Sorry you deny hereditary sensation. The idea of the experimentalists that the mind of the newly born child is a tabula rasa, and that all sensations are based on individual experiences, is no longer recognized—not at least by the evolutional school of psychology, the only purely scientific school. Spencer especially has denied this idea. In the life about us we see every day proofs of inherited capacity for pleasures we know nothing of, and incapacity for pleasures normal to us and to our whole race. Indeed, I can prove the fact to you at any time....
Faithfully,
Lafcadio Hearn.
P. S. I have been out for a walk. As usual the little boys cried “Ijin,” “Tōjin,”—and, although I don’t go out alone, the changed feeling of even the adult population toward a foreigner wandering through their streets was strongly visible.
A sadness, such as I never felt before in Japan, came over me. Perhaps your pencilled comments on the decrease of filial piety, and the erroneous impressions of national character in “Glimpses,” had something to do with it. I felt, as never before, how utterly dead Old Japan is, and how ugly New Japan is becoming. I thought how useless to write about things which have ceased to exist. Only on reaching a little shrine, filled with popular ex-voto,—innocent foolish things,—it seemed to me something of the old heart was beating still,—but far away from me, and out of reach. And I thought I would like to be in the old Buddhist cemetery at Gesshōji, which is in Matsue, in the Land of Izumo,—the dead are so much better off than the living, and were so much greater.
TO BASIL HALL CHAMBERLAIN
Kōbe, March, 1895.
Dear Chamberlain,—You will scarcely be able to believe me, I imagine; but I must confess that your letter on “shall” and “will” is a sort of revelation in one sense—it convinces me that some people, and I suppose all people of fine English culture, really feel a sharp distinction of meaning in the sight and sound of the words “will” and “shall.” I confess, also, that I never have felt such a distinction, and cannot feel it now. I have been guided chiefly by euphony, and the sensation of “will” as softer and gentler than “shall.” The word “shall” in the second person especially has for me a queer identification with English harshness and menace,—memories of school, perhaps. I shall study the differences by your teaching, and try to avoid mistakes, but I think I shall never be able to feel the distinction. The tone to me is everything—the word nothing. For example, the Western cowboy says “Yes, you will, Mister,” in a tone that means something much more terrible than the angry educated Englishman’s “you shall.” I know this confession is horrid—but there’s the truth of the matter; and I feel angry with conventional forms of language of which I cannot understand the real spirit. I trust the tendency to substitute “will” for “shall” which you have noticed, and which I have always felt, is going eventually to render the use of “shall” with the first person obsolete. I am “colour blind” to the values you assert; and I suspect that the majority of the English-speaking races—the raw people—are also blind thereunto. It is the people, after all, who make the language in the end, and in the direction of least resistance.
You did not quite catch my meaning on the subject of inherited feeling. I did not hint you denied heredity (though your last letter embodies several strong denials of it, I think). I believe it is an accepted general rule, for example, that only a child having parents of different races can learn even two languages equally well: in other cases, one language gains at the expense of the other. Creoles exemplify this rule. Toys are related to the æsthetic faculty, to the play-impulse, to the imaginative capacity. These differ really in different races; and represent, not individual education at all, but the sum of racial experiences under certain conditions. I cannot believe for a moment that an English child born in Japan could feel the same sensation on looking at a Japanese picture as the sensation felt by a Japanese child when looking at the same picture. (With food, the matter is different: English children in many cases disliking greasy cooking, and in other cases showing a decided preference for fat. Only a very large number of instances—many thousand—could really show any general rule in the case of English children born in Japan. The evidence you cite seems to me a contradiction, or exception to general tendencies.) The psychical fact about feelings and emotions is that they are inheritances, just as much as the colour of hair, or the size of limbs; and tastes—such as a taste for music or painting—are similarly inherited. They are outside of the individual experience as much as a birthmark. To explain fully why, would involve a lot of neurological scribbling,—but it is sufficient to say that as all feelings are the result of motions in nervous structure, the volume and character and kind of feeling is predetermined in each individual by the character of nerve-tissue and its arrangement and complexity. In no two individuals are the nervous structures exactly the same; and the differences in races or individuals are consequent upon the differences in quality, variety, and volume of ancestral experience shaping each life.