"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 injury 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 St. 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 माढ़ा (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, anything 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—