TO BASIL HALL CHAMBERLAIN
Kōbe, April, 1895.
Dear Chamberlain,—The factors of evolution are multitudinous beyond enumeration, and no one with a ghost of knowledge of the modern scientific researches on the subject could hold (as you suggest I do) that heredity is a first cause and “exclusive”(!) Heredity is a result, and the vehicle of transmission, as well as the “Karma” (which Huxley calls it). Degeneration, atrophy, atavism, are quite as much factors in evolution as variation and natural selection and development;—but the flowing of the eternal stream, the river of life, is heredity,—whatever form the ripples take. As I have given some twenty years’ study to these subjects, I am not likely to overlook any such thing as environment or climate or diet. You cannot, however, get a grasp of the system by reading only a digest of results—a study of biology and physiology is absolutely necessary before the psychology of the thing can be clearly perceived. Now you say you will accept anything Spencer writes on the subject. Well, he writes that “a child” playing with its “toys” experiences “presentative-representative feelings.” What are presentative-representative feelings? They are feelings chiefly “deeper than individual experience.” What are feelings deeper than individual experience? Mr. Spencer tells us they are “inherited feelings,”—the sum of ancestral experiences,—the aggregates of race-experience. Therefore when I said the child’s delight in its toys was “hereditary-ancestral,” I said precisely what Spencer says, but what you would never acknowledge so long as “only I” said it.
On this subject of emotions inherited as distinguished from others, and from those changes in states of [consciousness] generally which we call reasoning or constructive imagination, the definite utterances of Spencer as physiologist are electrically reënforced by the startling theory of Schopenhauer, by the system of Hartmann, and by the views of Janet and his rapidly growing school. Indeed, the mere fact that a child cries at the sight of a frowning face and laughs at a smiling one could be explained in no other manner.
You are not quite correct in saying that Spencer could not obtain a hearing before Darwin. Before Darwin, Spencer had already been recognized by Lewes as the mightiest of all English thinkers, with the remarkable observation that he was too large and near to be justly estimated even in his lifetime. Darwin did much, of course, to illuminate one factor of evolution; but I need hardly say that one factor, though the most commonly identified with evolution, is but one of myriads. Natural selection can explain but a very small part of the thing. The colossal brain which first detected the necessity of evolution as a cosmic law,—governing the growth of a solar system as well as the growth of a gnat,—the brain of Spencer, discerned that law by pure mathematical study of the laws of force. And the work of the Darwins and Huxleys and Tyndalls is but detail—small detail—in that tremendous system which has abolished all preëxisting philosophy and transformed all science and education.
I need scarcely say, however, that I should not be able, as a literary dreamer, to derive the inspiration needed from Spencer alone: he is best illuminated, I think, by the aid of Schopenhauer and the new French school which considers the so-called individual as really an infinite multiple. These men have said nothing of value which Spencer has not said much better scientifically,—but they are infinitely suggestive when they happen to coincide with him. So, after a fashion, is the Vedantic philosophy (much more so than Buddhism), and so also some few dreams of the old Greek schools.
Your criticisms also show that you take me as confusing changes of relation of integrated states of [consciousness] with inherited integrations of emotional feeling. These are absolutely distinct. But don’t think that I pretend to be invariably a state of facts: without theory, a very large part of life’s poetry could never be adequately uttered.
I knew that the music of the “Kimi ga yo” was new,—though I did not know the story of the German bandmaster. But I did not know that the words once had no reference to the Emperor. I was more careful, however, than you give me credit for,—since I wrote only “the syllables made sacred by the reverential love of a century of generations,” which, allowing for poetical exaggeration, seems to be all right anyhow, even if the words did not refer to the Emperor. Of course the implication to the foreign reader would, however, be wrong.
Still, on the subject of loyalty, I cannot see that the existence of the feeling as inborn is invalidated by the fact of transference. The feeling is the thing,—not the object, not the Emperor nor the Daimyō,—which, I imagine, must have survived all the changes. Trained from the time of the gods to obedience and loyalty to somebody, the feeling of the military classes would not have been instantly dissipated or annihilated by the change of government, but simply transferred. Indeed, that strikes me as having been what the Government worked for. It could not afford to ignore or throw away so enormous a source of power as the inherited feeling of the race offered, and attempted (I think very successfully) to transfer it to the Emperor. The fact in no way affects the truth or falsehood of the sketch “Yūho.”
Your criticism is only a re-denial of inherited feeling as a possibility.