy is capable of supplying(1)."
Now this support, as given by Professor Huxley, is singularly strong. It offers us no glimpse of a single
soul flitting from darkness to light, from death to rebirth, through myriads of millions of years; but it
leaves the main idea of pre-existence almost exactly in the form enunciated by the Buddha himself. In the
Oriental doctrine, the psychical personality, like the individual body, is an aggregate doomed to
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