Part 5

He declares Conscience to be a geographical and chronological accident. Thus he answers the modern philosopher whose soul was overwhelmed by the marvel and the awe of two things, “the starry heaven above and the moral law within.” He makes the latter sense a development of the gregarious and social instincts; and so travellers have observed that the moral is the last step in mental progress. His Moors are the savage Dankali and other negroid tribes, who offer a cup of milk with one hand and stab with the other. He translates literally the Indian word Hâthî (an elephant), the animal with the Hâth (hand, or trunk). Finally he alludes to the age of active volcanoes, the present, which is merely temporary, the shifting of the Pole, and the spectacle to be seen from Mushtari, or the planet Jupiter.

The Hâjî again asks the old, old question, What is Truth? And he answers himself, after the fashion of the wise Emperor of China, “Truth hath not an unchanging name.” A modern English writer says: “I have long been convinced by the experience of my life, as a pioneer of various heterodoxies, which are rapidly becoming orthodoxies, that nearly all truth is temperamental to us, or given in the affections and intuitions; and that discussion and inquiry do little more than feed temperament.” Our poet seems to mean that the Perceptions, when they perceive truly, convey objective truth, which is universal; whereas the Reflectives and the Sentiments, the working of the moral region, or the middle lobe of the phrenologists, supplies only subjective truth, personal and individual. Thus to one man the axiom, _Opes irritamenta malorum_, represents a distinct fact; while another holds wealth to be an incentive for good. Evidently both are right, according to their lights.

Hâjî Abdû cites Plato and Aristotle, as usual with Eastern songsters, who delight in Mantik (logic). Here he appears to mean that a false proposition is as real a proposition as one that is true. “Faith moves mountains” and “Manet immota fides” are evidently quotations. He derides the teaching of the “First Council of the Vatican” (cap. v.), “all the faithful are little children listening to the voice of Saint Peter,” who is the “Prince of the Apostles.” He glances at the fancy of certain modern physicists, “devotion is a definite molecular change in the convolution of grey pulp.” He notices with contumely the riddle of which Milton speaks so glibly, where the Dialoguists,

—reasoned high Of providence, foreknowledge, will and fate, Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute.

In opposition to the orthodox Mohammedan tenets which make Man’s soul his percipient Ego, an entity, a unity, the Soofi considers it a fancy, opposed to body, which is a fact; at most a state of things, not a thing; a consensus of faculties whereof our frames are but the phenomena. This is not contrary to Genesitic legend. The Hebrew Ruach and Arabic Ruh, now perverted to mean soul or spirit, simply signify wind or breath, the outward and visible sign of life. Their later schools are even more explicit. “For that which befalls man befalls beasts; as the one dies, so does the other; they have all one death; all go unto one place” (Eccles. iii. 19). But the modern soul, a nothing, a string of negations, a negative in chief, is thus described in the Mahâbhârat: “It is indivisible, inconceivable, inconceptible: it is eternal, universal, permanent, immovable: it is invisible and unalterable.” Hence the modern spiritualism which, rejecting materialism, can use only material language.

These, says the Hâjî, are mere sounds. He would not assert “Verba gignunt verba,” but “Verba gignunt res,” a step further. The idea is Bacon’s “idola fori, omnium molestissima,” the twofold illusions of language; either the names of things that have no existence in fact, or the names of things whose idea is confused and ill-defined.

He derives the Soul-idea from the “savage ghost” which Dr. Johnson defined to be a “kind of shadowy being.” He justly remarks that it arose (perhaps) in Egypt; and was not invented by the “People of the Book.” By this term Moslems denote Jews and Christians who have a recognized revelation, while their ignorance refuses it to Guebres, Hindus, and Confucians.

He evidently holds to the doctrine of progress. With him protoplasm is the Yliastron, the Prima Materies. Our word matter is derived from the Sanskrit {Sanskrit} (mâtrâ), which, however, signifies properly the invisible type of visible matter; in modern language, the substance distinct from the sum of its physical and chemical properties. Thus, Mâtrâ exists only in thought, and is not recognizable by the action of the five senses. His “Chain of Being” reminds us of Prof. Huxley’s Pedigree of the Horse, Orohippus, Mesohippus, Meiohippus, Protohippus, Pleiohippus, and Equus. He has evidently heard of modern biology, or Hylozoism, which holds its quarter-million species of living beings, animal and vegetable, to be progressive modifications of one great fundamental unity, an unity of so-called “mental faculties” as well as of bodily structure. And this is the jelly-speck. He scoffs at the popular idea that man is the great central figure round which all things gyrate like marionettes; in fact, the anthropocentric era of Draper, which, strange to say, lives by the side of the telescope and the microscope. As man is of recent origin, and may end at an early epoch of the macrocosm, so before his birth all things revolved round nothing, and may continue to do so after his death.

The Hâjî, who elsewhere denounces “compound ignorance,” holds that all evil comes from error; and that all knowledge has been developed by overthrowing error, the ordinary channel of human thought. He ends this section with a great truth. There are things which human Reason or Instinct matured, in its undeveloped state, cannot master; but Reason is a Law to itself. Therefore we are not bound to believe, or to attempt belief in, any thing which is contrary or contradictory to Reason. Here he is diametrically opposed to Rome, who says, “Do not appeal to History; that is private judgment. Do not appeal to Holy Writ; that is heresy. Do not appeal to Reason; that is Rationalism.”

He holds with the Patriarchs of Hebrew Holy Writ, that the present life is all-sufficient for an intellectual (not a sentimental) being; and, therefore, that there is no want of a Heaven or a Hell. With far more contradiction the Western poet sings:—

Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed In one self-place; but when we are in hell, And where hell is there must we ever be, And, to be short, when all this world dissolves, And every creature shall be purified, All places shall be hell which are not heaven.

For what want is there of a Hell when all are pure? He enlarges upon the ancient Buddhist theory, that Happiness and Misery are equally distributed among men and beasts; some enjoy much and suffer much; others the reverse. Hence Diderot declares, “Sober passions produce only the commonplace . . . the man of moderate passion lives and dies like a brute.” And again we have the half truth:—

That the mark of rank in nature Is capacity for pain.

The latter implies an equal capacity for pleasure, and thus the balance is kept.

Hâjî Abdû then proceeds to show that Faith is an accident of birth. One of his omitted distichs says:—

Race makes religion; true! but aye upon the Maker acts the made, A finite God, and infinite sin, in lieu of raising man, degrade.

In a manner of dialogue he introduces the various races each fighting to establish its own belief. The Frank (Christian) abuses the Hindu, who retorts that he is of Mlenchha, mixed or impure, blood, a term applied to all non-Hindus. The same is done by Nazarene and Mohammedan; by the Confucian, who believes in nothing, and by the Soofi, who naturally has the last word. The association of the Virgin Mary and St. Joseph with the Trinity, in the Roman and Greek Churches, makes many Moslems conclude that Christians believe not in three but in five Persons. So an Englishman writes of the early Fathers, “They not only said that 3 = 1, and that 1 = 3: they professed to explain how that curious arithmetical combination had been brought about. The Indivisible had been divided, and yet was not divided: it was divisible, and yet it was indivisible; black was white and white was black; and yet there were not two colours but one colour; and whoever did not believe it would be damned.” The Arab quotation runs in the original:—

_Ahsanu ’l-Makâni l’ il-Fat⠒l-Jehannamu_ The best of places for (the generous) youth is Gehenna.

Gehenna, alias Jahim, being the fiery place of eternal punishment. And the second saying, _Al- nâr wa l⠒l-’Ar_—“Fire (of Hell) rather than Shame,”—is equally condemned by the Koranist. The Gustâkhi (insolence) of Fate is the expression of Umar-i-Khayyam (St. xxx):—

What, without asking hither hurried _whence?_ And, without asking _whither_ hurried hence! Oh many a cup of this forbidden wine Must drown the memory of that insolence.

Soofistically, the word means “the coquetry of the beloved one,” the divinæ particula auræ. And the section ends with Pope’s:—

He can’t be wrong whose life is in the right.

CONCLUSION

Here the Hâjî ends his practical study of mankind. The image of Destiny playing with men as pieces is a view common amongst Easterns. His idea of wisdom is once more Pope’s:—

And all our knowledge is ourselves to know. (Essay IV. 398.)

Regret, _i.e._, repentance, was one of the forty-two deadly sins of the Ancient Egyptians. “Thou shalt not consume thy heart,” says the Ritual of the Dead, the negative justification of the soul or ghost (Lepsius “Alteste Texte des Todtenbuchs”). We have borrowed competitive examination from the Chinese; and, in these morbid days of weak introspection and retrospection, we might learn wisdom from the sturdy old Khemites. When he sings “Abjure the Why and seek the How,” he refers to the old Scholastic difference of the _Demonstratio propter quid_ (why is a thing?), as opposed to _Demonstratio quia_ (_i.e._ that a thing is). The “great Man” shall end with becoming deathless, as Shakespeare says in his noble sonnet:—

And Death once dead, there’s no more dying then!

Like the great Pagans, the Hâjî holds that man was born good, while the Christian, “tormented by the things divine,” cleaves to the comforting doctrine of innate sinfulness. Hence the universal tenet, that man should do good in order to gain by it here or hereafter; the “enlightened selfishness,” that says, Act well and get compound interest in a future state. The allusion to the “Theist-word” apparently means that the votaries of a personal Deity must believe in the absolute foreknowledge of the Omniscient in particulars as in generals. The Rule of Law emancipates man; and its exceptions are the gaps left by his ignorance. The wail over the fallen flower, etc., reminds us of the Pulambal (Lamentations) of the Anti-Brahminical writer, “Pathira-Giriyâr.” The allusion to Mâyâ is from Dâs Kabîr:—

Mâyâ mare, na man mare, mar mar gayâ, sarîr. Illusion dies, the mind dies not though dead and gone the flesh.

Nirwâna, I have said, is partial extinction by being merged in the Supreme, not to be confounded with Pari-nirwâna or absolute annihilation. In the former also, dying gives birth to a new being, the embodiment of _karma_ (deeds), good and evil, done in the countless ages of transmigration.

Here ends my share of the work. On the whole it has been considerable. I have omitted, as has been seen, sundry stanzas, and I have changed the order of others. The text has nowhere been translated verbatim; in fact, a familiar European turn has been given to many sentiments which were judged too Oriental. As the metre adopted by Hâjî Abdû was the Bahr Tawîl (long verse), I thought it advisable to preserve that peculiarity, and to fringe it with the rough, unobtrusive rhyme of the original.

Vive, valeque!