I have been thinking a heap, because of being much alone. (The Japanese do not understand Western thought at all--at least not its emotional side. Therefore devour time and devour thought even while they stimulate it.) ...
Now about these Shadows. Yes, there are forces about one,--vague, working soundlessly, imperceptibly, softening one as the action of air softens certain surfaces of rock while hardening others. The magnetism of another faith about you necessarily polarizes that loose-quivering needle of desire in a man that seeks source of attraction in spite of synthetic philosophy. The general belief in an infinite past and future interpenetrates one somehow. When you find children who do wrong are always warned, "Ah! your future birth will be unhappy;" when you find two lovers drinking death together, and leaving behind them letters saying, "This is the influence of our last birth, when we broke our promise to become husband and wife;" and last, but not least, when some loving woman murmurs, laughingly: "In the last life thou wert a woman and I a man, and I loved thee much; but thou didst not love me at all,"--you begin to doubt if you do not really believe like everybody else.
About the training of the senses. The idea is admirable, but _alas!_--a very clever Frenchman five years ago, in the _Revue Politique et Littéraire_, almost exhausted it. He represented a man who had cultivated his eye so that he could see the bacteria in the air, and the grain of metals,--also being able to adjust his eyes to distance. He had trained his ear so as to hear all sounds of growth and decomposition. He had trained his nose to smell all substances supposed to have no smell. He made a diagram of the five senses thus:--
For a little while, good-bye and best happiness.
DEAR E. H.,-- ... Your thoughts about the Shadows of the East are touching. You ought to be able to write something beautiful and quite new if you had time....
You have been seized by the fascination of monstrous cities built up to heaven, and eternally sending their thunder to the smoke-blacked sky,--cities where we live by machinery. I can shudder now only to think of walking down a street between miles of houses two hundred feet high, with a roaring of traffic through them as of a torrent in a cañon. And that fascination means elegance, fashion, social duties.... I have been trying to deal with these two problems: "What has been the moral value of Christianity to mankind?" and "Why is Western civilization still in slavery to religious hypocrisy?" The answer to the former seems to be that without the brutal denial of the value of life and pleasure by Christianity, we could never have learned that the highest enjoyments are, after all, intellectual, and that progress can be effected only by self-sacrifice to interest and indifference to physical gratifications. And the latter question, though I have not yet solved it, seems to suggest that the hypocrisy itself may have large hidden value,--may be in process of transmutation into a truth.