If, as is the case with the moon, the earth, as she travelled round her orbit turned always the same face inward, we might expect to find, between the thoughts of that hemisphere which looked continually to the sun, and those of the other peering eternally out at the stars, some such difference as actually exists between ourselves and our longitudinal antipodes. For our conception of the cosmos is of a sunlit world throbbing with life, while their Nirvana finds not unfit expression in the still, cold, fathomless awe of the midnight sky. That we cannot thus directly account for the difference in local coloring serves but to make that difference of more human interest. The dissimilarity between the Western and the Far Eastern attitude of mind has in it something beyond the effect of environment. For it points to the importance of the part which the principle of individuality plays in the great drama daily enacting before our eyes, and which we know as evolution. It shows, as I shall hope to prove, that individuality bears the same relation to the development of mind that the differentiation of species does to the evolution of organic life: that the degree of individualization of a people is the self-recorded measure of its place in the great march of mind.
All life, whether organic or inorganic, consists, as we know, in a change from a state of simple homogeneity to one of complex heterogeneity. The process is apparently the same in a nebula or a brachiopod, although much more intricate in the latter. The immediate force which works this change, the life principle of things, is, in the case of organic beings, a subtle something which we call spontaneous variation. What this mysterious impulse may be is beyond our present powers of recognition. As yet, the ultimates of all things lie hidden in the womb of the vast unknown. But just as in the case of a man we can tell what organs are vital, though we are ignorant what the vital spark may be, so in our great cosmical laws we can say in what their power resides, though we know not really what they are. Whether mind be but a sublimated form of matter, or, what amounts to the same thing, matter a menial kind of mind, or whether, which seems less likely, it be a something incomparable with substance, of one thing we are sure, the same laws of heredity govern both. In each a like chain of continuity leads from the present to the dim past, a connecting clue which we can follow backward in imagination. Now what spontaneous variation is to the material organism, imagination, apparently, is to the mental one. Just as spontaneous variation is constantly pushing the animal or the plant to push out, as a vine its tendrils, in all directions, while natural conditions are as constantly exercising over it a sort of unconscious pruning power, so imagination is ever at work urging man's mind out and on, while the sentiment of the community, commonly called common sense, which simply means the point already reached by the average, is as steadily tending to keep it at its own level. The environment helps, in the one case as in the other, to the shaping of the development. Purely physical in the first, it is both physical and psychical in the second, the two reacting on each other. But in either case it is only a constraining condition, not the divine impulse itself. Precisely, then, as in the organism, this subtle spirit checked in one direction finds a way to advance in another, and produces in consequence among an originally similar set of bodies a gradual separation into species which grow wider with time, so in brain evolution a like force for like reasons tends inevitably to an ever-increasing individualization.
Now what evidence have we that this analogy holds? Let us look at the facts, first as they present themselves subjectively.
The instinct of self-preservation, that guardian angel so persistent to appear when needed, owes its summons to another instinct no less strong, which we may call the instinct of individuality; for with the same innate tenacity with which we severally cling to life do we hold to the idea of our own identity. It is not for the philosophic desire of preserving a very small fraction of humanity at large that we take such pains to avoid destruction; it is that we insensibly regard death as threatening to the continuance of the ego, in spite of the theories of a future life which we have so elaborately developed. Indeed, the psychical shrinking is really the quintessence of the physical fear. We cleave to the abstract idea closer even than to its concrete embodiment. Sooner would we forego this earthly existence than surrender that something we know as self. For sufficient cause we can imagine courting death; we cannot conceive of so much as exchanging our individuality for another's, still less of abandoning it altogether; for gradually a man, as he grows older, comes to regard his body as, after all, separable from himself. It is the soul's covering, rendered indispensable by the climatic conditions of our present existence, one without which we could no longer continue to live here. To forego it does not necessarily negative, so far as we yet know, the possibility of living elsewhere. Some more congenial tropic may be the wandering spirit's fate. But to part with the sense of self seems to be like taking an eternal farewell of the soul. The Western mind shrinks before the bare idea of such a thought.
