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Page 29
This story is written in a Chinese book which the Japanese call
"Kai-ten-i-ji."
"ULTIMATE QUESTIONS"
A memory of long ago.... I am walking upon a granite pavement that
rings like iron, between buildings of granite bathed in the light of
a cloudless noon. Shadows are short and sharp: there is no stir in the
hot bright air; and the sound of my footsteps, strangely loud, is the
only sound in the street.... Suddenly an odd feeling comes to me,
with a sort of tingling shock,--a feeling, or suspicion, of universal
illusion. The pavement, the bulks of hewn stone, the iron rails,
and all things visible, are dreams! Light, color, form, weight,
solidity--all sensed existences--are but phantoms of being,
manifestations only of one infinite ghostliness for which the language
of man has not any word....
This experience had been produced by study of the first volume of
the Synthetic Philosophy, which an American friend had taught me
how to read. I did not find it easy reading; partly because I am a
slow thinker, but chiefly because my mind had never been trained to
sustained effort in such directions. To learn the "First Principles"
occupied me many months: no other volume of the series gave me equal
trouble. I would read one section at a time,--rarely two,--never
venturing upon a fresh section until I thought that I had made sure
of the preceding. Very cautious and slow my progress was, like that
of a man mounting, for the first time, a long series of ladders in
darkness. Reaching the light at last, I caught a sudden new vision of
things,--a momentary perception of the illusion of surfaces,--and from
that time the world never again appeared to me quite the same as it
had appeared before.
* * * * *
--This memory of more than twenty years ago, and the extraordinary
thrill of the moment, were recently revived for me by the reading of
the essay "Ultimate Questions," in the last and not least precious
volume bequeathed us by the world's greatest thinker. The essay
contains his final utterance about the riddle of life and death,
as that riddle presented itself to his vast mind in the dusk of a
lifetime of intellectual toil. Certainly the substance of what he had
to tell us might have been inferred from the Synthetic Philosophy;
but the particular interest of this last essay is made by the writer's
expression of personal sentiment regarding the problem that troubles
all deep thinkers. Perhaps few of us could have remained satisfied
with his purely scientific position. Even while fully accepting his
declaration of the identity of the power that "wells up in us under
the form of consciousness" with that Power Unknowable which shapes
all things, most disciples of the master must have longed for some
chance to ask him directly, "But how do _you_ feel in regard to the
prospect of personal dissolution?" And this merely emotional question
he has answered as frankly and as fully as any of us could have
desired,--perhaps even more frankly. "Old people," he remarks
apologetically, "must have many reflections in common. Doubtless
one which I have now in mind is very familiar. For years past, when
watching the unfolding buds in the spring, there has arisen the
thought, 'Shall I ever again see the buds unfold? Shall I ever again
be awakened at dawn by the song of the thrush?' Now that the end is
not likely to be long postponed, there results an increasing tendency
to meditate upon ultimate questions."... Then he tells us that these
ultimate questions--"of the How and the Why, of the Whence and the
Whither"--occupy much more space in the minds of those who cannot
accept the creed of Christendom, than the current conception fills
in the minds of the majority of men. The enormity of the problem of
existence becomes manifest only to those who have permitted themselves
to think freely and widely and deeply, with all such aids to thought
as exact science can furnish; and the larger the knowledge of the
thinker, the more pressing and tremendous the problem appears, and the
more hopelessly unanswerable. To Herbert Spencer himself it must have
assumed a vastness beyond the apprehension of the average mind; and
it weighed upon him more and more inexorably the nearer he approached
to death. He could not avoid the conviction--plainly suggested in his
magnificent Psychology and in other volumes of his great work--that
there exists no rational evidence for any belief in the continuance of
conscious personality after death:--
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