To the English reader this will appear such unmitigated nonsense that he will be almost ready to doubt the sanity of the people professing to believe it. But this disgust at the folly of the Chinese would be a good deal qualified by a careful consideration of the mental processes through which these curious results have been reached. We must refer the philosophic inquirer to Dr. Eitel's book, where he will find Feng-Shui traced up to the ancient opinion that the whole universe is a living organism, in which the trinity, heaven, earth, and man, share a common life, each member of the triad acting upon, and influenced by, the other two. There he will see also how the vast totality of phenomena are deduced by a system of permutations and combinations of numbers from two universal primordial principles, called the male and female principles, which two, when happily combined, constitute the favourable, and when disharmonious, the malign breath of nature. After he has fairly bewildered himself in the effort to follow this scheme through its complicated ramifications, and to do justice to it as a conception, though an imaginary one, of the true nature of things in themselves, he will probably cease to marvel that opinions supported by such an unbroken array of learned names, and argued out with such an appearance at once of plausibility and profundity, have taken deep root in the Chinese mind. Space forbids our attempting even a sketch of Chinese metaphysics, out of which this unique superstition, Feng-Shui, has grown, a not incongruous fruit. It remains, however, to point out the connection between Feng-Shui and the influence of the dead upon the living. A few sentences upon this topic will serve as a specimen of Chinese philosophical thought.

According to Choo-he and his followers, the soul of man is not simple, but possesses a dual nature. The two natures, which may be distinguished as animus and anima, belong respectively to the "breath of heaven" and the "breath of earth." The animus is the spiritual and male element of the soul while the material element or female principle of nature forms the anima. In living man the two principles exist in combination, but at death, with the dissolution of the body, the union is broken up, the animus returns to heaven and the anima to earth. Not that we are to conceive of this returning as movement in space, but rather that each part is absorbed again into the general elements of nature whence each derived its origin. The souls of deceased ancestors, therefore, are as omnipresent as the elements of nature, as heaven and earth themselves. Thus the Chinese have been taught to consider themselves as constantly surrounded by a spirit-world, invisible indeed and inaccessible by touch or handling, but none the less real, none the less influential. From the groundwork of these not altogether despicable imaginations about the invisible world, the transition is easy to the popular belief that the anima of the deceased binds him to the tomb, while the masculine animus hovers round the dwelling of his descendants. This, again, produces the inference that if the tomb be so placed that the animal spirit supposed to dwell there is free from disturbing elements, the ancestral spirit will be both able and

disposed to visit with benign influences the homes of his pious descendants. Hence practical Feng-Shui has no more important problem than to select the site of a grave.

It does not require much wisdom to ridicule and despise the absurd superstitions of individuals and races less enlightened than our noble selves. But in recent years we have seen another spirit arise. Men have taken to studying ancient myths and modern superstitions instead of mocking at them. The result is a growing conviction that the soil of the human mind cannot produce and foster pure error, unmixed falsehood. The human intellect has been guilty of a thousand aberrations and extravagances, but through them all there has run a vein of loyalty to, or at least desire for, truth. The error we denounce is either a truth pushed to an extreme, or it is, though erroneous, the best interpretation the mind is for the time being capable of, of the phenomena which press upon it for a solution, or perhaps it is to be attributed to the eagerness of the mind to frame for itself some explanation of a problem really quite insoluble. It is to this latter class that we would attach Feng-Shui. This Chinese superstition, absurd as it is, has not maintained itself for a thousand years among a vast eivilised people, a nation whose thinkers and scholars are innumerable, without basing itself upon something or other natural to man and not evidently repugnant to his reason. Where shall we look for this connecting link? I think we may see it in that mystery which has perplexed philosophers and theologians of all ages and countries, and of which we may reject the Chinese solution, but are ourselves unable to furnish a better. How is it that such innumerable diversities subsist among the characters and experiences of the children of men? Why is one born in the purple, cradled in luxury and splendour, while another drags along a few miserable years in a condition compared with which that of the brutes is enviable? Why, again, do we see some men naturally endowed with remarkable capacity and inclination, not for wisdom only but for virtue, where others display inherent tendencies to the worst of vices? Still more puzzling is the indisputable fact that the power, and beauty, and happiness of the world frequently fall to the share of the ignoble, while wisdom and goodness are linked to want and suffering. The Chinese looked around for an explanation of these mysterious arrangements of human life, not from a vague curiosity, but with the express hope of improving his own lot. Buddhism gave him a solution in its theory of successive existences, determined each by the merit and demerit of the preceding one; but Buddhism failed, even in its season of widest popularity, to lay hold of the Chinese national mind. The teachings of Confucius and his first disciples ignored difficulties which they could not remove. According to them, virtue is not only its own reward, but rightly and surely secures for itself the approval of heaven, the favour of man, and the lordship of this fair world.

The Chinese did homage to the ethical teaching of their great master, and accepted it as their highest trust for evermore. But the fact stared

them in the face that the sage himself passed a life of toil and wanderings "like a homeless dog," while licentious and illiterate princelets divided the world among them. It was an article of the Confucian creed that if the sage and the virtuous did not themselves attain to earthly honour and felicity, heaven, in recognition of their merit, would bestow these boons on their posterity. Experience has not confirmed this sentiment into a positive belief. The varieties and inequalities of earthly condition remained inexplicable. That right moral conduct is man's true life, the Chinese readily assented to; but that there is also some other principle at work, moulding human destinies without much regard to human character, seemed too palpable for disbelief. What is this principle? Philosophy stepped in, with her all-comprehensive speculations about the original absolute, the unity, the generation of all phenomena from one eternal substance, according to one all-pervading law, the evolution of the infinite variety of forms and conditions from the action and reaction of the great original upon itself. Clothed though they be in a Chinese garb, the European student frequently recognizes thoughts already familiar to him in Western speculation. Had Chinese metaphysics stopped at this stage, the result would be a striking similarity to the issue to which certain of our Western speculations seem to tend: a self-evolved universe, an organic whole, operating in all things by immutable law, but without a Law-giver; moving according to infinite order, but guided by no superintending Intelligence; explicable from itself, but containing no prophecy of a better explication to come. And it is, perhaps, more correct to say that Chinese philosophy did stop here; and to attribute the growth of FengShui rather to the craving of the popular mind for something more definite and practical, some clue to the mystery which could be followed up to its own advantage. If philosophy teaches that fatalism governs the immense whole, while utterly careless of the result to the individual, can we marvel that in a superstitious age men caught at the idea that they might possibly divert the mighty current of nature's irresistible forces into little artificial channels for their own behoof? Feng-Shui is the very audacity of superstition, and it will hold its own until it fades away before the progress of Christianity, or the spread of science, or the influence of both combined.

F. S. T.

349

The Unpleasant Past.

WHEN I put upon paper a few thoughts about "The Unpleasant Past," I do not mean the unpleasant past through which I have lived myself. In talking, indeed, about one's own earlier days, everybody, or nearly everybody, is so grievously hypocritical, that it is impossible to know how far they are deceiving themselves, or how far they are consciously deceiving others. There is the popular talk, for instance, about one's school days, or rather, I should say, one's school. Women, it should be observed, in this respect, are not so hypocritical as men. There are some women,

certainly, who speak with a sort of fervent affection of their former governesses, and, as far as one can see, with truth. But, as a rule, women care wondrously little for any school at which they have been doomed to pass their childhood and early youth. Perhaps this is because there are no great girls' schools which are national institutions always before the public eye, about which it is the correct thing to discourse with seeming enthusiasm. But with men who have had the happiness to be brought up at one of those glorious institutions, the great public schools of England, the case is quite different. The amount of deception which the English gentleman, as such, thinks it his duty to practise upon himself and upon his brother "public school men," is amazing. With rare exceptions, every "public school man seems to have succeeded in enveloping his own particular school with a certain mysterious haze of glory. I beg to state, with all due deference, that I except from this charge of mingled hypocrisy and self-deception that venerated race of youths, now oldish men, who came forth from Rugby under the reign of Arnold, accounting themselves apostles, or "missioners," to use the new cant term, sent abroad by a providential arrangement for the reformation of other young men in general (to say nothing of their elders), and of Oxford and Cambridge undergraduates in particular. Yet even the Rugby boys, while boys, were not always of the fiercely Arnoldian type, and ventured that they did not like Rugby under the Arnoldian dispensation. But I do not doubt that, now that they are grey-headed fathers of families, even they have learnt to talk as most fathers talk, and join in the general chorus of those who sing the praises of those ancient sacred nurseries of virtue, sport, and learning.

to

say

To what exact extent all this is simply fudge I will not presume to say. I know that in some cases it is pure fudge, and I suspect that in most cases it is a combination of self-deception and fudge. If it were not such

a dreadfully stale quotation, I should say that, in most instances, it is "distance that lends enchantment to the view." On the whole, and in my secret thoughts, I look upon what public school men say concerning their school days as being almost as hypocritical as what respectable Englishmen in general say about religion. It seems as if the Englishman is only honest when he speaks about business matters; and how often is he sincere even then?

Now, for myself, in this one respect at least, I am an honest man. I was at one of these very great public schools. I will not mention its name, or give the slightest hint by which it may be identified; but I can truly say that I always detested it, and that I have never pretended that I did otherwise than detest it. I learnt absolutely nothing there which I did not teach myself, and I often wished that it had been my destiny to have been sent to some other of the few "great public schools" which in those days were alone supposed (what a hypothesis !) to send forth "scholars and gentlemen" to the two great Universities. So far, then, when I meditate.on the unpleasant past of the world, I include my own personal very unpleasant past.

all

When, again, people would have me believe that it is a delight to them to think over their own past lives, apart from these current schoolday illusions, and that thus thinking they are made happy, it is doubtless a tenable supposition that they are not playing tricks either upon themselves or upon those who listen to them. I am entirely out of sympathy with them; but that is another thing. What is misery to one mind may be enjoyment to another. There was a certain infatuated banker, we know, who wrote a prettyish poem on the Pleasures of Memory, which he, being a wealthy banker, could afford to pay the great Turner a consider. able sum to illustrate with many exquisite little pictures. But does anybody read that poem because he loves the ideas which the verses suggest, or does anybody believe that there was one word of genuine, honest truth in the recollections of the verse-maker himself? In fact, it may be doubted which of the three once well-known poems was the more absolutely unreal, Rogers's Pleasures of Memory, Campbell's Pleasures of Hope, or Akenside's Pleasures of the Imagination.

This same word "unreal," too, if I may wander into a little bypath of discourse, how suggestive it is of the betterness of the present over the past! The word "betterness," itself, I am aware, is wholly unjustifiable on any legitimate authority; in truth, it suddenly formed itself in my brain as I was writing the last sentence. But is it not a better word than "superiority," or any kindred term? If the adjective "good," I argue, has its corresponding substantive "goodness," why should not "better" have its corresponding substantive "betterness"? But to return to the word "unreal" in the sense in which I have just used it, which is by no means the same in which it was used half a century ago. What should we do without it now, when we want to describe certain moods of feeling, or habits of thought, or religious professions and forms of speech, which