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Lafcadio Hearn - Kokoro
man's handiwork without perceiving something of its evolutional history. The most ordinary utensil will
appear to him not the mere product of individual capacity on the part of carpenter or potter, smith or
cutler, but the product of experiment continued through thousands of years with methods, with materials,
and with forms. Nor will it be possible for him to consider the vast time and toil necessitated in the
evolution, of any mechanical appliance, and yet experience no generous sentiment. Coming generations
must think of the material bequests of the past in relation to dead humanity.
But in the development of this "cosmic emotion" of humanity, a much more powerful factor than
recognition of our material indebtedness to the past will be the recognition of our psychical indebtedness.
For we owe to the dead our immaterial world also, - the world that lives within us, - the world of all that
is lovable in impulse, emotion, thought. Whosoever understands scientifically what human goodness is,
and the terrible cost of making it, can find in the commonest phases of the humblest lives that beauty,
which is divine, and can feel that in one sense our dead are truly gods.
So long as we supposed the woman soul one in itself, - a something specially created to fit one particular
physical being, - the beauty and the wonder of mother-love could never be fully revealed to us. But with
deeper knowledge we must perceive that the inherited love of myriads of millions of dead mothers has
been treasured up in one life; - that only thus can be interpreted the infinite sweetness of the speech
which the infant hears, - the infinite tenderness of the look of caress which meets its gaze. Unhappy the
mortal who has not known these; yet what mortal can adequately speak of them! Truly is mother-love
divine; for everything by human recognition called divine is summed up in that love; and every woman
uttering and transmitting its highest expression is more than the mother of man: she is the Mater
Dei.
Needless to speak here about the ghostliness of first love, sexual love, which is illusion, - because the
passion and the beauty of the dead revive in it, to dazzle, to delude; and to bewitch. It is very, very
wonderful; but it is not all good, because it is not all true. The real charm of woman in herself is that
which comes later, - when all the illusions fade away to reveal a reality, lovelier than any illusion, which
has been evolving behind the phantom-curtain of them. What is the divine magic of the woman thus
perceived? Only the affection, the sweetness, the faith, the unselfishness, the intuitions of millions of
buried hearts. All live again;-all throb anew, in every fresh warm beat of her own.
Certain amazing faculties exhibited in the highest social life tell in another way the story of soul structure
built up by dead lives. Wonderful is the man who can really "be all things to all men," or the woman who
can make herself twenty, fifty, a hundred different women, - comprehending all, penetrating all, unerring
to estimate all others; - seeming to have no individual self, but only selves innumerable; - able to meet
each varying personality with a soul exactly toned to the tone of that to be encountered. Rare these
characters are, but not so rare that the traveler is unlikely to meet one or two of them in any cultivated
society which he has a chance of studying. They are essentially multiple beings, - so visibly multiple that
even those who think of the Ego as single have to describe them as "highly complex." Nevertheless this
manifestation of forty or fifty different characters in the same person is a phenomenon so remarkable
(especially remarkable because it is commonly manifested in youth long before relative experience could
possibly account for it) that I cannot but wonder how few persons frankly realize its signification.
So likewise with what have been termed the "intuitions" of some forms of genius, - particularly those
which relate to the representation of the emotions. A Shakespeare would always remain
incomprehensible on the ancient soul-theory. Taine attempted to explain him by the phrase, "a perfect
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