|
Lafcadio Hearn - Kokoro
family: a feeling much deeper than what we call patriotism. As a religious emotion the feeling is
infinitely extended to all the past; the blended sense of love, of loyalty, and of gratitude is not less real,
though necessarily more vague, than the feeling to living kindred.
In the West, after the destruction of antique society, no such feeling could remain. The beliefs that
condemned the ancients to hell, and forbade the praise of their works, - the doctrine that trained us to
return thanks for everything to the God of the Hebrews, - created habits of thought and habits of
thoughtlessness, both inimical to every feeling of gratitude to the past. Then, with the decay of theology
and the dawn of larger knowledge, came the teaching that the dead had no choice in their work, - they
had obeyed necessity, and we had only received from them of necessity the results of necessity. And
to-day we still fail to recognize that the necessity itself ought to compel our sympathies with those who
obeyed it, and that its bequeathed results are as pathetic as they are precious. Such thoughts rarely occur
to us even in regard to the work of the living who serve us. We consider the cost of a thing purchased or
obtained to ourselves; - about its cost in effort to the producer we do not allow ourselves to think: indeed,
we should be laughed at for any exhibition of conscience on the subject. And our equal insensibility to
the pathetic meaning of the work of the past, and to that of the work of the present, largely explains the
wastefulness of our civilization, - the reckless consumption by luxury of the labor of years in the pleasure
of an hour, - the inhumanity of the thousands of unthinking rich, each of whom dissipates yearly in the
gratification of totally unnecessary wants the price of a hundred human lives. The cannibals of
civilization are unconsciously more cruel than those of savagery, and require much more flesh. The
deeper humanity, - the cosmic emotion of humanity, - is essentially the enemy of useless luxury, and
essentially opposed to any form of society which places no restraints upon the gratifications of sense or
the pleasures of egotism.
In the Far East, on the other hand, the moral duty of simplicity of life has been taught from very ancient
times, because ancestor-worship had developed and cultivated this cosmic emotion of humanity which
we lack, but which we shall certainly be obliged to acquire at a later day, simply to save our selves from
extermination, Two sayings of Iyeyasu exemplify the Oriental sentiment. When virtually master of the
empire, this greatest of Japanese soldiers and statesmen was seen one day cleaning and smoothing with
his own hands an old dusty pair of silk hakama or trousers. "What you see me do," he said to a retainer,
"I am not doing because I think of the worth of the garment in itself, but because I think of what it
needed to produce it. It is the result of the toil of a poor woman; and that is why I value it. If we do
not think, while using things, of the time and effort required to make them, - then our want of
consideration puts us on a level with the beasts." Again, in the days of his greatest wealth, we hear of
him rebuking his wife for wishing to furnish him too often with new clothing. "When I think," he
protested, "of the multitudes around me, and of the generations to come after me, I feel it my duty to be
very sparing, for their sake, of the goods in my possession." Nor has this spirit of simplicity yet departed
from Japan. Even the Emperor and Empress, in the privacy of their own apartments, continue to live as
simply as their subjects, and devote most of their revenue to the alleviation of public distress.
(1) Kalevala; thirty-sixth Rune.
V
It is through the teachings of evolution that there will ultimately be developed in the West a moral
recognition of duty to the past like that which ancestor-worship created in the Far East. For even to-day
whoever has mastered the first principles of the new philosophy cannot look at the commonest product of
|
