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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi
+by Richard F. Burton
+(#21 in our series by Richard F. Burton)
+
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+Title: The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi
+
+Author: Richard F. Burton
+
+Release Date: July, 2004  [EBook #6036]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on October 23, 2002]
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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE KASIDAH OF HAJI ABDU EL-YEZDI ***
+
+
+
+
+This eBook was prepared by Robert Sinton from a source supplied by the
+Sacred Texts Web site, http://www.sacred-texts.com, thanks to John B. Hare.
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+
+
+THE KASÎDAH OF HÂJÎ ABDÛ EL-YEZDÎ
+
+TRANSLATED AND ANNOTATED BY HS FRIEND AND PUPIL, F.B.
+
+
+
+TO THE READER
+
+
+The Translator has ventured to entitle a “Lay of the Higher Law”
+the following composition, which aims at being in advance of its
+time; and he has not feared the danger of collision with such
+unpleasant forms as the “Higher Culture.” The principles which
+justify the name are as follows:—
+
+The Author asserts that Happiness and Misery are equally divided
+and distributed in the world.
+
+He makes Self-cultivation, with due regard to others, the sole
+and sufficient object of human life.
+
+He suggests that the affections, the sympathies, and the “divine
+gift of Pity” are man’s highest enjoyments.
+
+He advocates suspension of judgment, with a proper suspicion of
+“Facts, the idlest of superstitions.”
+
+Finally, although destructive to appearance, he is essentially
+reconstructive.
+
+For other details concerning the Poem and the Poet, the curious
+reader is referred to the end of the volume.
+
+F. B.
+
+Vienna, Nov., 1880.
+
+
+
+THE KASÎDAH
+
+
+I
+
+
+The hour is nigh; the waning Queen
+   walks forth to rule the later night;
+Crown’d with the sparkle of a Star,
+   and throned on orb of ashen light:
+
+The Wolf-tail* sweeps the paling East
+   to leave a deeper gloom behind,
+And Dawn uprears her shining head,
+   sighing with semblance of a wind:
+
+   * The false dawn.
+
+The highlands catch yon Orient gleam,
+   while purpling still the lowlands lie;
+And pearly mists, the morning-pride,
+   soar incense-like to greet the sky.
+
+The horses neigh, the camels groan,
+   the torches gleam, the cressets flare;
+The town of canvas falls, and man
+   with din and dint invadeth air:
+
+The Golden Gates swing right and left;
+   up springs the Sun with flamy brow;
+The dew-cloud melts in gush of light;
+   brown Earth is bathed in morning-glow.
+
+Slowly they wind athwart the wild,
+   and while young Day his anthem swells,
+Sad falls upon my yearning ear
+   the tinkling of the Camel-bells:
+
+O’er fiery wastes and frozen wold,
+   o’er horrid hill and gloomy glen,
+The home of grisly beast and Ghoul,*
+   the haunts of wilder, grislier men;—
+
+   * The Demon of the Desert.
+
+With the brief gladness of the Palms,
+   that tower and sway o’er seething plain,
+Fraught with the thoughts of rustling shade,
+   and welling spring, and rushing rain;
+
+With the short solace of the ridge,
+   by gentle zephyrs played upon,
+Whose breezy head and bosky side
+   front seas of cooly celadon;—
+
+’Tis theirs to pass with joy and hope,
+   whose souls shall ever thrill and fill
+Dreams of the Birthplace and the Tomb,
+   visions of Allah’s Holy Hill.*
+
+   * Arafât, near Mecca.
+
+But we? Another shift of scene,
+   another pang to rack the heart;
+Why meet we on the bridge of Time
+   to ’change one greeting and to part?
+
+We meet to part; yet asks my sprite,
+   Part we to meet? Ah! is it so?
+Man’s fancy-made Omniscience knows,
+   who made Omniscience nought can know.
+
+Why must we meet, why must we part,
+   why must we bear this yoke of MUST,
+Without our leave or askt or given,
+   by tyrant Fate on victim thrust?
+
+That Eve so gay, so bright, so glad,
+   this Morn so dim, and sad, and grey;
+Strange that life’s Registrar should write
+   this day a day, that day a day!
+
+Mine eyes, my brain, my heart, are sad,—
+   sad is the very core of me;
+All wearies, changes, passes, ends;
+   alas! the Birthday’s injury!
+
+Friends of my youth, a last adieu!
+   haply some day we meet again;
+Yet ne’er the self-same men shall meet;
+   the years shall make us other men:
+
+The light of morn has grown to noon,
+   has paled with eve, and now farewell!
+Go, vanish from my Life as dies
+   the tinkling of the Camel’s bell.
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+In these drear wastes of sea-born land,
+   these wilds where none may dwell but He,
+What visionary Pasts revive,
+   what process of the Years we see:
+
+Gazing beyond the thin blue line
+   that rims the far horizon-ring,
+Our sadden’d sight why haunt these ghosts,
+   whence do these spectral shadows spring?
+
+What endless questions vex the thought,
+   of Whence and Whither, When and How?
+What fond and foolish strife to read
+   the Scripture writ on human brow;
+
+As stand we percht on point of Time,
+   betwixt the two Eternities,
+Whose awful secrets gathering round
+   with black profound oppress our eyes.
+
+“This gloomy night, these grisly waves,
+   these winds and whirlpools loud and dread:
+What reck they of our wretched plight
+   who Safety’s shore so lightly tread?”
+
+Thus quoth the Bard of Love and Wine,*
+   whose dream of Heaven ne’er could rise
+Beyond the brimming Kausar-cup
+   and Houris with the white-black eyes;
+
+   * Hâfiz of Shirâz.
+
+Ah me! my race of threescore years
+   is short, but long enough to pall
+My sense with joyless joys as these,
+   with Love and Houris, Wine and all.
+
+Another boasts he would divorce
+   old barren Reason from his bed,
+And wed the Vine-maid in her stead;—
+   fools who believe a word he said!*
+
+   * Omar-i-Kayyâm, the tent-maker poet of Persia.
+
+And “‘Dust thou art to dust returning.’
+   ne’er was spoke of human soul”
+The Soofi cries, ’tis well for him
+   that hath such gift to ask its goal.
+
+“And this is all, for this we’re born
+   to weep a little and to die!”
+So sings the shallow bard whose life
+   still labours at the letter “I.”
+
+“Ear never heard, Eye never saw
+   the bliss of those who enter in
+My heavenly kingdom,” Isâ said,
+   who wailed our sorrows and our sin:
+
+Too much of words or yet too few!
+   What to thy Godhead easier than
+One little glimpse of Paradise
+   to ope the eyes and ears of man?
+
+“I am the Truth! I am the Truth!”
+   we hear the God-drunk gnostic cry
+“The microcosm abides in ME;
+   Eternal Allah’s nought but I!”
+
+Mansûr* was wise, but wiser they
+   who smote him with the hurlèd stones;
+And, though his blood a witness bore,
+   no wisdom-might could mend his bones.
+
+   * A famous Mystic stoned for blasphemy.
+
+“Eat, drink, and sport; the rest of life’s
+   not worth a fillip,” quoth the King;
+Methinks the saying saith too much:
+   the swine would say the selfsame thing!
+
+Two-footed beasts that browse through life,
+   by Death to serve as soil design’d,
+Bow prone to Earth whereof they be,
+   and there the proper pleasures find:
+
+But you of finer, nobler, stuff,
+   ye, whom to Higher leads the High,
+What binds your hearts in common bond
+   with creatures of the stall and sty?
+
+“In certain hope of Life-to-come
+   I journey through this shifting scene”
+The Zâhid* snarls and saunters down
+   his Vale of Tears with confi’dent mien.
+
+   * The “Philister” of “respectable” belief.
+
+Wiser than Amrân’s Son* art thou,
+   who ken’st so well the world-to-be,
+The Future when the Past is not,
+   the Present merest dreamery;
+
+   * Moses in the Koran.
+
+What know’st thou, man, of Life? and yet,
+   forever twixt the womb, the grave,
+Thou pratest of the Coming Life,
+   of Heav’n and Hell thou fain must rave.
+
+The world is old and thou art young;
+   the world is large and thou art small;
+Cease, atom of a moment’s span,
+   To hold thyself an All-in-All!
+
+
+
+III.
+
+
+Fie, fie! you visionary things,
+   ye motes that dance in sunny glow,
+Who base and build Eternities
+   on briefest moment here below;
+
+Who pass through Life liked cagèd birds,
+   the captives of a despot will;
+Still wond’ring How and When and Why,
+   and Whence and Whither, wond’ring still;
+
+Still wond’ring how the Marvel came
+   because two coupling mammals chose
+To slake the thirst of fleshly love,
+   and thus the “Immortal Being” rose;
+
+Wond’ring the Babe with staring eyes,
+   perforce compel’d from night to day,
+Gript in the giant grasp of Life
+   like gale-born dust or wind-wrung spray;
+
+Who comes imbecile to the world
+   ’mid double danger, groans, and tears;
+The toy, the sport, the waif and stray
+   of passions, error, wrath and fears;
+
+Who knows not Whence he came nor Why,
+   who kens not Whither bound and When,
+Yet such is Allah’s choicest gift,
+   the blessing dreamt by foolish men;
+
+Who step by step perforce returns
+   to couthless youth, wan, white and cold,
+Lisping again his broken words
+   till all the tale be fully told:
+
+Wond’ring the Babe with quenchèd orbs,
+   an oldster bow’d by burthening years,
+How ’scaped the skiff an hundred storms;
+   how ’scaped the thread a thousand shears;
+
+How coming to the Feast unbid,
+   he found the gorgeous table spread
+With the fair-seeming Sodom-fruit,
+   with stones that bear the shape of bread:
+
+How Life was nought but ray of sun
+   that clove the darkness thick and blind,
+The ravings of the reckless storm,
+   the shrieking of the rav’ening wind;
+
+How lovely visions ’guiled his sleep,
+   aye fading with the break of morn,
+Till every sweet became a sour,
+   till every rose became a thorn;
+
+Till dust and ashes met his eyes
+   wherever turned their saddened gaze;
+The wrecks of joys and hopes and loves,
+   the rubbish of his wasted days;
+
+How every high heroic Thought
+   that longed to breathe empyrean air,
+Failed of its feathers, fell to earth,
+   and perisht of a sheer despair;
+
+How, dower’d with heritage of brain,
+   whose might has split the solar ray,
+His rest is grossest coarsest earth,
+   a crown of gold on brow of clay;
+
+This House whose frame be flesh and bone,
+   mortar’d with blood and faced with skin,
+The home of sickness, dolours, age;
+   unclean without, impure within:
+
+Sans ray to cheer its inner gloom,
+   the chambers haunted by the Ghost,
+Darkness his name, a cold dumb Shade
+   stronger than all the heav’nly host.
+
+This tube, an enigmatic pipe,
+   whose end was laid before begun,
+That lengthens, broadens, shrinks and breaks;
+   —puzzle, machine, automaton;
+
+The first of Pots the Potter made
+   by Chrysorrhoas’ blue-green wave;*
+Methinks I see him smile to see
+   what guerdon to the world he gave!
+
+   * The Abana, River of Damascus.
+
+How Life is dim, unreal, vain,
+   like scenes that round the drunkard reel;
+How “Being” meaneth not to be;
+   to see and hear, smell, taste and feel.
+
+A drop in Ocean’s boundless tide,
+   unfathom’d waste of agony;
+Where millions live their horrid lives
+   by making other millions die.
+
+How with a heart that would through love
+   to Universal Love aspire,
+Man woos infernal chance to smite,
+   as Min’arets draw the Thunder-fire.
+
+How Earth on Earth builds tow’er and wall,
+   to crumble at a touch of Time;
+How Earth on Earth from Shînar-plain
+   the heights of Heaven fain would climb.
+
+How short this Life, how long withal;
+   how false its weal, how true its woes,
+This fever-fit with paroxysms
+   to mark its opening and its close.
+
+Ah! gay the day with shine of sun,
+   and bright the breeze, and blithe the throng
+Met on the River-bank to play,
+   when I was young, when I was young:
+
+Such general joy could never fade;
+   and yet the chilling whisper came
+One face had paled, one form had failed;
+   had fled the bank, had swum the stream;
+
+Still revellers danced, and sang, and trod
+   the hither bank of Time’s deep tide,
+Still one by one they left and fared
+   to the far misty thither side;
+
+And now the last hath slipt away
+   yon drear Death-desert to explore,
+And now one Pilgrim worn and lorn
+   still lingers on the lonely shore.
+
+Yes, Life in youth-tide standeth still;
+   in manhood streameth soft and slow;
+See, as it nears the ’abysmal goal
+   how fleet the waters flash and flow!
+
+And Deaths are twain; the Deaths we see
+   drop like the leaves in windy Fall;
+But ours, our own, are ruined worlds,
+   a globe collapst, last end of all.
+
+We live our lives with rogues and fools,
+   dead and alive, alive and dead,
+We die ’twixt one who feels the pulse
+   and one who frets and clouds the head:
+
+And,—oh, the Pity!—hardly conned
+   the lesson comes its fatal term;
+Fate bids us bundle up our books,
+   and bear them bod’ily to the worm:
+
+Hardly we learn to wield the blade
+   before the wrist grows stiff and old;
+Hardly we learn to ply the pen
+   ere Thought and Fancy faint with cold.
+
+Hardly we find the path of love,
+   to sink the self, forget the “I,”
+When sad suspicion grips the heart,
+   when Man, _the_ Man begins to die:
+
+Hardly we scale the wisdom-heights,
+   and sight the Pisgah-scene around,
+And breathe the breath of heav’enly air,
+   and hear the Spheres’ harmonious sound;
+
+When swift the Camel-rider spans
+   the howling waste, by Kismet sped,
+And of his Magic Wand a wave
+   hurries the quick to join the dead.*
+
+   * Death in Arabia rides a Camel, not a pale horse.
+
+How sore the burden, strange the strife;
+   how full of splendour, wonder, fear;
+Life, atom of that Infinite Space
+   that stretcheth ’twixt the Here and There.
+
+How Thought is imp’otent to divine
+   the secret which the gods defend,
+The Why of birth and life and death,
+   that Isis-veil no hand may rend.
+
+Eternal Morrows make our Day;
+   our _Is_ is aye _to be_ till when
+Night closes in; ’tis all a dream,
+   and yet we die,—and then and THEN?
+
+And still the Weaver plies his loom,
+   whose warp and woof is wretched Man
+Weaving th’ unpattern’d dark design,
+   so dark we doubt it owns a plan.
+
+Dost not, O Maker, blush to hear,
+   amid the storm of tears and blood,
+Man say Thy mercy made what is,
+   and saw the made and said ’twas good?
+
+The marvel is that man can smile
+   dreaming his ghostly ghastly dream;-
+Better the heedless atomy
+   that buzzes in the morning beam!
+
+O the dread pathos of our lives!
+   how durst thou, Allah, thus to play
+With Love, Affection, Friendship, all
+   that shows the god in mortal clay?
+
+But ah! what ’vaileth man to mourn;
+   shall tears bring forth what smiles ne’er brought;
+Shall brooding breed a thought of joy?
+   Ah hush the sigh, forget the thought!
+
+Silence thine immemorial quest,
+   contain thy nature’s vain complaint
+None heeds, none cares for thee or thine;—
+   like thee how many came and went?
+
+Cease, Man, to mourn, to weep, to wail;
+   enjoy thy shining hour of sun;
+We dance along Death’s icy brink,
+   but is the dance less full of fun?
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+What Truths hath gleaned that Sage consumed
+   by many a moon that waxt and waned?
+What Prophet-strain be his to sing?
+   What hath his old Experience gained?
+
+There is no God, no man-made God;
+   a bigger, stronger, crueller man;
+Black phantom of our baby-fears,
+   ere Thought, the life of Life, began.
+
+Right quoth the Hindu Prince of old,*
+   “An Ishwara for one I nill,
+Th’ almighty everlasting Good
+   who cannot ’bate th’ Eternal Ill:”
+
+   * Buddha.
+
+“Your gods may be, what shows they are?”
+   hear China’s Perfect Sage declare;*
+“And being, what to us be they
+   who dwell so darkly and so far?”
+
+   * Confucius.
+
+“All matter hath a birth and death;
+   ’tis made, unmade and made anew;
+“We choose to call the Maker ‘God’:—
+   such is the Zâhid’s owly view.
+
+“You changeful finite Creatures strain”
+   (rejoins the Drawer of the Wine)*
+“The dizzy depths of Inf’inite Power
+   to fathom with your foot of twine”;
+
+   * The Soofi or Gnostic opposed to the Zâhid.
+
+“Poor idols of man’s heart and head
+   with the Divine Idea to blend;
+“To preach as ‘Nature’s Common Course’
+   what any hour may shift or end.”
+
+“How shall the Shown pretend to ken
+   aught of the Showman or the Show?
+“Why meanly bargain to believe,
+   which only means thou ne’er canst know?
+
+“How may the passing Now contain
+   the standing Now—Eternity?—
+“An endless _is_ without a _was_,
+   the _be_ and never the _to-be?_
+
+“Who made your Maker? If Self-made,
+   why fare so far to fare the worse
+“Sufficeth not a world of worlds,
+   a self-made chain of universe?
+
+“Grant an Idea, Primal Cause,
+   the Causing Cause, why crave for more?
+“Why strive its depth and breadth to mete,
+   to trace its work, its aid to ’implore?
+
+“Unknown, Incomprehensible,
+   whate’er you choose to call it, call;
+“But leave it vague as airy space,
+   dark in its darkness mystical.
+
+“Your childish fears would seek a Sire,
+   by the non-human God defin’d,
+“What your five wits may wot ye weet;
+   what _is_ you please to dub ‘design’d;’
+
+“You bring down Heav’en to vulgar Earth;
+   your maker like yourselves you make,
+“You quake to own a reign of Law,
+   you pray the Law its laws to break;
+
+“You pray, but hath your thought e’er weighed
+   how empty vain the prayer must be,
+“That begs a boon already giv’en,
+   or craves a change of law to see?
+
+“Say, Man, deep learnèd in the Scheme
+   that orders mysteries sublime,
+“How came it this was Jesus, that
+   was Judas from the birth of Time?
+
+“How I the tiger, thou the lamb;
+   again the Secret, prithee, show
+“Who slew the slain, bowman or bolt
+   or Fate that drave the man, the bow?
+
+“Man worships self: his God is Man;
+   the struggling of the mortal mind
+“To form its model as ’twould be,
+   the perfect of itself to find.
+
+“The God became sage, priest and scribe
+   where Nilus’ serpent made the vale;
+“A gloomy Brahm in glowing Ind,
+   a neutral something cold and pale:
+
+“Amid the high Chaldean hills
+   a moulder of the heavenly spheres;
+“On Guebre steppes the Timeless-God
+   who governs by his dual peers:
+
+“In Hebrew tents the Lord that led
+   His leprous slaves to fight and jar;
+“Yahveh,* Adon or Elohîm,
+   the God that smites, the Man of War.
+
+   * Jehovah.
+
+“The lovely Gods of lib’ertine Greece,
+   those fair and frail humanities
+“Whose homes o’erlook’d the Middle Sea,
+   where all Earth’s beauty cradled lies,
+
+“Ne’er left its blessèd bounds, nor sought
+   the barb’arous climes of barb’arous gods
+“Where Odin of the dreary North
+   o’er hog and sickly mead-cup nods:
+
+“And when, at length, ‘Great Pan is dead’
+   uprose the loud and dol’orous cry
+“A glamour wither’d on the ground,
+   a splendour faded in the sky.
+
+“Yea, Pan was dead, the Nazar’ene came
+   and seized his seat beneath the sun,
+“The votary of the Riddle-god,
+   whose one is three and three is one;
+
+“Whose sadd’ening creed of herited Sin
+   spilt o’er the world its cold grey spell;
+“In every vista showed a grave,
+   and ’neath the grave the glare of Hell;
+
+“Till all Life’s Po’esy sinks to prose;
+   romance to dull Real’ity fades;
+“Earth’s flush of gladness pales in gloom
+   and God again to man degrades.
+
+“Then the lank Arab foul with sweat,
+   the drainer of the camel’s dug,
+“Gorged with his leek-green lizard’s meat,
+   clad in his filthy rag and rug,
+
+“Bore his fierce Allah o’er his sands
+   and broke, like lava-burst upon
+“The realms where reigned pre-Adamite Kings,
+   where rose the Grand Kayânian throne.*
+
+   * Kayâni—of the race of Cyrus; old Guebre heroes.
+
+“Who now of ancient Kayomurs,
+   of Zâl or Rustam cares to sing,
+“Whelmed by the tempest of the tribes
+   that called the Camel-driver King?
+
+“Where are the crown of Kay Khusraw,
+   the sceptre of Anûshirwân,
+“The holy grail of high Jamshîd,
+   Afrâsiyab’s hall?—Canst tell me, man?
+
+“Gone, gone, where I and thou must go,
+   borne by the winnowing wings of Death,
+“The Horror brooding over life,
+   and nearer brought with every breath:
+
+“Their fame hath filled the Seven Climes,
+   they rose and reigned, they fought and fell,
+“As swells and swoons across the wold
+   the tinkling of the Camel’s bell.”
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+There is no Good, there is no Bad;
+   these be the whims of mortal will:
+What works me weal that call I ‘good,’
+   what harms and hurts I hold as ‘ill:’
+
+They change with place, they shift with race;
+   and, in the veriest span of Time,
+Each Vice has worn a Virtue’s crown;
+   all Good was banned as Sin or Crime:
+
+Like ravelled skeins they cross and twine,
+   while this with that connects and blends;
+And only Khizr* his eye shall see
+   where one begins, where other ends:
+
+   * Supposed to be the Prophet Elijah.
+
+What mortal shall consort with Khizr,
+   when Musâ turned in fear to flee?
+What man foresees the flow’er or fruit
+   whom Fate compels to plant the tree?
+
+For Man’s Free-will immortal Law,
+   Anagkê, Kismet, Des’tiny read
+That was, that is, that aye shall be,
+   Star, Fortune, Fate, Urd, Norn or Need.
+
+“Man’s nat’ural state is God’s design;”
+   such is the silly sage’s theme;
+“Man’s primal Age was Age of Gold;”
+   such is the Poet’s waking dream:
+
+Delusion, Ign’orance! Long ere Man
+   drew upon Earth his earliest breath
+The world was one contin’uous scene
+   of anguish, torture, prey and Death;
+
+Where hideous Theria of the wild
+   rended their fellows limb by limb;
+Where horrid Saurians of the sea
+   in waves of blood were wont to swim:
+
+The “fair young Earth” was only fit
+   to spawn her frightful monster-brood;
+Now fiery hot, now icy frore,
+   now reeking wet with steamy flood.
+
+Yon glorious Sun, the greater light,
+   the “Bridegroom” of the royal Lyre,
+A flaming, boiling, bursting mine;
+   a grim black orb of whirling fire:
+
+That gentle Moon, the lesser light,
+   the Lover’s lamp, the Swain’s delight,
+A ruined world, a globe burnt out,
+   a corpse upon the road of night.
+
+What reckt he, say, of Good or Ill
+   who in the hill-hole made his lair,
+The blood-fed rav’ening Beast of prey,
+   wilder than wildest wolf or bear?
+
+How long in Man’s pre-Ad’amite days
+   to feed and swill, to sleep and breed,
+Were the Brute-biped’s only life,
+   a perfect life sans Code or Creed?
+
+His choicest garb a shaggy fell,
+   his choicest tool a flake of stone;
+His best of orn’aments tattoo’d skin
+   and holes to hang his bits of bone;
+
+Who fought for female as for food
+   when Mays awoke to warm desire;
+And such the Lust that grew to Love
+   when Fancy lent a purer fire.
+
+Where then “Th’ Eternal nature-law
+   by God engraved on human heart?”
+Behold his simiad sconce and own
+   the Thing could play no higher part.
+
+Yet, as long ages rolled, he learnt
+   from Beaver, Ape and Ant to build
+Shelter for sire and dam and brood,
+   from blast and blaze that hurt and killed;
+
+And last came Fire; when scrap of stone
+   cast on the flame that lit his den,
+Gave out the shining ore, and made
+   the Lord of beasts a Lord of men.
+
+The “moral sense,” your Zâhid-phrase,
+   is but the gift of latest years;
+Conscience was born when man had shed
+   his fur, his tail, his pointed ears.
+
+What conscience has the murd’erous Moor,
+   who slays his guest with felon blow,
+Save sorrow he can slay no more,
+   what prick of pen’itence can he know?
+
+You cry the “Cruelty of Things”
+   is myst’ery to your purblind eye,
+Which fixed upon a point in space
+   the general project passes by:
+
+For see! the Mammoth went his ways,
+   became a mem’ory and a name;
+While the half-reasoner with the hand*
+   survives his rank and place to claim.
+
+   * The Elephant.
+
+Earthquake and plague, storm, fight and fray,
+   portents and curses man must deem
+Since he regards his self alone,
+   nor cares to trace the scope, the scheme;
+
+The Quake that comes in eyelid’s beat
+   to ruin, level, ’gulf and kill,
+Builds up a world for better use,
+   to general Good bends special Ill:
+
+The dreadest sound man’s ear can hear,
+   the war and rush of stormy Wind
+Depures the stuff of human life,
+   breeds health and strength for humankind:
+
+What call ye them or Goods or Ills,
+   ill-goods, good-ills, a loss, a gain,
+When realms arise and falls a roof;
+   a world is won, a man is slain?
+
+And thus the race of Being runs,
+   till haply in the time to be
+Earth shifts her pole and Mushtari*-men
+   another falling star shall see:
+
+   * The Planet Jupiter.
+
+Shall see it fall and fade from sight,
+   whence come, where gone no Thought can tell,—
+Drink of yon mirage-stream and chase
+   the tinkling of the camel-bell!
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+All Faith is false, all Faith is true:
+   Truth is the shattered mirror strown
+In myriad bits; while each believes
+   his little bit the whole to own.
+
+What is the Truth? was askt of yore.
+   Reply all object Truth is one
+As twain of halves aye makes a whole;
+   the moral Truth for all is none.
+
+Ye scantly-learned Zâhids learn
+   from Aflatûn and Aristû,*
+While Truth is real like your good:
+   th’ Untrue, like ill, is real too;
+
+   * Plato and Aristotle.
+
+As palace mirror’d in the stream,
+   as vapour mingled with the skies,
+So weaves the brain of mortal man
+   the tangled web of Truth and Lies.
+
+What see we here? Forms, nothing more!
+   Forms fill the brightest, strongest eye,
+We know not substance; ’mid the shades
+   shadows ourselves we live and die.
+
+“Faith mountains move” I hear: I see
+   the practice of the world unheed
+The foolish vaunt, the blatant boast
+   that serves our vanity to feed.
+
+“Faith stands unmoved”; and why? Because
+   man’s silly fancies still remain,
+And will remain till wiser man
+   the day-dreams of his youth disdain.
+
+“’Tis blessèd to believe”; you say:
+   The saying may be true enow
+And it can add to Life a light:—
+   only remains to show us how.
+
+E’en if I could I nould believe
+   your tales and fables stale and trite,
+Irksome as twice-sung tune that tires
+   the dullèd ear of drowsy wight.
+
+With God’s foreknowledge man’s free will!
+   what monster-growth of human brain,
+What powers of light shall ever pierce
+   this puzzle dense with words inane?
+
+Vainly the heart on Providence calls,
+   such aid to seek were hardly wise
+For man must own the pitiless Law
+   that sways the globe and sevenfold skies.
+
+“Be ye Good Boys, go seek for Heav’en,
+   come pay the priest that holds the key;”
+So spake, and speaks, and aye shall speak
+   the last to enter Heaven,—he.
+
+Are these the words for men to hear?
+   yet such the Church’s general tongue,
+The horseleech-cry so strong so high
+   her heav’enward Psalms and Hymns among.
+
+What? Faith a merit and a claim,
+   when with the brain ’tis born and bred?
+Go, fool, thy foolish way and dip
+   in holy water burièd dead!
+
+Yet follow not th’ unwisdom-path,
+   cleave not to this and that disclaim;
+Believe in all that man believes;
+   here all and naught are both the same.
+
+But is it so? How may we know?
+   Haply this Fate, this Law may be
+A word, a sound, a breath; at most
+   the Zâhid’s moonstruck theory.
+
+Yes Truth may be, but ’tis not Here;
+   mankind must seek and find it There,
+But Where nor I nor you can tell,
+   nor aught earth-mother ever bare.
+
+Enough to think that Truth can be:
+   come sit we where the roses glow,
+Indeed he knows not how to know
+   who knows not also how to ’unknow.
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+Man hath no Soul, a state of things,
+   a no-thing still, a sound, a word
+Which so begets substantial thing
+   that eye shall see what ear hath heard.
+
+Where was his Soul the savage beast
+   which in primeval forests strayed,
+What shape had it, what dwelling-place,
+   what part in nature’s plan it played?
+
+This Soul to ree a riddle made;
+   who wants the vain duality?
+Is not myself enough for me?
+   what need of “I” within an “I”?
+
+Words, words that gender things! The soul
+   is a new-comer on the scene;
+Sufficeth not the breath of Life
+   to work the matter-born machine?
+
+We know the Gen’esis of the Soul;
+   we trace the Soul to hour of birth;
+We mark its growth as grew mankind
+   to boast himself sole Lord of Earth:
+
+The race of Be’ing from dawn of Life
+   in an unbroken course was run;
+What men are pleased to call their Souls
+   was in the hog and dog begun:
+
+Life is a ladder infinite-stepped,
+   that hides its rungs from human eyes;
+Planted its foot in chaos-gloom,
+   its head soars high above the skies:
+
+No break the chain of Being bears;
+   all things began in unity;
+And lie the links in regular line
+   though haply none the sequence see.
+
+The Ghost, embodied natural Dread
+   of dreary death and foul decay,
+Begat the Spirit, Soul and Shade
+   with Hades’ pale and wan array.
+
+The Soul required a greater Soul,
+   a Soul of Souls, to rule the host;
+Hence spirit-powers and hierarchies,
+   all gendered by the savage Ghost.
+
+Not yours, ye Peoples of the Book,
+   these fairy visions fair and fond,
+Got by the gods of Khemi-land*
+   and faring far the seas beyond!
+
+   * Egypt; Kam, Kem, Khem (hierogl.), in the Demotic Khemi.
+
+“Th’ immortal mind of mortal man!”
+   we hear yon loud-lunged Zealot cry;
+Whose mind but means his sum of thought,
+   an essence of atomic “I.”
+
+Thought is the work of brain and nerve,
+   in small-skulled idiot poor and mean;
+In sickness sick, in sleep asleep,
+   and dead when Death lets drop the scene.
+
+“Tush!” quoth the Zâhid, “well we ken
+   the teaching of the school abhorr’d
+“That maketh man automaton,
+   mind a secretion, soul a word.”
+
+“Of molecules and protoplasm
+   you matter-mongers prompt to prate;
+“Of jelly-speck development
+   and apes that grew to man’s estate.”
+
+Vain cavil! all that is hath come
+   either by Mir’acle or by Law;—
+Why waste on this your hate and fear,
+   why waste on that your love and awe?
+
+Why heap such hatred on a word,
+   why “Prototype” to type assign,
+Why upon matter spirit mass?
+   wants an appendix your design?
+
+Is not the highest honour his
+   who from the worst hath drawn the best;
+May not your Maker make the world
+   from matter, an it suit His hest?
+
+Nay more, the sordider the stuff
+   the cunninger the workman’s hand:
+Cease, then, your own Almighty Power
+   to bind, to bound, to understand.
+
+“Reason and Instinct!” How we love
+   to play with words that please our pride;
+Our noble race’s mean descent
+   by false forged titles seek to hide!
+
+For “gift divine” I bid you read
+   the better work of higher brain,
+From Instinct diff’ering in degree
+   as golden mine from leaden vein.
+
+Reason is Life’s sole arbiter,
+   the magic Laby’rinth’s single clue:
+Worlds lie above, beyond its ken;
+   what crosses it can ne’er be true.
+
+“Fools rush where Angels fear to tread!”
+   Angels and Fools have equal claim
+To do what Nature bids them do,
+   sans hope of praise, sans fear of blame!
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+There is no Heav’en, there is no Hell;
+   these be the dreams of baby minds;
+Tools of the wily Fetisheer,
+   to ’fright the fools his cunning blinds.
+
+Learn from the mighty Spi’rits of old
+   to set thy foot on Heav’en and Hell;
+In Life to find thy hell and heav’en
+   as thou abuse or use it well.
+
+So deemed the doughty Jew who dared
+   by studied silence low to lay
+Orcus and Hades, lands of shades,
+   the gloomy night of human day.
+
+Hard to the heart is final death:
+   fain would an Ens not end in Nil;
+Love made the senti’ment kindly good:
+   the Priest perverted all to ill.
+
+While Reason sternly bids us die,
+   Love longs for life beyond the grave:
+Our hearts, affections, hopes and fears
+   for Life-to-be shall ever crave.
+
+Hence came the despot’s darling dream,
+   a Church to rule and sway the State;
+Hence sprang the train of countless griefs
+   in priestly sway and rule innate.
+
+For future Life who dares reply?
+   No witness at the bar have we;
+Save what the brother Potsherd tells,—
+   old tales and novel jugglery.
+
+Who e’er return’d to teach the Truth,
+   the things of Heaven and Hell to limn?
+And all we hear is only fit
+   for grandam-talk and nursery-hymn.
+
+“Have mercy, man!” the Zâhid cries,
+   “of our best visions rob us not!
+“Mankind a future life must have
+   to balance life’s unequal lot.”
+
+“Nay,” quoth the Magian, “’tis not so;
+   I draw my wine for one and all,
+“A cup for this, a score for that,
+   e’en as his measure’s great or small:
+
+“Who drinks one bowl hath scant delight;
+   to poorest passion he was born;
+“Who drains the score must e’er expect
+   to rue the headache of the morn.”
+
+Safely he jogs along the way
+   which ‘Golden Mean’ the sages call;
+Who scales the brow of frowning Alp
+   must face full many a slip and fall.
+
+Here èxtremes meet, anointed Kings
+   whose crownèd heads uneasy lie,
+Whose cup of joy contains no more
+   than tramps that on the dunghill die.
+
+To fate-doomed Sinner born and bred
+   for dangling from the gallows-tree;
+To Saint who spends his holy days
+   in rapt’urous hope his God to see;
+
+To all that breathe our upper air
+   the hands of Dest’iny ever deal,
+In fixed and equal parts, their shares
+   of joy and sorrow, woe and weal.
+
+“How comes it, then, our span of days
+   in hunting wealth and fame we spend
+“Why strive we (and all humans strive)
+   for vain and visionary end?”
+
+Reply: mankind obeys a law
+   that bids him labour, struggle, strain;
+The Sage well knowing its unworth,
+   the Fool a-dreaming foolish gain.
+
+And who, ’mid e’en the Fools, but feels
+   that half the joy is in the race
+For wealth and fame and place, nor sighs
+   when comes success to crown the chase?
+
+Again: in Hind, Chîn, Franguestân
+   that accident of birth befell,
+Without our choice, our will, our voice:
+   Faith is an accident as well.
+
+What to the Hindu saith the Frank:
+   “Denier of the Laws divine!
+“However godly-good thy Life,
+   Hell is the home for thee and thine.”
+
+“Go strain the draught before ’tis drunk,
+   and learn that breathing every breath,
+“With every step, with every gest,
+   something of life thou do’est to death.”
+
+Replies the Hindu: “Wend thy way
+   for foul and foolish Mlenchhas fit;
+“Your Pariah-par’adise woo and win;
+   at such dog-Heav’en I laugh and spit.”
+
+“Cannibals of the Holy Cow!
+   who make your rav’ening maws the grave
+“Of Things with self-same right to live;—
+   what Fiend the filthy license gave?”
+
+What to the Moslem cries the Frank?
+   “A polygamic Theist thou!
+“From an imposter-Prophet turn;
+   Thy stubborn head to Jesus bow.”
+
+Rejoins the Moslem: “Allah’s one
+   tho’ with four Moslemahs I wive,
+“One-wife-men ye and (damnèd race!)
+   you split your God to Three and Five.”
+
+The Buddhist to Confucians thus:
+   “Like dogs ye live, like dogs ye die;
+“Content ye rest with wretched earth;
+   God, Judgment, Hell ye fain defy.”
+
+Retorts the Tartar: “Shall I lend
+   mine only ready-money ‘now,’
+“For vain usurious ‘Then’ like thine,
+   avaunt, a triple idiot Thou!”
+
+“With this poor life, with this mean world
+   I fain complete what in me lies;
+“I strive to perfect this my me;
+   my sole ambition’s to be wise.”
+
+When doctors differ who decides
+   amid the milliard-headed throng?
+Who save the madman dares to cry:
+   “’Tis I am right, you all are wrong?”
+
+“You all are right, you all are wrong,”
+   we hear the careless Soofi say,
+“For each believes his glimm’ering lamp
+   to be the gorgeous light of day.”
+
+“Thy faith why false, my faith why true?
+   ’tis all the work of Thine and Mine,
+“The fond and foolish love of self
+   that makes the Mine excel the Thine.”
+
+Cease then to mumble rotten bones;
+   and strive to clothe with flesh and blood
+The skel’eton; and to shape a Form
+   that all shall hail as fair and good.
+
+“For gen’erous youth,” an Arab saith,
+   “Jahim’s* the only genial state;
+“Give us the fire but not the shame
+   with the sad, sorry blest to mate.”
+
+   * Jehannum, Gehenna, Hell.
+
+And if your Heav’en and Hell be true,
+   and Fate that forced me to be born
+Force me to Heav’en or Hell—I go,
+   and hold Fate’s insolence in scorn.
+
+I want not this, I want not that,
+   already sick of Me and Thee;
+And if we’re both transform’d and changed,
+   what then becomes of Thee and Me?
+
+Enough to think such things may be:
+   to say they are not or they are
+Were folly: leave them all to Fate,
+   nor wage on shadows useless war.
+
+Do what thy manhood bids thee do,
+   from none but self expect applause;
+He noblest lives and noblest dies
+   who makes and keeps his self-made laws.
+
+All other Life is living Death,
+   a world where none but Phantoms dwell,
+A breath, a wind, a sound, a voice,
+   a tinkling of the camel-bell.
+
+
+
+IX
+
+
+How then shall man so order life
+   that when his tale of years is told,
+Like sated guest he wend his way;
+   how shall his even tenour hold?
+
+Despite the Writ that stores the skull;
+   despite the Table and the Pen;*
+Maugre the Fate that plays us down,
+   her board the world, her pieces men?
+
+   * Emblems of Kismet, or Destiny.
+
+How when the light and glow of life
+   wax dim in thickly gath’ering gloom,
+Shall mortal scoff at sting of Death,
+   shall scorn the victory of the Tomb?
+
+One way, two paths, one end the grave.
+   This runs athwart the flow’ery plain,
+That breasts the bush, the steep, the crag,
+   in sun and wind and snow and rain:
+
+Who treads the first must look adown,
+   must deem his life an all in all;
+Must see no heights where man may rise,
+   must sight no depths where man may fall.
+
+Allah in Adam form must view;
+   adore the Maker in the made.
+Content to bask in Mâyâ’s smile,*
+   in joys of pain, in lights of shade.
+
+   * Illusion.
+
+He breaks the Law, he burns the Book,
+   he sends the Moolah back to school;
+Laughs at the beards of Saintly men;
+   and dubs the Prophet dolt and fool,
+
+Embraces Cypress’ taper-waist;
+   cools feet on wavy breast of rill;
+Smiles in the Nargis’ love-lorn eyes,
+   and ’joys the dance of Daffodil;
+
+Melts in the saffron light of Dawn
+   to hear the moaning of the Dove;
+Delights in Sundown’s purpling hues
+   when Bulbul woos the Rose’s love.
+
+Finds mirth and joy in Jamshid-bowl;
+   toys with the Daughter of the vine;
+And bids the beauteous cup-boy say,
+   “Master I bring thee ruby wine!”*
+
+   * That all the senses, even the ear, may enjoy.
+
+Sips from the maiden’s lips the dew;
+   brushes the bloom from virgin brow:—
+Such is his fleshly bliss that strives
+   the Maker through the Made to know.
+
+I’ve tried them all, I find them all
+   so same and tame, so drear, so dry;
+My gorge ariseth at the thought;
+   I commune with myself and cry:—
+
+Better the myriad toils and pains
+   that make the man to manhood true,
+This be the rule that guideth life;
+   these be the laws for me and you:
+
+With Ignor’ance wage eternal war,
+   to know thy self forever strain,
+Thine ignorance of thine ignorance is
+   thy fiercest foe, thy deadliest bane;
+
+That blunts thy sense, and dulls thy taste;
+   that deafs thine ears, and blinds thine eyes;
+Creates the thing that never was,
+   the Thing that ever is defies.
+
+The finite Atom infinite
+   that forms thy circle’s centre-dot,
+So full-sufficient for itself,
+   for other selves existing not,
+
+Finds the world mighty as ’tis small;
+   yet must be fought the unequal fray;
+A myriad giants here; and there
+   a pinch of dust, a clod of clay.
+
+Yes! maugre all thy dreams of peace
+   still must the fight unfair be fought;
+Where thou mayst learn the noblest lore,
+   to know that all we know is nought.
+
+True to thy Nature, to Thy self,
+   Fame and Disfame nor hope nor fear:
+Enough to thee the small still voice
+   aye thund’ering in thine inner ear.
+
+From self-approval seek applause:
+   What ken not men thou kennest, thou!
+Spurn ev’ry idol others raise:
+   Before thine own Ideal bow:
+
+Be thine own Deus: Make self free,
+   liberal as the circling air:
+Thy Thought to thee an Empire be;
+   break every prison’ing lock and bar:
+
+Do thou the Ought to self aye owed;
+   here all the duties meet and blend,
+In widest sense, withouten care
+   of what began, for what shall end.
+
+Thus, as thou view the Phantom-forms
+   which in the misty Past were thine,
+To be again the thing thou wast
+   with honest pride thou may’st decline;
+
+And, glancing down the range of years,
+   fear not thy future self to see;
+Resign’d to life, to death resign’d,
+   as though the choice were nought to thee.
+
+On Thought itself feed not thy thought;
+   nor turn from Sun and Light to gaze,
+At darkling cloisters paved with tombs,
+   where rot the bones of bygone days:
+
+“Eat not thy heart,” the Sages said;
+   “nor mourn the Past, the buried Past;”
+Do what thou dost, be strong, be brave;
+   and, like the Star, nor rest nor haste.
+
+Pluck the old woman from thy breast:
+   Be stout in woe, be stark in weal;
+Do good for Good is good to do:
+   Spurn bribe of Heav’en and threat of Hell.
+
+To seek the True, to glad the heart,
+   such is of life the HIGHER LAW,
+Whose differ’ence is the Man’s degree,
+   the Man of gold, the Man of straw.
+
+See not that something in Mankind
+   that rouses hate or scorn or strife,
+Better the worm of Izrâil*
+   than Death that walks in form of life.
+
+   * The Angel of Death.
+
+Survey thy kind as One whose wants
+   in the great Human Whole unite;*
+The Homo rising high from earth
+   to seek the Heav’ens of Life-in-Light;
+
+   * The “Great Man” of the Enochites and the Mormons.
+
+And hold Humanity one man,
+   whose universal agony
+Still strains and strives to gain the goal,
+   where agonies shall cease to be.
+
+Believe in all things; none believe;
+   judge not nor warp by “Facts” the thought;
+See clear, hear clear, tho’ life may seem
+   Mâyâ and Mirage, Dream and Naught.
+
+Abjure the Why and seek the How:
+   the God and gods enthroned on high,
+Are silent all, are silent still;
+   nor hear thy voice, nor deign reply.
+
+The Now, that indivis’ible point
+   which studs the length of inf’inite line
+Whose ends are nowhere, is thine all,
+   the puny all thou callest thine.
+
+Perchance the law some Giver hath:
+   Let be! let be! what canst thou know?
+A myriad races came and went;
+   this Sphinx hath seen them come and go.
+
+Haply the Law that rules the world
+   allows to man the widest range;
+And haply Fate’s a Theist-word,
+   subject to human chance and change.
+
+This “I” may find a future Life,
+   a nobler copy of our own,
+Where every riddle shall be ree’d,
+   where every knowledge shall be known;
+
+Where ’twill be man’s to see the whole
+   of what on Earth he sees in part;
+Where change shall ne’er surcharge the thought;
+   nor hope defer’d shall hurt the heart.
+
+But!—faded flow’er and fallen leaf
+   no more shall deck the parent tree;
+And man once dropt by Tree of Life
+   what hope of other life has he?
+
+The shatter’d bowl shall know repair;
+   the riven lute shall sound once more;
+But who shall mend the clay of man,
+   the stolen breath to man restore?
+
+The shiver’d clock again shall strike;
+   the broken reed shall pipe again:
+But we, we die, and Death is one,
+   the doom of brutes, the doom of men.
+
+Then, if Nirwânâ* round our life
+   with nothingness, ’tis haply best;
+Thy toils and troubles, want and woe
+   at length have won their guerdon—Rest.
+
+   * Comparative annihilation.
+
+Cease, Abdû, cease! Thy song is sung,
+   nor think the gain the singer’s prize;
+Till men hold Ignor’ance deadly sin,
+   till man deserves his title “Wise:”*
+
+   * “Homo sapiens.”
+
+In Days to come, Days slow to dawn,
+   when Wisdom deigns to dwell with men,
+These echoes of a voice long stilled
+   haply shall wake responsive strain:
+
+Wend now thy way with brow serene,
+   fear not thy humble tale to tell:—
+The whispers of the Desert-wind;
+   the tinkling of the camel’s bell.
+
+{Hebrew: ShLM}
+
+
+
+NOTES
+
+
+NOTE I
+
+
+HÂJÎ ABDÛ, THE MAN
+
+Hâjî Abdû has been known to me for more years than I care to
+record. A native, it is believed, of Darâbghird in the Yezd
+Province, he always preferred to style himself El-Hichmakâni, a
+facetious “lackab” or surname, meaning “Of No-hall, Nowhere.” He
+had travelled far and wide with his eyes open; as appears by his
+“couplets.” To a natural facility, a knack of language learning,
+he added a store of desultory various reading; scraps of Chinese
+and old Egyptian; of Hebrew and Syriac; of Sanskrit and Prakrit;
+of Slav, especially Lithuanian; of Latin and Greek, including
+Romaic; of Berber, the Nubian dialect, and of Zend and Akkadian,
+besides Persian, his mother-tongue, and Arabic, the classic of
+the schools. Nor was he ignorant of “the -ologies” and the
+triumphs of modern scientific discovery. Briefly, his memory was
+well-stored; and he had every talent save that of using his
+talents.
+
+But no one thought that he “woo’d the Muse,” to speak in the
+style of the last century. Even his intimates were ignorant of
+the fact that he had a skeleton in his cupboard, his Kasîdah or
+distichs. He confided to me his secret when we last met in
+Western India—I am purposely vague in specifying the place. When
+so doing he held in hand the long and hoary honours of his chin
+with the points toward me, as if to say with the Island-King:
+
+   There is a touch of Winter in my beard,
+   A sign the Gods will guard me from imprudence.
+
+And yet the piercing eye, clear as an onyx, seemed to protest
+against the plea of age. The MS. was in the vilest “Shikastah” or
+running-hand; and, as I carried it off, the writer declined to
+take the trouble of copying out his cacograph.
+
+We, his old friends, had long addressed Hâjî Abdû by the
+sobriquet of _Nabbianâ_ (“our Prophet”); and the reader will see
+that the Pilgrim has, or believes he has, a message to deliver.
+He evidently aspires to preach a faith of his own; an Eastern
+Version of Humanitarianism blended with the sceptical or, as we
+now say, the scientific habit of mind. The religion, of which
+Fetishism, Hinduism and Heathendom; Judæism, Christianity and
+Islamism are mere fractions, may, methinks, be accepted by the
+Philosopher: it worships with single-minded devotion the Holy
+Cause of Truth, of Truth for its own sake, not for the goods it
+may bring; and this belief is equally acceptable to honest
+ignorance, and to the highest attainments in nature-study.
+
+With Confucius, the Hâjî cultivates what Strauss has called the
+“stern common-sense of mankind”; while the reign of order is a
+paragraph of his “Higher Law.” He traces from its rudest
+beginnings the all but absolute universality of some perception
+by man, called “Faith”; that _sensus Numinis_ which, by
+inheritance or communication, is now universal except in those
+who force themselves to oppose it. And he evidently holds this
+general consent of mankind to be so far divine that it primarily
+discovered for itself, if it did not create, a divinity. He does
+not cry with the Christ of Novalis, “Children, you have no
+father”; and perhaps he would join Renan in exclaiming, _Un monde
+sans Dieu est horrible!_
+
+But he recognises the incompatibility of the Infinite with the
+Definite; of a Being who loves, who thinks, who hates; of an
+_Actus purus_ who is called jealous, wrathful and revengeful,
+with an “Eternal that makes for righteousness.” In the presence
+of the endless contradictions, which spring from the idea of a
+Personal Deity, with the Synthesis, the _Begriff_ of Providence,
+our Agnostic takes refuge in the sentiment of an unknown and an
+unknowable. He objects to the countless variety of forms assumed
+by the perception of a _Causa Causans_ (a misnomer), and to that
+intellectual adoption of general propositions, capable of
+distinct statement but incapable of proofs, which we term Belief.
+
+He looks with impartial eye upon the endless variety of systems,
+maintained with equal confidence and self-sufficiency, by men of
+equal ability and honesty. He is weary of wandering over the
+world, and of finding every petty race wedded to its own
+opinions; claiming the monopoly of Truth; holding all others to
+be in error, and raising disputes whose violence, acerbity and
+virulence are in inverse ratio to the importance of the disputed
+matter. A peculiarly active and acute observation taught him that
+many of these jarring families, especially those of the same
+blood, are par in the intellectual processes of perception and
+reflection; that in the business of the visible working world
+they are confessedly by no means superior to one another; whereas
+in abstruse matters of mere Faith, not admitting direct and
+sensual evidence, one in a hundred will claim to be right, and
+immodestly charge the other ninety-nine with being wrong.
+
+Thus he seeks to discover a system which will prove them all
+right, and all wrong; which will reconcile their differences;
+will unite past creeds; will account for the present, and will
+anticipate the future with a continuous and uninterrupted
+development; this, too, by a process, not negative and
+distinctive, but, on the contrary, intensely positive and
+constructive. I am not called upon to sit in the seat of
+judgment; but I may say that it would be singular if the attempt
+succeeded. Such a system would be all-comprehensive, because not
+limited by space, time, or race; its principle would be extensive
+as Matter itself, and, consequently, eternal. Meanwhile he
+satisfies himself,—the main point.
+
+Students of metaphysics have of late years defined the abuse of
+their science as “the morphology of common opinion.” Contemporary
+investigators, they say, have been too much occupied with
+introspection; their labors have become merely
+physiologico-biographical, and they have greatly neglected the
+study of averages. For, says La Rochefoucauld, _Il est plus aisé
+de connoître l’homme en général que de connoître un homme en
+particulier_; and on so wide a subject all views must be
+one-sided.
+
+But this is not the fashion of Easterns. They have still to treat
+great questions _ex analogiâ universi_, instead of _ex analogiâ
+hominis_. They must learn the basis of sociology, the philosophic
+conviction that mankind should be studied, not as a congeries of
+individuals, but as an organic whole. Hence the _Zeitgeist_, or
+historical evolution of the collective consciousness of the age,
+despises the obsolete opinion that Society, the State, is bound
+by the same moral duties as the simple citizen. Hence, too, it
+holds that the “spirit of man, being of equal and uniform
+substance, doth usually suppose and feign in nature a greater
+equality and uniformity than is in Truth.”
+
+Christianity and Islamism have been on their trial for the last
+eighteen and twelve centuries. They have been ardent in
+proselytizing, yet they embrace only one-tenth and one-twentieth
+of the human race. Hâjî Abdû would account for the tardy and
+unsatisfactory progress of what their votaries call “pure
+truths,” by the innate imperfections of the same. Both propose a
+reward for mere belief, and a penalty for simple unbelief;
+rewards and punishments being, by the way, very disproportionate.
+Thus they reduce everything to the scale of a somewhat unrefined
+egotism; and their demoralizing effects become clearer to every
+progressive age.
+
+Hâjî Abdû seeks Truth only, truth as far as man, in the present
+phase of his development, is able to comprehend it. He disdains
+to associate utility, like Bacon (Nov. Org. I. Aph. 124), the
+High Priest of the English Creed, _le gros bon sens_, with the
+_lumen siccum ac purum notionum verarum_. He seems to see the
+injury inflicted upon the sum of thought by the _â posteriori_
+superstition, the worship of “facts,” and the deification of
+synthesis. Lastly, came the reckless way in which Locke “freed
+philosophy from the incubus of innate ideas.” Like Luther and the
+leaders of the great French Revolution, he broke with the Past;
+and he threw overboard the whole cargo of human tradition. The
+result has been an immense movement of the mind which we love to
+call Progress, when it has often been retrograde; together with a
+mighty development of egotism resulting from the pampered
+sentiment of personality.
+
+The Hâjî regrets the excessive importance attached to a possible
+future state: he looks upon this as a psychical stimulant, a day
+dream, whose revulsion and reaction disorder waking life. The
+condition may appear humble and prosaic to those exalted by the
+fumes of Fancy, by a spiritual dram-drinking, which, like the
+physical, is the pursuit of an ideal happiness. But he is too
+wise to affirm or to deny the existence of another world. For
+life beyond the grave there is no consensus of mankind, no
+Catholic opinion held _semper, et ubique, et ab omnibus_. The
+intellectual faculties (perception and reflection) are mute upon
+the subject: they bear no testimony to facts; they show no proof.
+Even the instinctive sense of our kind is here dumb. We may
+believe what we are taught: we can know nothing. He would,
+therefore, cultivate that receptive mood which, marching under
+the shadow of mighty events, leads to the highest of goals,—the
+development of Humanity. With him suspension of judgment is a
+system.
+
+Man has done much during the sixty-eight centuries which
+represent his history. This assumes the first Egyptian Empire,
+following the pre-historic, to begin with B. C. 5000, and to end
+with B. C. 3249. It was the Old, as opposed to the Middle, the
+New, and the Low: it contained the Dynasties from I. to X., and
+it was the age of the Pyramids, at once simple, solid, and grand.
+When the praiser of the Past contends that modern civilization
+has improved in nothing upon Homer and Herodotus, he is apt to
+forget that every schoolboy is a miracle of learning compared
+with the Cave-man and the palæolithic race. And, as the Past has
+been, so shall the Future be.
+
+The Pilgrim’s view of life is that of the Soofi, with the usual
+dash of Buddhistic pessimism. The profound sorrow of existence,
+so often sung by the dreamy Eastern poet, has now passed into the
+practical European mind. Even the light Frenchman murmurs,—
+
+   Moi, moi, chaque jour courbant plus bas ma tête
+     Je passe—et refroidi sous ce soleil joyeux,
+   Je m’en irai bientôt, au milieu de la fête,
+     Sans que rien manque au monde immense et radieux.
+
+But our Hâjî is not Nihilistic in the “no-nothing” sense of
+Hood’s poem, or, as the American phrases it, “There is nothing
+new, nothing true, and it don’t signify.” His is a healthy wail
+over the shortness, and the miseries of life, because he finds
+all created things—
+
+   Measure the world, with “Me” immense.
+
+He reminds us of St. Augustine (Med. c. 21). “Vita hæc, vita
+misera, vita caduca, vita incerta, vita laboriosa, vita immunda,
+vita domina malorum, regina superborum, plena miseriis et
+erroribus . . . Quam humores tumidant, escæ inflant, jejunia
+macerant, joci dissolvunt, tristitiæ consumunt; sollicitudo
+coarctat, securitas hebetat, divitiæ inflant et jactant.
+Paupertas dejicit, juventus extollit, senectus incurvat,
+importunitas frangit, mæror deprimit. Et his malis omnibus mors
+furibunda succedit.” But for _furibunda_ the Pilgrim would
+perhaps read _benedicta_.
+
+With Cardinal Newman, one of the glories of our age, Hâjî Abdû
+finds “the Light of the world nothing else than the Prophet’s
+scroll, full of lamentations and mourning and woe.” I cannot
+refrain from quoting all this fine passage, if it be only for the
+sake of its lame and shallow deduction. “To consider the world in
+its length and breadth, its various history and the many races of
+men, their starts, their fortunes, their mutual alienation, their
+conflicts, and then their ways, habits, governments, forms of
+worship; their enterprises, their aimless courses, their random
+achievements and acquirements, the impotent conclusion of
+long-standing facts, the tokens so faint and broken of a
+superintending design, the blind evolution (!) of what turn out
+to be great powers or truths, the progress of things as if from
+unreasoning elements, not towards final causes; the greatness and
+littleness of man, his far-reaching aims and short duration. the
+curtain hung over his futurity, the disappointments of life, the
+defeat of good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental
+anguish, the prevalence and intensity of sin, the pervading
+idolatries, the corruptions, the dreary hopeless irreligion, that
+condition of the whole race so fearfully yet exactly described in
+the Apostle’s words, ‘having no hope and without God in the
+world’—_all this is a vision to dizzy and appall, and inflicts
+upon the mind the sense of a profound mystery which is absolutely
+without human solution_.” Hence that admirable writer postulates
+some “terrible original calamity”; and thus the hateful doctrine,
+theologically called “original sin,” becomes to him almost as
+certain as that “the world exists, and as the existence of God.”
+Similarly the “Schedule of Doctrines” of the most liberal
+Christian Church insists upon the human depravity, and the
+“absolute need of the Holy Spirit’s agency in man’s regeneration
+and sanctification.”
+
+But what have we here? The “original calamity” was either caused
+by God or arose without leave of God, in either case degrading
+God to man. It is the old dilemma whose horns are the
+irreconcilable attributes of goodness and omniscience in the
+supposed Creator of sin and suffering. If the one quality be
+predicable, the other cannot be predicable of the same subject.
+Far better and wiser is the essayist’s poetical explanation now
+apparently despised because it was the fashionable doctrine of
+the sage bard’s day:—
+
+   All nature is but art . . .
+   All discord harmony not understood;
+   All partial evil universal good.—(Essay 289–292.)
+
+The Pilgrim holds with St. Augustine Absolute Evil is impossible
+because it is always rising up into good. He considers the theory
+of a beneficent or maleficent deity a purely sentimental fancy,
+contradicted by human reason and the aspect of the world. Evil is
+often the active form of good; as F. W. Newman says, “so likewise
+is Evil the revelation of Good.” With him all existences are
+equal: so long as they possess the Hindu Agasa, Life-fluid or
+vital force, it matters not they be,—
+
+   Fungus or oak or worm or man.
+
+War, he says, brings about countless individual miseries, but it
+forwards general progress by raising the stronger upon the ruins
+of the weaker races. Earthquakes and cyclones ravage small areas;
+but the former builds up earth for man’s habitation, and the
+latter renders the atmosphere fit for him to breathe. Hence he
+echoes:
+
+                  —The universal Cause
+   Acts not by partial but by general laws.
+
+Ancillary to the churchman’s immoral view of “original sin” is
+the unscientific theory that evil came into the world with Adam
+and his seed. Let us ask what was the state of our globe in the
+pre-Adamite days, when the tyrants of the Earth, the huge
+Saurians and other monsters, lived in perpetual strife, in a
+destructiveness of which we have now only the feeblest examples?
+What is the actual state of the world of waters, where the only
+object of life is death, where the Law of murder is the Law of
+Development?
+
+Some will charge the Hâjî with irreverence, and hold him a
+“lieutenant of Satan who sits in the chair of pestilence.” But he
+is not intentionally irreverent. Like men of far higher strain,
+who deny divinely the divine, he speaks the things that others
+think and hide. With the author of “Supernatural Religion,” he
+holds that we “gain infinitely more than we lose in abandoning
+belief in the reality of revelation”; and he looks forward to the
+day when “the old tyranny shall have been broken, and when the
+anarchy of transition shall have passed away.” But he is an
+Eastern. When he repeats the Greek’s “Remember not to believe,”
+he means Strive to learn, to know, for right ideas lead to right
+actions. Among the couplets not translated for this eclogue is:—
+
+   Of all the safest ways of Life
+      the safest way is still to doubt,
+   Men win the future world with Faith,
+      the present world they win without.
+
+This is the Spaniard’s:—
+
+   De las cosas mas seguras, mas seguro es duvidar;
+
+a typically modern sentiment of the Brazen Age of Science
+following the Golden Age of Sentiment. But the Pilgrim
+continues:—
+
+   The sages say: I tell thee no!
+      with equal faith all Faiths receive;
+   None more, none less, for Doubt is Death:
+      they live the most who most believe.
+
+Here, again, is an oriental subtlety; a man who believes in
+everything equally and generally may be said to believe in
+nothing. It is not a simple European view which makes honest
+Doubt worth a dozen of the Creeds. And it is in direct opposition
+to the noted writer who holds that the man of simple faith is
+worth ninety-nine of those who hold only to the egotistic
+interests of their own individuality. This dark saying means (if
+it mean anything), that the so-called moral faculties of man,
+fancy and ideality, must lord it over the perceptive and
+reflective powers,—a simple absurdity! It produced a
+Turricremata, alias Torquemada, who, shedding floods of honest
+tears, caused his victims to be burnt alive; and an Anchieta, the
+Thaumaturgist of Brazil, who beheaded a converted heretic lest
+the latter by lapse from grace lose his immortal soul.
+
+But this vein of speculation, which bigots brand as “Doubt,
+Denial, and Destruction;” this earnest religious scepticism; this
+curious inquiry, “Has the universal tradition any base of fact?”;
+this craving after the secrets and mysteries of the future, the
+unseen, the unknown, is common to all races and to every age.
+Even amongst the Romans, whose model man in Augustus’ day was
+Horace, the philosophic, the epicurean, we find Propertius
+asking:—
+
+   An ficta in miseras descendit fabula gentes
+      Et timor haud ultra quam rogus esse potest?
+
+To return: the Pilgrim’s doctrines upon the subject of conscience
+and repentance will startle those who do not follow his train of
+thought:—
+
+   Never repent because thy will
+      with will of Fate be not at one:
+   Think, an thou please, before thou dost,
+      but never rue the deed when done.
+
+This again is his modified fatalism. He would not accept the
+boisterous mode of cutting the Gordian-knot proposed by the noble
+British Philister—“we know we’re free and there’s an end on it!”
+He prefers Lamarck’s, “The will is, in truth, never free.” He
+believes man to be a co-ordinate term of Nature’s great
+progression; a result of the interaction of organism and
+environment, working through cosmic sections of time. He views
+the human machine, the pipe of flesh, as depending upon the
+physical theory of life. Every corporeal fact and phenomenon
+which, like the tree, grows from within or without, is a mere
+product of organization; living bodies being subject to the
+natural law governing the lifeless and the inorganic. Whilst the
+religionist assures us that man is not a mere toy of fate, but a
+free agent responsible to himself, with work to do and duties to
+perform, the Hâjî, with many modern schools, holds Mind to be a
+word describing a special operation of matter; the faculties
+generally to be manifestations of movements in the central
+nervous system; and every idea, even of the Deity, to be a
+certain little pulsation of a certain little mass of animal
+pap,—the brain. Thus he would not object to relationship with a
+tailless catarrhine anthropoid ape, descended from a monad or a
+primal ascidian.
+
+Hence he virtually says, “I came into the world without having
+applied for or having obtained permission; nay, more, without my
+leave being asked or given. Here I find myself hand-tied by
+conditions, and fettered by laws and circumstances, in making
+which my voice had no part. While in the womb I was an automaton;
+and death will find me a mere machine. Therefore not I, but the
+Law, or if, you please, the Lawgiver, is answerable for all my
+actions.” Let me here observe that to the Western mind “Law”
+postulates a Lawgiver; not so to the Eastern, and especially to
+the Soofi, who holds these ideas to be human, unjustifiably
+extended to interpreting the non-human, which men call the
+Divine.
+
+Further he would say, “I am an individual (_qui nil habet
+dividui_), a circle touching and intersecting my neighbours at
+certain points, but nowhere corresponding, nowhere blending.
+Physically I am not identical in all points with other men.
+Morally I differ from them: in nothing do the approaches of
+knowledge, my five organs of sense (with their Shelleyan
+“interpretation”), exactly resemble those of any other being.
+_Ergo_, the effect of the world, of life, of natural objects,
+will not in my case be the same as with the beings most
+resembling me. Thus I claim the right of creating or modifying
+for my own and private use the system which most imports me; and
+if the reasonable leave be refused to me, I take it without
+leave.
+
+“But my individuality, however all-sufficient for myself, is an
+infinitesimal point, an atom subject in all things to the Law of
+Storms called Life. I feel, I know that Fate _is_. But I cannot
+know what is or what is not fated to befall me. Therefore in the
+pursuit of perfection as an individual lies my highest, and
+indeed my only duty, the ‘I’ being duly blended with the ‘We.’ I
+object to be a ‘selfless man,’ which to me denotes an inverted
+moral sense. I am bound to take careful thought concerning the
+consequences of every word and deed. When, however, the Future
+has become the Past, it would be the merest vanity for me to
+grieve or to repent over that which was decreed by universal
+Law.”
+
+The usual objection is that of man’s practice. It says, “This is
+well in theory; but how carry it out? For instance, why would you
+kill, or give over to be killed, the man compelled by Fate to
+kill your father?” Hâjî Abdû replies, “I do as others do, not
+because the murder was done by him, but because the murderer
+should not be allowed another chance of murdering. He is a tiger
+who has tasted blood and who should be shot. I am convinced that
+he was a tool in the hands of Fate, but that will not prevent my
+taking measures, whether predestined or not, in order to prevent
+his being similarly used again.”
+
+As with repentance so with conscience. Conscience may be a “fear
+which is the shadow of justice”; even as pity is the shadow of
+love. Though simply a geographical and chronological accident,
+which changes with every age of the world, it may deter men from
+seeking and securing the prize of successful villainy. But this
+incentive to beneficence must be applied to actions that will be
+done, not to deeds that have been done.
+
+The Hâjî, moreover, carefully distinguishes between the working
+of fate under a personal God, and under the Reign of Law. In the
+former case the contradiction between the foreknowledge of a
+Creator, and the free-will of a Creature, is direct, palpable,
+absolute. We might as well talk of black-whiteness and of
+white-blackness. A hundred generations of divines have never been
+able to ree the riddle; a million will fail. The difficulty is
+insurmountable to the Theist whose Almighty is perforce
+Omniscient, and as Omniscient, Prescient. But it disappears when
+we convert the Person into Law, or a settled order of events;
+subject, moreover, to certain exceptions fixed and immutable, but
+at present unknown to man. The difference is essential as that
+between the penal code with its narrow forbiddal, and the broad
+commandment which is a guide rather than a task-master.
+
+Thus, too, the belief in fixed Law, versus arbitrary will,
+modifies the Hâjî’s opinions concerning the pursuit of happiness.
+Mankind, _das rastlose Ursachenthier_, is born to be on the whole
+equally happy and miserable. The highest organisms, the fine
+porcelain of our family, enjoy the most and suffer the most: they
+have a capacity for rising to the empyrean of pleasure and for
+plunging deep into the swift-flowing river of woe and pain. Thus
+Dante (Inf. vi. 106):—
+
+                        —tua scienza
+   Che vuol, quanto la cosa è più perfetta
+   Più senta ’l bene, e cosi la doglienza.
+
+So Buddhism declares that existence in itself implies effort,
+pain and sorrow; and, the higher the creature, the more it
+suffers. The common clay enjoys little and suffers little. Sum up
+the whole and distribute the mass: the result will be an average;
+and the beggar is, on the whole, happy as the prince. Why, then,
+asks the objector, does man ever strive and struggle to change,
+to rise; a struggle which involves the idea of improving his
+condition? The Hâjî answers, “Because such is the Law under which
+man is born: it may be fierce as famine, cruel as the grave, but
+man must obey it with blind obedience.” He does not enter into
+the question whether life is worth living, whether man should
+elect to be born. Yet his Eastern pessimism, which contrasts so
+sharply with the optimism of the West, re-echoes the lines:
+
+                           —a life,
+   With large results so little rife,
+   Though bearable seems hardly worth
+   This pomp of words, this pain of birth.
+
+Life, whatever may be its consequence, is built upon a basis of
+sorrow. Literature, the voice of humanity, and the verdict of
+mankind proclaim that all existence is a state of sadness. The
+“physicians of the Soul” would save her melancholy from
+degenerating into despair by doses of steadfast belief in the
+presence of God, in the assurance of Immortality, and in visions
+of the final victory of good. Were Hâjî Abdû a mere Theologist,
+he would add that Sin, not the possibility of revolt, but the
+revolt itself against conscience, is the primary form of evil,
+because it produces error, moral and intellectual. This man, who
+omits to read the Conscience-law, however it may differ from the
+Society-law, is guilty of negligence. That man, who obscures the
+light of Nature with sophistries, becomes incapable of discerning
+his own truths. In both cases error, deliberately adopted, is
+succeeded by suffering which, we are told, comes in justice and
+benevolence as a warning, a remedy, and a chastisement.
+
+But the Pilgrim is dissatisfied with the idea that evil
+originates in the individual actions of free agents, ourselves
+and others. This doctrine fails to account for its
+characteristics,—essentiality and universality. That creatures
+endowed with the mere possibility of liberty should not always
+choose the Good appears natural. But that of the milliards of
+human beings who have inhabited the Earth, not one should have
+been found invariably to choose Good, proves how insufficient is
+the solution. Hence no one believes in the existence of the
+complete man under the present state of things. The Hâjî rejects
+all popular and mythical explanation by the Fall of “Adam,” the
+innate depravity of human nature, and the absolute perfection of
+certain Incarnations, which argues their divinity. He can only
+wail over the prevalence of evil, assume its foundation to be
+error, and purpose to abate it by unrooting that Ignorance which
+bears and feeds it.
+
+His “eschatology,” like that of the Soofis generally, is vague
+and shadowy. He may lean towards the doctrine of Marc Aurelius,
+“The unripe grape, the ripe and the dried: all things are changes
+not into nothing, but into that which is not at present.” This is
+one of the _monstruosa opinionum portenta_ mentioned by the XIXth
+General Council, alias the First Council of the Vatican. But he
+only accepts it with a limitation. He cleaves to the ethical, not
+to the intellectual, worship of “Nature,” which moderns define to
+be an “unscientific and imaginary synonym for the sum total of
+observed phenomena.” Consequently he holds to the “dark and
+degrading doctrines of the Materialist,” the “Hylotheist”; in
+opposition to the spiritualist, a distinction far more marked in
+the West than in the East. Europe draws a hard, dry line between
+Spirit and Matter: Asia does not.
+
+Among us the Idealist objects to the Materialists that the latter
+cannot agree upon fundamental points; that they cannot define
+what is an atom; that they cannot account for the transformation
+of physical action and molecular motion into consciousness; and
+_vice versâ_, that they cannot say what matter is; and, lastly,
+that Berkeley and his school have proved the existence of spirit
+while denying that of matter.
+
+The Materialists reply that the want of agreement shows only a
+study insufficiently advanced; that man cannot describe an atom,
+because he is still an infant in science, yet there is no reason
+why his mature manhood should not pass through error and
+incapacity to truth and knowledge; that consciousness becomes a
+property of matter when certain conditions are present; that Hyle
+({Greek: hylae}) or Matter may be provisionally defined as
+“phenomena with a substructure of their own, transcendental and
+eternal, subject to the action, direct or indirect, of the five
+senses, whilst its properties present themselves in three states,
+the solid, the liquid, and the gaseous.” To casuistical Berkeley
+they prefer the common sense of mankind. They ask the idealist
+and the spiritualist why they cannot find names for themselves
+without borrowing from a “dark and degraded” school; why the
+former must call himself after his eye (_idein_); the latter
+after his breath (_spiritus_)? Thus the Hâjî twits them with
+affixing their own limitations to their own Almighty Power, and,
+as Socrates said, with bringing down Heaven to the market-place.
+
+Modern thought tends more and more to reject crude idealism and
+to support the monistic theory, the double aspect, the
+transfigured realism. It discusses the Nature of Things in
+Themselves. To the question, is there anything outside of us
+which corresponds with our sensations? that is to say, is the
+whole world simply “I,” they reply that obviously there is a
+something else; and that this something else produces the
+brain-disturbance which is called sensation. Instinct orders us
+to do something; Reason (the balance of faculties) directs; and
+the strongest motive controls. Modern Science, by the discovery
+of Radiant Matter, a fourth condition, seems to conciliate the
+two schools. “La découverte d’un quatrième état de la matière,”
+says a Reviewer, “c’est la porte ouverte à l’infini de ses
+transformations; c’est l’homme invisible et impalpable de même
+possible sans cesser d’être substantiel; c’est le monde des
+esprits entrant sans absurdité dans la domaine des hypothèses
+scientifiques; c’est la possibilité pour le matérialiste de
+croire à la vie d’outre tombe, sans renoncer au substratum
+matériel qu’il croit nécessaire au maintien de l’individualité.”
+
+With Hâjî Abdû the soul is not material, for that would be a
+contradiction of terms. He regards it, with many moderns, as a
+state of things, not a thing; a convenient word denoting the
+sense of personality, of individual identity. In its ghostly
+signification he discovers an artificial dogma which could hardly
+belong to the brutal savages of the Stone Age. He finds it in the
+funereal books of ancient Egypt, whence probably it passed to the
+Zendavesta and the Vedas. In the Hebrew Pentateuch, of which part
+is still attributed to Moses, it is unknown, or, rather, it is
+deliberately ignored by the author or authors. The early
+Christians could not agree upon the subject; Origen advocated the
+pre-existence of men’s souls, supposing them to have been all
+created at one time and successively embodied. Others make Spirit
+born with the hour of birth: and so forth.
+
+But the brain-action or, if you so phrase it, the mind, is not
+confined to the reasoning faculties; nor can we afford to ignore
+the sentiments, the affections which are, perhaps, the most
+potent realities of life. Their loud affirmative voice contrasts
+strongly with the titubant accents of the intellect. They seem to
+demand a future life, even, a state of rewards and punishments
+from the Maker of the world, the _Ortolano Eterno_,[1] the Potter
+of the East, the Watchmaker of the West. They protest against the
+idea of annihilation. They revolt at the notion of eternal
+parting from parents, kinsmen and friends. Yet the dogma of a
+future life is by no means catholic and universal. The
+Anglo-European race apparently cannot exist without it, and we
+have lately heard of the “Aryan Soul-land.” On the other hand
+many of the Buddhist and even the Brahman Schools preach Nirwâna
+(comparative non-existence) and Parinirwâna (absolute
+nothingness). Moreover, the great Turanian family, actually
+occupying all Eastern Asia, has ever ignored it; and the
+200,000,000 of Chinese Confucians, the mass of the nation,
+protest emphatically against the mainstay of the western creeds,
+because it “unfits men for the business and duty of life by
+fixing their speculations on an unknown world.” And even its
+votaries, in all ages, races and faiths, cannot deny that the
+next world is a copy, more or less idealized, of the present; and
+that it lacks a single particular savouring of originality. It is
+in fact a mere continuation; and the continuation is “not
+proven.”
+
+   It is most hard to be a man;
+
+and the Pilgrim’s sole consolation is in self-cultivation, and in
+the pleasures of the affections. This sympathy may be an indirect
+self-love, a reflection of the light of egotism: still it is so
+transferred as to imply a different system of convictions. It
+requires a different name: to call benevolence “self-love” is to
+make the fruit or flower not only depend upon a root for
+development (which is true), but the very root itself (which is
+false). And, finally, his ideal is of the highest: his praise is
+reserved for:
+
+                          —Lives
+   Lived in obedience to the inner law
+   Which cannot alter.
+
+
+
+[1] The Eternal Gardener: so the old inscription saying:—
+
+         locatus est in
+Homo     damnatus est in     horto
+         humatus est in
+         renatus est in
+
+
+
+NOTE II
+
+
+A few words concerning the Kasîdah itself. Our Hâjî begins with a
+_mise-en-scène_; and takes leave of the Caravan setting out for
+Mecca. He sees the “Wolf’s tail” (_Dum-i-gurg_), the {Greek:
+lykaugés}, or wolf-gleam, the Diluculum, the Zodiacal dawn-light,
+the first faint brushes of white radiating from below the Eastern
+horizon. It is accompanied by the morning-breath (_Dam-i-Subh_),
+the current of air, almost imperceptible except by the increase
+of cold, which Moslem physiologists suppose to be the early
+prayer offered by Nature to the First Cause. The Ghoul-i-Biyâbân
+(Desert-Demon) is evidently the personification of man’s fears
+and of the dangers that surround travelling in the wilds. The
+“wold-where-none-save-He (Allah)-can-dwell” is a great and
+terrible wilderness (_Dasht-i-lâ-siwâ Hu_); and Allah’s Holy Hill
+is Arafât, near Mecca, which the Caravan reaches after passing
+through Medina. The first section ends with a sore lament that
+the “meetings of this world take place upon the highway of
+Separation”; and the original also has:—
+
+   The chill of sorrow numbs my thought:
+      methinks I hear the passing knell;
+   As dies across yon thin blue line
+      the tinkling of the Camel-bell.
+
+The next section quotes the various aspects under which Life
+appeared to the wise and foolish teachers of humanity. First
+comes Hafiz, whose well-known lines are quoted beginning with
+Shab-i-târîk o bîm-i-mauj, etc. Hûr is the plural of Ahwar, in
+full Ahwar el-Ayn, a maid whose eyes are intensely white where
+they should be white, and black elsewhere: hence our silly
+“Houries.” Follows Umar-i-Khayyâm, who spiritualized Tasawwof, or
+Sooffeism, even as the Soofis (Gnostics) spiritualized Moslem
+Puritanism. The verses alluded to are:—
+
+   You know, my friends, with what a brave carouse
+   I made a second marriage in my house,
+      Divorced old barren Reason from my bed
+   And took the Daughter of the Vine to spouse.
+            (St. 60, Mr. Fitzgerald’s translation.)
+
+Here “Wine” is used in its mystic sense of entranced Love for the
+Soul of Souls. Umar was hated and feared because he spoke boldly
+when his brethren the Soofis dealt in innuendoes. A third
+quotation has been trained into a likeness of the “Hymn of Life,”
+despite the commonplace and the _navrante vulgarité_ which
+characterize the pseudo-Schiller-Anglo-American School. The same
+has been done to the words of Isâ (Jesus); for the author, who is
+well-read in the Ingîl (Evangel), evidently intended the
+allusion. Mansur el-Hallâj (the Cotton-Cleaner) was stoned for
+crudely uttering the Pantheistic dogma _Ana ’l Hakk_ (I am the
+Truth, _i.e._, God), _wa laysa fi-jubbatî il’ Allah_ (and within
+my coat is nought but God). His blood traced on the ground the
+first-quoted sentence. Lastly, there is a quotation from
+“Sardanapalus, son of Anacyndaraxes,” etc.: here {Greek: paîze}
+may mean sport; but the context determines the kind of sport
+intended. The Zâhid is the literal believer in the letter of the
+Law, opposed to the Soofi, who believes in its spirit: hence the
+former is called a Zâhiri (outsider), and the latter a Bâtini, an
+insider. Moses is quoted because he ignored future rewards and
+punishments. As regards the “two Eternities,” Persian and Arab
+metaphysicians split Eternity, _i.e._, the negation of Time, into
+two halves, _Azal_ (beginninglessness) and _Abad_ (endlessness);
+both being mere words, gatherings of letters with a subjective
+significance. In English we use “Eternal” (_Æviternus_, age-long,
+life-long) as loosely, by applying it to three distinct ideas;
+(1) the habitual, in popular parlance; (2) the exempt from
+duration; and (3) the everlasting, which embraces all duration.
+“Omniscience-Maker” is the old Roman sceptic’s _Homo fecit Deos_.
+
+The next section is one long wail over the contradictions, the
+mysteries, the dark end, the infinite sorrowfulness of all
+existence, and the arcanum of grief which, Luther said, underlies
+all life. As with Euripides “to live is to die, to die is to
+live.” Hâjî Abdû borrows the Hindu idea of the human body. “It is
+a mansion,” says Menu, “with bones for its beams and rafters;
+with nerves and tendons for cords; with muscles and blood for
+cement; with skin for its outer covering; filled with no sweet
+perfume, but loaded with impurities; a mansion infested by age
+and sorrow; the seat of malady; harassed with pains; haunted with
+the quality of darkness (Tama-guna), and incapable of standing.”
+The Pot and Potter began with the ancient Egyptians. “Sitting as
+a potter at the wheel, Cneph (at Philæ) moulds clay, and gives
+the spirit of life to the nostrils of Osiris.” Hence the
+Genesitic “breath.” Then we meet him in the Vedas, the Being “by
+whom the fictile vase is formed; the clay out of which it is
+fabricated.” We find him next in Jeremiah’s “Arise and go down
+unto the Potter’s house,” etc. (xviii. 2), and lastly in Romans
+(ix. 20), “Hath not the potter power over the clay?” No wonder
+that the first Hand who moulded the man-mud is a _lieu commun_ in
+Eastern thought. The “waste of agony” is Buddhism, or
+Schopenhauerism pure and simple, I have moulded “Earth on Earth”
+upon “Seint Ysidre”’s well-known rhymes (A.D. 1440):—
+
+   Erthe out of Erthe is wondirli wrouzt,
+   Erthe out of Erthe hath gete a dignity of nouzt,
+   Erthe upon Erthe hath sett all his thouzt
+   How that Erthe upon Erthe may be his brouzt, etc.
+
+The “Camel-rider,” suggests Ossian, “yet a few years and the
+blast of the desert comes.” The dromedary was chosen as Death’s
+vehicle by the Arabs, probably because it bears the Bedouin’s
+corpse to the distant burial-ground, where he will lie among his
+kith and kin. The end of this section reminds us of:—
+
+   How poor, how rich; how abject, how august,
+   How complicate, how wonderful is Man!
+
+The Hâjî now passes to the results of his long and anxious
+thoughts: I have purposely twisted his exordium into an echo of
+Milton:—
+
+   Till old experience doth attain
+   To something of prophetic strain.
+
+He boldly declares that there is no God as man has created his
+Creator. Here he is at one with modern thought:—“En général les
+croyants font le Dieu comme ils sont eux-mêmes,” (says J. J.
+Rousseau, “Confessions,” I. 6): “les bons le font bon: les
+méchants le font méchant: les dévots haineux et bilieux, ne
+voient que l’enfer, parce qu’ils voudraient damner tout le monde;
+les âmes aimantes et douces n’y croient guère; et l’un des
+étonnements dont je ne reviens pas est de voir le bon Fénélon en
+parler dans son Télémaque comme s’il y croyoit tout de bon: mais
+j’espère qu’il mentoit alors; car enfin quelque véridique qu’on
+soit, il faut bien mentir quelquefois quand on est évêque.” “Man
+depicts himself in his gods,” says Schiller. Hence the
+_Naturgott_, the deity of all ancient peoples, and with which
+every system began, allowed and approved of actions distinctly
+immoral, often diabolical. Belief became moralized only when the
+conscience of the community, and with it of the individual items,
+began aspiring to its golden age,—Perfection. “Dieu est le
+superlatif, dont le positif est l’homme,” says Carl Vogt;
+meaning, that the popular idea of a _numen_ is that of a
+magnified and non-natural man.
+
+He then quotes his authorities. Buddha, whom the Catholic Church
+converted to Saint Josaphat, refused to recognize Ishwara (the
+deity), on account of the mystery of the “cruelty of things.”
+Schopenhauer, Miss Cobbe’s model pessimist, who at the humblest
+distance represents Buddha in the world of Western thought, found
+the vision of man’s unhappiness, irrespective of his actions, so
+overpowering that he concluded the Supreme Will to be malevolent,
+“heartless, cowardly, and arrogant.” Confucius, the “Throneless
+king, more powerful than all kings,” denied a personal deity. The
+Epicurean idea rules the China of the present day. “God is great,
+but he lives too far off,” say the Turanian Santâls in Aryan
+India; and this is the general language of man in the Turanian
+East.
+
+Hâjî Abdû evidently holds that idolatry begins with a personal
+deity. And let us note that the latter is deliberately denied by
+the “Thirty-nine Articles.” With them God is “a Being without
+Parts (personality) or Passions.” He professes a vague
+Agnosticism, and attributes popular faith to the fact that Timor
+fecit Deos; “every religion being, without exception, the child
+of fear and ignorance” (Carl Vogt). He now speaks as the “Drawer
+of the Wine,” the “Ancient Taverner,” the “Old Magus,” the
+“Patron of the Mughân or Magians”; all titles applied to the
+Soofi as opposed to the Zâhid. His “idols” are the eidola
+(illusions) of Bacon, “having their foundations in the very
+constitution of man,” and therefore appropriately called
+_fabulæ_. That “Nature’s Common Course” is subject to various
+interpretation, may be easily proved. Aristotle was as great a
+subverter as Alexander; but the quasi-prophetical Stagyrite of
+the Dark Ages, who ruled the world till the end of the thirteenth
+century, became the “twice execrable” of Martin Luther; and was
+finally abolished by Galileo and Newton. Here I have excised two
+stanzas. The first is:—
+
+   Theories for truths, fable for fact;
+      system for science vex the thought
+   Life’s one great lesson you despise—
+      to know that all we know is nought.
+
+This is in fact:—
+
+   Well didst thou say, Athena’s noblest son,
+   The most we know is nothing can be known.
+
+The next is:—
+
+   Essence and substance, sequence, cause,
+      beginning, ending, space and time,
+   These be the toys of manhood’s mind,
+      at once ridiculous and sublime.
+
+He is not the only one who so regards “bothering Time and Space.”
+A late definition of the “infinitely great,” viz., that the idea
+arises from denying form to any figure; of the “infinitely
+small,” from refusing magnitude to any figure, is a fair specimen
+of the “dismal science”—metaphysics.
+
+Another omitted stanza reads:—
+
+   How canst thou, Phenomen! pretend
+      the Noumenon to mete and span?
+   Say which were easier probed and proved,
+      Absolute Being or mortal man?
+
+One would think that he had read Kant on the “Knowable and the
+Unknowable,” or had heard of the Yankee lady, who could
+“differentiate between the Finite and the Infinite.” It is a
+common-place of the age, in the West as well as the East, that
+Science is confined to phenomena, and cannot reach the Noumena,
+the things themselves. This is the scholastic realism, the
+“residuum of a bad metaphysic,” which deforms the system of
+Comte. With all its pretensions, it simply means that there are,
+or can be conceived, things in themselves (_i.e._, unrelated to
+thought); that we know them to exist; and, at the same time, that
+we cannot know what they are. But who dares say “cannot”? Who can
+measure man’s work when he shall be as superior to our present
+selves as we are to the Cave-man of past time?
+
+The “Chain of Universe” alludes to the Jain idea that the whole,
+consisting of intellectual as well as of natural principles,
+existed from all eternity; and that it has been subject to
+endless revolutions, whose causes are the inherent powers of
+nature, intellectual as well as physical, without the
+intervention of a deity. But the Poet ridicules the “non-human,”
+_i.e._, the not-ourselves, the negation of ourselves and
+consequently a non-existence. Most Easterns confuse the
+contradictories, in which one term stands for something, and the
+other for nothing (_e.g._, ourselves and not-ourselves), with the
+contraries (_e.g._, rich and not-rich = poor), in which both
+terms express a something. So the positive-negative “infinite” is
+not the complement of “finite,” but its negation. The Western man
+derides the process by making “not-horse” the complementary
+entity of “horse.” The Pilgrim ends with the favourite Soofi
+tenet that the five (six?) senses are the doors of all human
+knowledge, and that no form of man, incarnation of the deity,
+prophet, apostle or sage, has ever produced an idea not conceived
+within his brain by the sole operation of these vulgar material
+agents. Evidently he is neither spiritualist nor idealist.
+
+He then proceeds to show that man depicts himself in his God, and
+that “God is the racial expression”; a pedagogue on the Nile, an
+abstraction in India, and an astrologer in Chaldæa; where
+Abraham, says Berosus (Josephus, Ant. I. 7, § 2, and II. 9, § 2)
+was “skilful in the celestial science.” He notices the
+Akârana-Zamân (endless Time) of the Guebres, and the working
+dual, Hormuzd and Ahriman. He brands the God of the Hebrews with
+pugnacity and cruelty. He has heard of the beautiful creations of
+Greek fancy which, not attributing a moral nature to the deity,
+included Theology in Physics; and which, like Professor Tyndall,
+seemed to consider all matter everywhere alive. We have adopted a
+very different Unitarianism; Theology, with its one Creator;
+Pantheism with its “one Spirit’s plastic stress”; and Science
+with its one Energy. He is hard upon Christianity and its “trinal
+God”: I have not softened his expression ({Arabic} = a riddle),
+although it may offend readers. There is nothing more enigmatical
+to the Moslem mind than Christian Trinitarianism: all other
+objections they can get over, not this. Nor is he any lover of
+Islamism, which, like Christianity, has its ascetic Hebraism and
+its Hellenic hedonism; with the world of thought moving between
+these two extremes. The former, defined as predominant or
+exclusive care for the practice of right, is represented by
+Semitic and Arab influence, Korânic and Hadîsic. The latter, the
+religion of humanity, a passion for life and light, for culture
+and intelligence; for art, poetry and science, is represented in
+Islamism by the fondly and impiously-cherished memory of the old
+Guebre kings and heroes, beauties, bards and sages. Hence the
+mention of Zâl and his son Rostam; of Cyrus and of the
+Jâm-i-Jamshîd, which may be translated either grail (cup) or
+mirror: it showed the whole world within its rim; and hence it
+was called Jâm-i-Jehân-numâ (universe-exposing). The contemptuous
+expressions about the diet of camel’s milk and the meat of the
+Susmâr, or green lizard, are evidently quoted from Firdausi’s
+famous lines beginning:—
+
+   Arab-râ be-jâî rasîd’est kâr.
+
+The Hâjî is severe upon those who make of the Deity a
+Khwân-i-yaghmâ (or tray of plunder) as the Persians phrase it. He
+looks upon the shepherds as men,
+
+   —Who rob the sheep themselves to clothe.
+
+So Schopenhauer (Leben, etc., by Wilhelm Gewinner) furiously
+shows how the “English nation ought to treat that set of
+hypocrites, imposters and money-graspers, the clergy, that
+annually devours £3,500,000.”
+
+The Hâjî broadly asserts that there is no Good and no Evil in the
+absolute sense as man has made them. Here he is one with Pope:—
+
+   And spite of pride, in erring nature’s spite
+   One truth is clear—whatever is, is right.
+
+Unfortunately the converse is just as true:—whatever is, is
+wrong. Khizr is the Elijah who puzzled Milman. He represents the
+Soofi, the Bâtini, while Musâ (Moses) is the Zâhid, the Zâhiri;
+and the strange adventures of the twain, invented by the Jews,
+have been appropriated by the Moslems. He derides the Freewill of
+man; and, like Diderot, he detects “pantaloon in a prelate, a
+satyr in a president, a pig in a priest, an ostrich in a
+minister, and a goose in a chief clerk.” He holds to Fortune, the
+{Greek: Túxae} of Alcman, which is, {Greek: Eunomías te kaì
+Peithoûs adelphà kaì Promatheías thugátaer},—Chance, the sister
+of Order and Trust, and the daughter of Forethought. The
+Scandinavian Spinners of Fate were Urd (the Was, the Past),
+Verdandi (the Becoming, or Present), and Skuld (the To-be, or
+Future). He alludes to Plato, who made the Demiourgos create the
+worlds by the Logos (the Hebrew Dabar) or Creative Word, through
+the Æons. These {Greek: Aìwnes} of the Mystics were spiritual
+emanations from {Greek: Aìwn}, lit. a wave of influx, an age,
+period, or day; hence the Latin _ævum_, and the Welsh Awen, the
+stream of inspiration falling upon a bard. Basilides, the
+Egypto-Christian, made the Creator evolve seven Æons or Pteromata
+(fulnesses); from two of whom, Wisdom and Power, proceeded the
+365 degrees of Angels. All were subject to a Prince of Heaven,
+called Abraxas, who was himself under guidance of the chief Æon,
+Wisdom. Others represent the first Cause to have produced an Æon
+or Pure Intelligence; the first a second, and so forth till the
+tenth. This was material enough to affect Hyle, which thereby
+assumed a spiritual form. Thus the two incompatibles combined in
+the Scheme of Creation.
+
+He denies the three ages of the Buddhists: the wholly happy; the
+happy mixed with misery, and the miserable tinged with
+happiness,—the present. The Zoroastrians had four, each of 3,000
+years. In the first, Hormuzd, the good-god, ruled alone; then
+Ahriman, the bad-god, began to rule subserviently: in the third
+both ruled equally; and in the last, now current, Ahriman has
+gained the day.
+
+Against the popular idea that man has caused the misery of this
+world, he cites the ages, when the Old Red Sandstone bred
+gigantic cannibal fishes; when the Oolites produced the mighty
+reptile tyrants of air, earth, and sea; and when the monsters of
+the Eocene and Miocene periods shook the ground with their
+ponderous tread. And the world of waters is still a hideous scene
+of cruelty, carnage, and destruction.
+
+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-Fatâ ’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 lâ ’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!
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE KASIDAH OF HAJI ABDU EL-YEZDI ***
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