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Lafcadio Hearn - Kokoro
The great religions have recognized that heredity could not explain the whole question of self,-could not
account for the fate of the original residual self. So they have generally united in holding the inner
independent of the outer being. Science can no more fully decide the issues they have raised than it can
decide the nature of Reality-in-itself. Again we may vainly ask, What becomes of the forces which
constituted the vitality of a dead plant? Much more difficult the question, What becomes of the
sensations which formed the psychical life of a dead man?-since nobody can explain the simplest
sensation. We know only that during life certain active forces within the body of the plant or the body of
the man adjusted themselves continually to outer forces; and that after the interior forces could no longer
respond to the pressure of the exterior forces, - then the body in which the former were stored was
dissolved into the elements out of which it had been built up. We know nothing more of the ultimate
nature of those elements than we know of the ultimate nature of the tendencies which united them. But
we have more right to believe the ultimates of life persist after the dissolution of the forms they created,
than to believe they cease. The theory of spontaneous generation (misnamed, for only in a qualified sense
can the term "spontaneous" be applied to the theory of the beginnings of mundane life) is a theory which
the evolutionist must accept, and which can frighten none aware of the evidence of chemistry that matter
itself is in evolution. The real theory (not the theory of organized life beginning in bottled infusions, but
of the life primordial arising upon a planetary surface) has enormous - nay, infinite - spiritual
significance. It requires the belief that all potentialities of life and thought and emotion pass from nebula
to universe, from system to system, from star to planet or moon, and again back to cyclonic storms of
atomicity; it means that tendencies survive sunburnings, - survive all cosmic evolutions and
disintegrations. The elements are evolutionary products only; and the difference of universe from
universe must be the creation of tendencies, - of a form of heredity too vast and complex for imagination.
There is no chance. There is only law. Each fresh evolution must be influenced by previous evolutions, -
just as each individual human life is influenced by the experience of all the lives in its ancestral chain.
Must not the tendencies even of the ancestral forms of matter be inherited by the forms of matter to
come; and may not the acts and thoughts of men even now be helping to shape the character of future
worlds? No longer is it possible to say that the dreams of the Alchemists were absurdities. And no longer
can we even assert that all material phenomena are not determined, as in the thought of the ancient East,
by soul- polarities.
Whether our dead do or do not continue to dwell without us as well as within us, - a question not to be
decided in our present undeveloped state of comparative blindness, - certain it is that the testimony of
cosmic facts accords with one weird belief of Shinto: the belief that all things are determined by the
dead, - whether by ghosts of men or ghosts of worlds. Even as our personal lives are ruled by the now
viewless lives of the past, so doubtless the life of our Earth, and of the system to which it belongs, is
ruled by ghosts of spheres innumerable: dead universes, - dead suns and planets and moons, - as forms
long since dissolved into the night, but as forces immortal and eternally working.
Back to the Sun, indeed, like the Shintoist, we can trace our descent; yet we know that even there the
beginning of us was not. Infinitely more remote in time than a million sun-lives was that beginning, - if it
can truly be said there was a beginning. The teaching of Evolution is that we are one with that unknown
Ultimate, of which matter and human mind are but ever-changing manifestations. The teaching of
Evolution is also that each of us is many, yet that all of us are still one with each other and with the
cosmos; - that we must know all past humanity not only in ourselves, but likewise in the preciousness
and beauty of every fellow-life; - that we can best love ourselves in others; - that we shall best serve
ourselves in others; - that forms are but veils and phantoms; - and that to the formless Infinite alone
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