[The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell]@TWC D-Link bookThe Soul of the Far East CHAPTER 1 30/35
For nothing is so isolating as a persistent idea which one dares not confide. And yet,--stranger paradox still,--was there ever any one willing to exchange his personality for another's? Who can imagine foregoing his own self? Nay, do we not cling even to its outward appearance? Is there a man so poor in all that man holds dear that he does not keenly resent being accidentally mistaken for his neighbor? Surely there must be something more than mirage in this deep-implanted, widespread instinct of human race. But however strong the conviction now of one's individuality, is there aught to assure him of its continuance beyond the confines of its present life? Will it awake on death's morrow and know itself, or will it, like the body that gave it lodgment, disintegrate again into indistinguishable spirit dust? Close upon the heels of the existing consciousness of self treads the shadow-like doubt of its hereafter. Will analogy help to answer the grewsome riddle of the Sphinx? Are the laws we have learned to be true for matter true also for mind? Matter we now know is indestructible; yet the form of it with which we once were so fondly familiar vanishes never to return.
Is a like fate to be the lot of the soul? That mind should be capable of annihilation is as inconceivable as that matter should cease to be.
Surely the spirit we feel existing round about us on every side now has been from ever, and will be for ever to come.
But that portion of it which we each know as self, is it not like to a drop of rain seen in its falling through the air? Indistinguishable the particle was in the cloud whence it came; indistinguishable it will become again in the ocean whither it is bound. Its personality is but its passing phase from a vast impersonal on the one hand to an equally vast impersonal on the other.
Thus seers preached in the past; so modern science is hinting to-day.
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