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Lafcadio Hearn - Kokoro
intellectual expansion. That as mere doctrine religion will ultimately pass away is a conclusion to which
the study of evolution leads; but that religion as feeling, or even as faith in the unknown power shaping
equally a brain or a constellation, can ever utterly die, is not at present conceivable. Science wars only
upon erroneous interpretations of phenomena; it only magnifies the cosmic mystery, and proves that
everything, however minute, is infinitely wonderful and incomprehensible. And it is this indubitable
tendency of science to broaden beliefs and to magnify cosmic emotion which justifies the supposition
that future modifications of Western religious ideas will be totally unlike any modifications effected in
the past; that the Occidental conception of Self will orb into something akin to the Oriental conception of
Self; and that all present petty metaphysical notions of personality and individuality as realities per se
will be annihilated. Already the growing popular comprehension of the facts of heredity, as science
teaches them, indicates the path by which some, at least, of these modifications will be reached. In the
coming contest over the great question of psychological evolution, common intelligence will follow
Science along the line of least resistance; and that line will doubtless be the study of heredity, since the
phenomena to be considered, however in themselves uninterpretable, are familiar to general experience,
and afford partial answers to countless old enigmas. It is thus quite possible to imagine a coming form of
Western religion supported by the whole power of synthetic philosophy, differing from Buddhism mainly
in the greater exactness of its conceptions, holding the soul as a composite, and teaching a new spiritual
law resembling the doctrine of karma.
An objection to this idea will, however, immediately present itself to many minds. Such a modification
of belief, it will be averred, would signify the sudden conquest and transformation of feelings by ideas.
"The world," says Herbert Spencer, "is not governed by ideas, but by feelings, to which ideas serve only
as guides." How are the notions of a change, such as that supposed, to be reconciled with common
knowledge of existing religious sentiment in the West, and the force of religious emotionalism?
Were the ideas of pre-existence and of the soul as multiple really antagonistic to Western religious
sentiment, no satisfactory answer could be made. But are they so antagonistic? The idea of pre-existence
certainly is not; the Occidental mind is already prepared for it. It is true that the notion of Self as a
composite, destined to dissolution, may seem little better than the materialistic idea of annihilation, - at
least to those still unable to divest themselves of the old habits of thought. Nevertheless, impartial
reflection will show that there is no emotional reason for dreading the disintegration of the Ego. Actually,
though unwittingly, it is for this very disintegration that Christians and Buddhists alike perpetually pray.
Who has not often wished to rid himself of the worse parts of his nature, of tendencies to folly or to
wrong, of impulses to say or do unkind things, - of all that lower inheritance which still clings about the
higher man, and weighs down his finest aspirations? Yet that of which we so earnestly desire the
separation, the elimination, the death, is not less surely a part of psychological inheritance, of veritable
Self, than are those younger and larger faculties which help to the realization of noble ideals. Rather than
an end to be feared, the dissolution of Self is the one object of all objects to which our efforts should be
turned. What no new philosophy can forbid us to hope is that the best elements of Self will thrill on to
seek loftier affinities, to enter into grander and yet grander combinations, till the supreme revelation
comes, and we discern, through infinite vision, - through the vanishing of all Self, - the Absolute Reality.
For while we know that even the so-called elements themselves are evolving, we have no proof that
anything utterly dies. That we are is the certainty that, we have been and will be. We have survived
countless evolutions, countless universes. We know that through the Cosmos all is law. No chance
decides what units shall form the planetary core, or what shall feel the sun; what shall be locked in
granite and basalt, or shall multiply in plant and in animal. So far as reason can venture to infer from
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