The Soul of the Far East | Page 7

of those who do
not, alike depend ultimately for the right to be upon the truth or the
falsity of the sense of self.
For if there be no such actual thing as individuality, if the feeling we
call by that name be naught but the transient illusion the Buddhists
would have us believe it, any faith founded upon it as basis vanishes as
does the picture in a revolving kaleidoscope,-- less enduring even than
the flitting phantasmagoria of a dream. If the ego be but the passing
shadow of the material brain, at the disintegration of the gray matter
what will become of us? Shall we simply lapse into an
indistinguishable part of the vast universe that compasses us round? At
the thought we seem to stand straining our gaze, on the shore of the
great sea of knowledge, only to watch the fog roll in, and hide from our
view even those headlands of hope that, like beseeching hands, stretch
out into the deep.
So more materially. If individuality be a delusion of the mind, what
motive potent enough to excite endeavor in the breast of an ordinary
mortal remains? Philosophers, indeed, might still work for the

advancement of mankind, but mankind itself would not continue long
to labor energetically for what should profit only the common weal.
Take away the stimulus of individuality, and action is paralyzed at once.
For with most men the promptings of personal advantage only afford
sufficient incentive to effort. Destroy this force, then any consideration
due it lapses, and socialism is not only justified, it is raised instantly
into an axiom of life. The community, in that case, becomes itself the
unit, the indivisible atom of existence. Socialism, then communism,
then nihilism, follow in inevitable sequence. That even the Far Oriental,
with all his numbing impersonality, has not touched this goal may at
least suggest that individuality is a fact.
But first, what do we know about its existence ourselves?
Very early in the course of every thoughtful childhood an event takes
place, by the side of which, to the child himself, all other events sink
into insignificance. It is not one that is recognized and chronicled by
the world, for it is wholly unconnected with action. No one but the
child is aware of its occurrence, and he never speaks of it to others. Yet
to that child it marks an epoch. So intensely individual does it seem that
the boy is afraid to avow it, while in reality so universal is it that
probably no human being has escaped its influence. Though subjective
purely, it has more vividness than any external event; and though
strictly intrinsic to life, it is more startling than any accident of fate or
fortune. This experience of the boy's, at once so singular and yet so
general, is nothing less than the sudden revelation to him one day of the
fact of his own personality.
Somewhere about the time when sensation is giving place to
sensitiveness as the great self-educator, and the knowledge gained by
the five bodily senses is being fused into the wisdom of that mental one
we call common sense, the boy makes a discovery akin to the act of
waking up. All at once he becomes conscious of himself; and the
consciousness has about it a touch of the uncanny. Hitherto he has been
aware only of matter; he now first realizes mind. Unwarned,
unprepared, he is suddenly ushered before being, and stands awe-struck
in the presence of--himself.
If the introduction to his own identity was startling, there is nothing
reassuring in the feeling that this strange acquaintanceship must last.
For continue it does. It becomes an unsought intimacy he cannot shake

off. Like to his own shadow he cannot escape it. To himself a man
cannot but be at home. For years this alter ego haunts him, for he
imagines it an idiosyncrasy of his own, a morbid peculiarity he dare not
confide to any one, for fear of being thought a fool. Not till long
afterwards, when he has learned to live as a matter of course with his
ever-present ghost, does he discover that others have had like familiars
themselves.
Sometimes this dawn of consciousness is preceded by a long twilight of
soul-awakening; but sometimes, upon more sensitive and subtler
natures, the light breaks with all the suddenness of a sunrise at the
equator, revealing to the mind's eye an unsuspected world of self within.
But in whatever way we may awake to it, the sense of personality,
when first realized, appears already, like the fabled Goddess of
Wisdom, full grown in the brain. From the moment when we first
remember ourselves we seem to be as old as we ever seem to others
afterwards to become. We grow, indeed,