RELIGION AND SCIENCE
"For the Buddha of the deeper Buddhism is not Gautama, nor yet any one Tathagata, but simply the divine in man. Chrysalides of the infinite we all are: each contains a ghostly Buddha, and the millions are but one. All humanity is potentially the Buddha-to-come, dreaming through the ages in Illusion; and the teacher's smile will make beautiful the world again when selfishness shall die. Every noble sacrifice brings the hour of his awakening; and who may justly doubt—remembering the myriads of the centuries of man—that even now there does not remain one place on earth where life has not been freely given for love or duty?"
Though some years were yet to elapse before Hearn received his definite marching orders, each halt was but a bivouac nearer the field of operations where effective work and fame awaited him.
"Have wild theories about Japan," he writes prophetically to Mr. Watkin. "Splendid field in Japan—a climate just like England—perhaps a little milder. Plenty of European and English newspapers...." And again, "I have half a mind to study medicine in practical earnest, for as a doctor I may do well in Japan."
When the New Orleans Exposition was opened in 1885, Harpers, the publishers—who had already sent Hearn on a tour in Florida with an artist of their staff—now made an arrangement with him, by which he was to supply descriptive articles, varied by sketches and drawings, copied from photographs, of the principal exhibits.
On January 3rd, Hearn's first article appeared in Harper's Weekly. In it he describes the fans, the kakemonos, the screens in the Japanese department. Long lines of cranes flying against a vermilion sky, a flight of gulls sweeping through the golden light of a summer morning; the heavy, eccentric, velvety flight of bats under the moon; the fairy hovering of moths, of splendid butterflies; the modelling and painting of animal forms, the bronzed tortoises, crabs, storks, frogs, not mere copies of nature, but exquisite idealisations stirred his artistic sense as did also the representations of the matchless mountain Fuji-no-yama—of which the artist, Hokusai, alone drew one hundred different views, on fans, behind rains of gold, athwart a furnace of sunset, or against an immaculate blue burnished by some wizard dawn, exhaling from its mimic crater a pillar of incense smoke, towering above stretches of vineyards and city-speckled plains, or perchance begirdled by a rich cloud of silky shifting tints, like some beauty of Yoshiwara.
It seems almost as if he already saw the light of the distant dreamy world and the fairy vapours of morning, and the marvellous wreathing of clouds, and heard the pilgrims' clapping of hands, saluting the mighty day in Shinto prayer, as a decade later he saw, and heard, when he ascended Fuji-no-yama.
A year after the exposition, Hearn made the acquaintance of a young Lieutenant Crosby. Young Crosby was a native of Louisiana, educated at West Point, stationed at the time with his regiment at New Orleans. He was a person, apparently, of considerable culture. He and Hearn frequented the same literary circles. Interest in science and philosophy was as wide-spread in America as in Europe during the course of last century.
One day Crosby lent his new acquaintance Herbert Spencer's "First Principles." In his usual vehement, impressionable way Hearn immediately accepted all the tenets, all the conclusions arrived at. And from that day began what only can be called an intellectual idolatry for the colourless analytic English philosopher that lasted till his death.