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Lafcadio Hearn - Kokoro
imagination;" - and the phrase reaches far in the truth. But what is the meaning of a perfect imagination?
Enormous multiplicity of soul-life, - countless past existences revived in one. Nothing else can explain
it.... It is not however, in the world of pure intellect that the story of psychical complexity is most
admirable: it is in the world which speaks to our simplest emotions of love honor, sympathy, heroism.
"But by such a theory," some critic may observe, "the source of impulses to heroism is also the source of
the impulses that people jails. Both are of the dead." This is true. We inherited evil as well as good.
Being composites only, - still evolving, still becoming, - we inherit imperfections. But the survival of the
fittest in impulses is certainly proven by the average moral condition of humanity, - using the word
"fittest" in its ethical sense. In spite of all the misery and vice and crime, nowhere so terribly developed
as under our own so-called Christian civilization, the fact must be patent to any one who has lived much,
traveled much, and thought much, that the mass of humanity is good, and therefore that the vast majority
of impulses bequeathed us by past humanity is good. Also it is certain that the more normal a social
condition, the better its humanity. Through all the past the good Kami have always managed to keep the
bad Kami from controlling the world. And with the acceptation of this truth, our future ideas of wrong
and of right must take immense expansion. Just as a heroism, or any act of pure goodness for a noble
end, must assume a preciousness heretofore unsuspected, - so a real crime must come to be regarded as a
crime less against the existing individual or society, than against the sum of human experience, and the
whole past struggle of ethical aspiration. Real goodness will, therefore, be more prized, and real crime
less leniently judged. And the early Shinto teaching, that no code of ethics is necessary, - that the right
rule of human conduct can always be known by consulting the heart, - is a teaching which will doubtless
be accepted by a more perfect humanity than that of the present.
VI
"Evolution" the reader may say, "does indeed show through its doctrine of heredity that the living are in
one sense really controlled by the dead. But it also shows that the dead are within us, not without us.
They are part of us; - there is no proof that they have any existence which is not our own. Gratitude to the
past would, therefore, be gratitude to ourselves; love of the dead would be self-love. So that your attempt
at analogy ends in the absurd."
No. Ancestor-worship in its primitive form may be a symbol only of truth. It may be an index or
foreshadowing only of the new moral duty which larger knowledge must force upon as: the duty of
reverence and obedience to the sacrificial past of human ethical experience. But it may also be much
more. The facts of heredity can never afford but half an explanation of the facts of psychology. A plant
produces ten, twenty, a hundred plants without yielding up its own life in the process. An animal gives
birth to many young, yet lives on with all its physical capacities and its small powers of thought
undiminished. Children are born; and the parents survive them. Inherited the mental life certainly is, not
less than the physical; yet the reproductive cells, the least specialized of all cells, whether in plant or in
animal, never take away, but only repeat the parental being. Continually multiplying, each conveys and
transmits the whole experience of a race; yet leaves the whole experience of the race behind it. Here is
the marvel inexplicable: the self-multiplication of physical and psychical being, - life after life thrown off
from the parent life, each to become complete and reproductive. Were all the parental life given to the
offspring, heredity might be said to favor the doctrine of materialism. But like the deities of Hindoo
legend, the Self multiplies and still remains the same, with full capacities for continued multiplication.
Shinto has its doctrine of souls multiplying by fission; but the facts of psychological emanation are
infinitely more wonderful than any theory.
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