The Writings of Lafcadio Hearn, Volume 7

Front Cover
Houghton Mifflin, 1922

From inside the book

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

Popular passages

Page 243 - The adoption of Western civilization was not nearly such an easy matter as un-thinking persons imagined. And it is quite evident that the mental readjustments, effected at a cost which remains to be told, have given good results only along directions in which the race had always shown capacities of special kinds. Thus, the appliances of Western industrial invention have worked admirably in Japanese hands, — have produced excellent results in those crafts at which the nation had been skillful, in...
Page 119 - Therefore, O Ananda, be ye lamps unto yourselves. Be ye a refuge to yourselves. Betake yourselves to no external refuge. Hold fast to the truth as a lamp. Hold fast as a refuge to the truth. Look not for refuge to any one besides yourselves.
Page 415 - The corollary here drawn from the general argument is that the human brain is an organized register of infinitely numerous experiences received during the evolution of life, or rather, during the evolution of that series of organisms through which the human organism has been reached. The effects of the most uniform and frequent of these experiences have been successively bequeathed, principal and interest...
Page 380 - ... supplied, and among whom public opinion has great influence, the rights of others are fully respected. It is true, also, that we have vastly extended the sphere of those rights, and include within them all the brotherhood of man. But...
Page 419 - After the first recognition even by theology of physical evolution, it was easy to predict that the recognition of psychical evolution could not be indefinitely delayed; for the barrier erected by old dogma to keep men from looking backward had been broken down. And to-day for the student of scientific psychology the idea of preexistence passes out of the realm of theory into the realm of fact, proving the Buddhist explanation of the universal mystery quite as plausible as any other. "None but very...
Page 415 - The human brain is an organized register of infinitely numerous experiences received during the evolution of life, or rather, during the evolution of that series of organisms through which the human organism has been reached. The effects of the most uniform and frequent of these experiences have been successively bequeathed, principal and interest ; and have slowly amounted to that high intelligence which lies latent in the brain of the infant — which the infant in after-life exercises and perhaps...
Page 455 - What you see me do," he said to a retainer, "I am not doing because I think of the worth of the garment in itself, but because I think of what it needed to produce it. It is the result of the toil of a poor woman; and that is why I value it. If we do not think, while using things, of the time and effort required to make them — then our want of consideration puts us on a level with the beasts...
Page 18 - I have memory of a place and a magical time in which the Sun and the Moon were larger and brighter than now. Whether it was of this life or of some life before I cannot tell. But I know the sky was very much more blue, and nearer to the world, — almost as it seems to become above the masts of a steamer steaming into equatorial summer. The sea was alive, and used to talk, — and the Wind made me cry out for joy when it touched me. Once or twice during other years, in divine days lived among the...
Page 445 - ... point of eternal truth as any thinker of the nineteenth century. We are now learning, also, that the theories of the astrologers and of the alchemists were but partially, not totally, wrong. We have reason even to suppose that no dream of the invisible world has ever been dreamed, — that no hypothesis of the unseen has ever been imagined, — which future science will not prove to have contained some germ of reality.
Page 250 - Returnbig after five hours' absence, I find on the same lot the skeleton of a two-story house. Next forenoon I see that the walls are nearly finished already, — mud and wattles. By sundown the roof has been completely tiled. On the following morning I observe that the mattings have been put down...

Bibliographic information