Properly, however, there is no such thing as an individual, but only a combination,—one balance of an infinite sum. The charm of a very superior man or woman is the ghostliest of all conceivable experiences. For the man or woman in question can in a single evening become fifty, a hundred, two hundred different people—not in fancy, but in actual fact. Here the character of the ancestral experience has been so high and rare that a different part of the race’s mental life is instantly resurrected at will to welcome and charm, or to master and repel, the various sorts of character encountered, haphazard, in the salon of the aristocratic milieu.
It would be natural to ask: If the emotions and passions are inheritances, why are not these higher faculties inherited en masse as well? Because feeling is infinitely older than thinking, developed millions of years before thinking. Also because the reasoning powers have been grown out of the feelings—as trees from soil. Those forms of consciousness most connected with the animal life of the race are, of course, the first to develop, and the first to become transmissible. But the time may come when higher faculties will be also similarly transmissible.
Taking the highest possible form of human thought,—a mathematical concept,—and analyzing it, we find a whole volume is required for the mere statement of the analysis. The flash of the thought took less than a second; to write all the thinking it involved requires years. We take it to pieces by bundles of concepts and bundles of experiences,—which are changes in relations of compound states of consciousness. The relations of those states of consciousness are resolvable into simpler ones, and those into simpler, and at last we come down to mere perceptions, and the perceptions are separated into ideas, and the ideas into compound sensations, and the compound sensations into sensations simple as those of the amœba, or the humblest protozoa.
Thus we can also trace up the history of any thought from the state of mere animalcular sensation. The highest thought is resolvable into infinite compounds of such sensations. Beyond that we cannot go. The Universe may be sentient, but we don’t know it. All we know is sensation and combinations of sensations in the brain. The highest spiritual sentiment is based upon the lowest animal sensations. But what is sensation? No one can tell. On this subject very awful discoveries are perhaps awaiting us.
Now heredity is the most wonderful thing of all things, because it is utterly incomprehensible.
A mathematical calculation has established beyond all question the fact that the number of ultimate units in a sperm-cell and germ-cell combined is totally insufficient to account for the number of impressions and tendencies transmitted—supposing a change in the ultimate units possible. Therefore in order to have a working theory, we are obliged to use the term polarity,—which only means physical tendency to relationships. But the mystery of the transmission of the impulse remains just as far away as ever.
Of course I can’t agree with you as to the statement of culture from outside, except in the poetical sense. Scientifically the culture movement is internal,—the responses of innumerable dead to exterior influence,—the weirdest resurrections of buried faculties.
As for evolution being caused by outer influences, I think the idea leads to misconception of an intelligent power working and watching things. We have no need of such a theory. Pain is the chief mental factor. The elements of life are remarkable in being chemically unstable,—astonishingly unstable, and the mere working of the universal forces on such elements quite sufficiently accounts for all changes. But the fact that there is no line between life and not-life, no line between the animal and vegetable world, no line between the visible and invisible, no assurance that matter has any existence in itself—that is a very awful truth. It is otherwise incorrect to think of evolution being caused by outer influences, because the inner forces are the really direct ones,—answering to the outer. Moreover, the thing evolved, and the power evolving, and the forces internal and external,—the visible and the non-visible,—are (so far as human reason permits us to judge) all one and the same. We know only phenomena; and modern thought recognizes more and more the Indian thought that the Supreme Brahma is only playing a chess game with himself. Absolutely we know only forces—pure ghostliness. The individual substance is but a force combination,—its changes are force combinations,—the powers outside are but force combinations,—the universe is a force combination—and we can know nothing more than vibrations.
Ever,
Lafcadio Hearn.