III
Just beyond the cemetery, in a tiny patch of hedged-in land, a farmer and his ox are plowing the black soil with a plow of the Period of the Gods; and the wife helps the work with a hoe more ancient than even the Empire of Japan. All the three are toiling with a strange earnestness, as though goaded without mercy by the knowledge that labor is the price of life.
That man I have often seen before in the colored prints of another century. I have seen him in kakemono of much more ancient date. I have seen him on painted screens of still greater antiquity. Exactly the same! Other fashions beyond counting have passed: the peasant's straw hat, straw coat, and sandals of straw remain. He himself is older, incomparably older, than his attire. The earth he tills has indeed swallowed him up a thousand times a thousand times; but each time it has given back to him his life with force renewed. And with this perpetual renewal he is content: he asks no more. The mountains change their shapes; the rivers shift their courses; the stars change their places in the sky: he changes never. Yet, though unchanging, is he a maker of change. Out of the sum of his toil are wrought the ships of iron, the roads of steel, the palaces of stone; his are the hands that pay for the universities and the new learning, for the telegraphs and the electric lights and the repeating-rifles, for the machinery of science and the machinery of commerce and the machinery of war. He is the giver of all; he is given in return—the right to labor forever. Wherefore he plows the centuries under, to plant new lives of men. And he will thus toil on till the work of the world shall have been done,—till the time of the end of man.
And what will be that end? Will it be ill or well? Or must it for all of us remain a mystery insolvable?
Out of the wisdom of the West is answer given: "Man's evolution is a progress into perfection and beatitude. The goal of evolution is Equilibration. Evils will vanish, one by one, till only that which is good survive. Then shall knowledge obtain its uttermost expansion; then shall mind put forth its most wondrous blossoms; then shall cease all struggle and all bitterness of soul, and all the wrongs and all the follies of life. Men shall become as gods, in all save immortality; and each existence shall be prolonged through centuries; and all the joys of life shall be made common in many a paradise terrestrial, fairer than poet's dream. And there shall be neither riders nor ruled, neither governments nor laws; for the order of all things shall be resolved by love."
But thereafter?
"Thereafter? Oh, thereafter by reason of the persistence of Force and other cosmic laws, dissolution must come: all integration must yield to disintegration. This is the testimony of science."
Then all that may have been won, must be lost; all that shall have been wrought, utterly undone. Then all that shall have been overcome, must overcome; all that may have been suffered for good, must be suffered again for no purpose interpretable. Even as out of the Unknown was born the immeasurable pain of the Past, so into the Unknown must expire the immeasurable pain of the Future. What, therefore, the worth of our evolution? what, therefore, the meaning of life—of this phantom-flash between darknesses? Is your evolution only a passing out of absolute mystery into universal death? In the hour when that man in the hat of straw shall have crumbled back, for the last mundane time, into the clay he tills, of what avail shall have been all the labor of a million years?
"Nay!" answers the West. "There is not any universal death in such a sense. Death signifies only change. Thereafter will appear another universal life. All that assures us of dissolution, not less certainly assures us of renewal. The Cosmos, resolved into a nebula, must recondense to form another swarm of worlds. And then, perhaps, your peasant may reappear with his patient ox, to till some soil illumined by purple or violet suns." Yes, but after that resurrection? "Why, then another evolution, another equilibration, another dissolution. This is the teaching of science. This is the infinite law."
But then that resurrected life, can it be ever new? Will it not rather be infinitely old? For so surely as that which is must eternally be, so must that which will be have eternally been. As there can be no end, so there can have been no beginning; and even Time is an illusion, and there is nothing new beneath a hundred million suns. Death is not death, not a rest, not an end of pain, but the most appalling of mockeries. And out of this infinite whirl of pain you can tell us no way of escape. Have you then made us any wiser than that straw-sandaled peasant is? He knows all this. He learned, while yet a child, from the priests who taught him to write in the Buddhist temple school, something of his own innumerable births, and of the apparition and disparition of universes, and of the unity of life. That which you have mathematically discovered was known to the East long before the coming of the Buddha. How known, who may say? Perhaps there have been memories that survived the wrecks of universes. But be that as it may, your annunciation is enormously old: your methods only are new, and serve merely to confirm ancient theories of the Cosmos, and to recomplicate the complications of the everlasting Riddle.
Unto which the West makes answer:—"Not so! I have discerned the rhythm of that eternal action whereby worlds are shapen or dissipated; I have divined the Laws of Pain evolving all sentient existence, the Laws of Pain evolving thought; I have discovered and proclaimed the means by which sorrow may be lessened; I have taught the necessity of effort, and the highest duty of life. And surely the knowledge of the duty of life is the knowledge of largest worth to man."
Perhaps. But the knowledge of the necessity and of the duty, as you have proclaimed them, is a knowledge very, very much older than you. Probably that peasant knew it fifty thousand years ago, on this planet. Possibly also upon other long—vanished planets, in cycles forgotten by the gods. If this be the Omega of Western wisdom, then is he of the straw sandals our equal in knowledge, even though he be classed by the Buddha among the ignorant ones only,—they who "people the cemeteries again and again."
"He cannot know," makes answer Science; "at the very most he only believes, or thinks that he believes. Not even his wisest priests can prove. I alone have proven; I alone have given proof absolute. And I have proved for ethical renovation, though accused of proving for destruction. I have defined the uttermost impassable limit of human knowledge; but I have also established for all time the immovable foundations of that highest doubt which is wholesome, since it is the substance of hope. I have shown that even the least of human thoughts, of human acts, may have perpetual record,—making self-registration through tremulosities invisible that pass to the eternities. And I have fixed the basis of a new morality upon everlasting truth, even though I may have left of ancient creeds only their empty shell."
Creeds of the West—yes! But not of the creed of this older East. Not yet have you even measured it. What matter that this peasant cannot prove, since thus much of his belief is that which you have proved for all of us? And he holds still another belief that reaches beyond yours. He too has been taught that acts and thoughts outlive the lives of men. But he has been taught more than this. He has been taught that the thoughts and acts of each being, projected beyond the individual existence, shape other lives unborn; he has been taught to control his most secret wishes, because of their immeasurable inherent potentialities. And he has been taught all this in words as plain and thoughts as simply woven as the straw of his rain-coat. What if he cannot prove his premises? you have proved them, for him and for the world. He has only a theory of the future, indeed; but you have furnished irrefutable evidence that it is not founded upon dreams. And since all your past labors have only served to confirm a few of the beliefs stored up in his simple mind, is it any folly to presume that your future labors also may serve to prove the truth of other beliefs of his, which you have not yet taken the trouble to examine?
"For instance, that earthquakes are caused by a big fish?"
Do not sneer! Our Western notions about such things were just as crude only a few generations back. No! I mean the ancient teaching that acts and thoughts are not merely the incidents of life, but its creators. Even as it has been written, "All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts; it is made up of our thoughts."