Sir Richard Francis Burton

“ With Ignor’ance wage eternal war, to know thy self forever strain, Thine ignorance of thine ignorance is thy fiercest foe, thy deadliest bane; That blunts thy sense, and dulls thy taste; that deafs thine ears, and blinds thine eyes; Creates the thing that never was, the Thing that ever is defies. The finite Atom infinite that forms thy circle’s centre-dot, So full-sufficient for itself, for other selves existing not, Finds the world mighty as ’tis small; yet must be fought the unequal fray; A myriad giants here; and there a pinch of dust, a clod of clay. ”

“ The soul is a new-comer on the scene; Sufficeth not the breath of Life to work the matter-born machine? We know the Gen’esis of the Soul; we trace the Soul to hour of birth; We mark its growth as grew mankind to boast himself sole Lord of Earth: The race of Be’ing from dawn of Life in an unbroken course was run; What men are pleased to call their Souls was in the hog and dog begun: Life is a ladder infinite-stepped, that hides its rungs from human eyes ”

“ He looks with impartial eye upon the endless variety of systems, maintained with equal confidence and self-sufficiency, by men of equal ability and honesty. He is weary of wandering over the world, and of finding every petty race wedded to its own opinions; claiming the monopoly of Truth; holding all others to be in error, and raising disputes whose violence, acerbity and virulence are in inverse ratio to the importance of the disputed matter. ”

“ Enough to think such things may be: to say they are not or they are Were folly: leave them all to Fate, nor wage on shadows useless war. Do what thy manhood bids thee do, from none but self expect applause; He noblest lives and noblest dies who makes and keeps his self-made laws. All other Life is living Death, a world where none but Phantoms dwell, A breath, a wind, a sound, a voice, a tinkling of the camel-bell. IX How then shall man so order life that when his tale of years is told, Like sated guest he wend his way ”

“ But he is too wise to affirm or to deny the existence of another world. For life beyond the grave there is no consensus of mankind, no Catholic opinion held semper, et ubique, et ab omnibus. The intellectual faculties (perception and reflection) are mute upon the subject: they bear no testimony to facts; they show no proof. Even the instinctive sense of our kind is here dumb. We may believe what we are taught: we can know nothing. He would, therefore, cultivate that receptive mood which, marching under the shadow of mighty events, leads to the highest of goals,—the development of Humanity. ”

“ Fate bids us bundle up our books, and bear them bod’ily to the worm: Hardly we learn to wield the blade before the wrist grows stiff and old; Hardly we learn to ply the pen ere Thought and Fancy faint with cold. Hardly we find the path of love, to sink the self, forget the “I,” When sad suspicion grips the heart, when Man, the Man begins to die: Hardly we scale the wisdom-heights, and sight the Pisgah-scene around, And breathe the breath of heav’enly air, and hear the Spheres’ harmonious sound ”

“ Be stout in woe, be stark in weal; Do good for Good is good to do: Spurn bribe of Heav’en and threat of Hell. To seek the True, to glad the heart, such is of life the HIGHER LAW, Whose differ’ence is the Man’s degree, the Man of gold, the Man of straw. See not that something in Mankind that rouses hate or scorn or strife, Better the worm of Izrâil* than Death that walks in form of life. ”

“ And hold Humanity one man, whose universal agony Still strains and strives to gain the goal, where agonies shall cease to be. Believe in all things; none believe; judge not nor warp by “Facts” the thought; See clear, hear clear, tho’ life may seem Mâyâ and Mirage, Dream and Naught. Abjure the Why and seek the How: the God and gods enthroned on high, Are silent all, are silent still; nor hear thy voice, nor deign reply. The Now, that indivis’ible point which studs the length of inf’inite line Whose ends are nowhere, is thine all, the puny all thou callest thine. ”

“ And now the last hath slipt away yon drear Death-desert to explore, And now one Pilgrim worn and lorn still lingers on the lonely shore. Yes, Life in youth-tide standeth still; in manhood streameth soft and slow; See, as it nears the ’abysmal goal how fleet the waters flash and flow! And Deaths are twain; the Deaths we see drop like the leaves in windy Fall; But ours, our own, are ruined worlds, a globe collapst, last end of all. ”

“ That gentle Moon, the lesser light, the Lover’s lamp, the Swain’s delight, A ruined world, a globe burnt out, a corpse upon the road of night. What reckt he, say, of Good or Ill who in the hill-hole made his lair, The blood-fed rav’ening Beast of prey, wilder than wildest wolf or bear? How long in Man’s pre-Ad’amite days to feed and swill, to sleep and breed, Were the Brute-biped’s only life, a perfect life sans Code or Creed? ”

“ Learn from the mighty Spi’rits of old to set thy foot on Heav’en and Hell; In Life to find thy hell and heav’en as thou abuse or use it well. So deemed the doughty Jew who dared by studied silence low to lay Orcus and Hades, lands of shades, the gloomy night of human day. Hard to the heart is final death: fain would an Ens not end in Nil; Love made the senti’ment kindly good: the Priest perverted all to ill. While Reason sternly bids us die, Love longs for life beyond the grave: Our hearts, affections, hopes and fears for Life-to-be shall ever crave. ”

“ This man, who omits to read the Conscience-law, however it may differ from the Society-law, is guilty of negligence. That man, who obscures the light of Nature with sophistries, becomes incapable of discerning his own truths. In both cases error, deliberately adopted, is succeeded by suffering which, we are told, comes in justice and benevolence as a warning, a remedy, and a chastisement.
But the Pilgrim is dissatisfied with the idea that evil originates in the individual actions of free agents, ourselves and others. ”

“ Literature, the voice of humanity, and the verdict of mankind proclaim that all existence is a state of sadness. The “physicians of the Soul” would save her melancholy from degenerating into despair by doses of steadfast belief in the presence of God, in the assurance of Immortality, and in visions of the final victory of good. Were Hâjî Abdû a mere Theologist, he would add that Sin, not the possibility of revolt, but the revolt itself against conscience, is the primary form of evil, because it produces error, moral and intellectual. ”

“ As palace mirror’d in the stream, as vapour mingled with the skies, So weaves the brain of mortal man the tangled web of Truth and Lies. What see we here? Forms, nothing more! Forms fill the brightest, strongest eye, We know not substance; ’mid the shades shadows ourselves we live and die. “Faith mountains move” I hear: I see the practice of the world unheed The foolish vaunt, the blatant boast that serves our vanity to feed. “Faith stands unmoved”; and why? Because man’s silly fancies still remain, And will remain till wiser man the day-dreams of his youth disdain. ”

“ Thus, as thou view the Phantom-forms which in the misty Past were thine, To be again the thing thou wast with honest pride thou may’st decline; And, glancing down the range of years, fear not thy future self to see; Resign’d to life, to death resign’d, as though the choice were nought to thee. On Thought itself feed not thy thought ”

“ Haply the Law that rules the world allows to man the widest range; And haply Fate’s a Theist-word, subject to human chance and change. This “I” may find a future Life, a nobler copy of our own, Where every riddle shall be ree’d, where every knowledge shall be known; Where ’twill be man’s to see the whole of what on Earth he sees in part; Where change shall ne’er surcharge the thought; nor hope defer’d shall hurt the heart. But!—faded flow’er and fallen leaf no more shall deck the parent tree; And man once dropt by Tree of Life what hope of other life has he? ”

“ With God’s foreknowledge man’s free will! what monster-growth of human brain, What powers of light shall ever pierce this puzzle dense with words inane? Vainly the heart on Providence calls, such aid to seek were hardly wise For man must own the pitiless Law that sways the globe and sevenfold skies. “Be ye Good Boys, go seek for Heav’en, come pay the priest that holds the key;” So spake, and speaks, and aye shall speak the last to enter Heaven,—he. Are these the words for men to hear? ”

“ A peculiarly active and acute observation taught him that many of these jarring families, especially those of the same blood, are par in the intellectual processes of perception and reflection; that in the business of the visible working world they are confessedly by no means superior to one another; whereas in abstruse matters of mere Faith, not admitting direct and sensual evidence, one in a hundred will claim to be right, and immodestly charge the other ninety-nine with being wrong. ”

“ But who shall mend the clay of man, the stolen breath to man restore? The shiver’d clock again shall strike; the broken reed shall pipe again: But we, we die, and Death is one, the doom of brutes, the doom of men. Then, if Nirwânâ* round our life with nothingness, ’tis haply best; Thy toils and troubles, want and woe at length have won their guerdon—Rest. ”

“ Conscience may be a “fear which is the shadow of justice”; even as pity is the shadow of love. Though simply a geographical and chronological accident, which changes with every age of the world, it may deter men from seeking and securing the prize of successful villainy. ”

“ The world is old and thou art young; the world is large and thou art small; Cease, atom of a moment’s span, To hold thyself an All-in-All! III. Fie, fie! you visionary things, ye motes that dance in sunny glow, Who base and build Eternities on briefest moment here below; Who pass through Life liked cagèd birds, the captives of a despot will ”

“ Man’s fancy-made Omniscience knows, who made Omniscience nought can know. Why must we meet, why must we part, why must we bear this yoke of MUST, Without our leave or askt or given, by tyrant Fate on victim thrust? ”

“ VII Man hath no Soul, a state of things, a no-thing still, a sound, a word Which so begets substantial thing that eye shall see what ear hath heard. Where was his Soul the savage beast which in primeval forests strayed, What shape had it, what dwelling-place, what part in nature’s plan it played? This Soul to ree a riddle made; who wants the vain duality? Is not myself enough for me? ”

“ This doctrine fails to account for its characteristics,—essentiality and universality. That creatures endowed with the mere possibility of liberty should not always choose the Good appears natural. But that of the milliards of human beings who have inhabited the Earth, not one should have been found invariably to choose Good, proves how insufficient is the solution. Hence no one believes in the existence of the complete man under the present state of things. ”

“ Ancillary to the churchman’s immoral view of “original sin” is the unscientific theory that evil came into the world with Adam and his seed. Let us ask what was the state of our globe in the pre-Adamite days, when the tyrants of the Earth, the huge Saurians and other monsters, lived in perpetual strife, in a destructiveness of which we have now only the feeblest examples? What is the actual state of the world of waters, where the only object of life is death, where the Law of murder is the Law of Development? ”

“ Whilst the religionist assures us that man is not a mere toy of fate, but a free agent responsible to himself, with work to do and duties to perform, the Hâjî, with many modern schools, holds Mind to be a word describing a special operation of matter; the faculties generally to be manifestations of movements in the central nervous system; and every idea, even of the Deity, to be a certain little pulsation of a certain little mass of animal pap,—the brain. ”

“ Mankind, das rastlose Ursachenthier, is born to be on the whole equally happy and miserable. The highest organisms, the fine porcelain of our family, enjoy the most and suffer the most: they have a capacity for rising to the empyrean of pleasure and for plunging deep into the swift-flowing river of woe and pain. ”

“ The Ghost, embodied natural Dread of dreary death and foul decay, Begat the Spirit, Soul and Shade with Hades’ pale and wan array. The Soul required a greater Soul, a Soul of Souls, to rule the host; Hence spirit-powers and hierarchies, all gendered by the savage Ghost. ”

“ The common clay enjoys little and suffers little. Sum up the whole and distribute the mass: the result will be an average; and the beggar is, on the whole, happy as the prince. Why, then, asks the objector, does man ever strive and struggle to change, to rise; a struggle which involves the idea of improving his condition? The Hâjî answers, “Because such is the Law under which man is born: it may be fierce as famine, cruel as the grave, but man must obey it with blind obedience.” He does not enter into the question whether life is worth living, whether man should elect to be born. ”

“ May not your Maker make the world from matter, an it suit His hest? Nay more, the sordider the stuff the cunninger the workman’s hand: Cease, then, your own Almighty Power to bind, to bound, to understand. “Reason and Instinct!” How we love to play with words that please our pride; Our noble race’s mean descent by false forged titles seek to hide! For “gift divine” I bid you read the better work of higher brain, From Instinct diff’ering in degree as golden mine from leaden vein. Reason is Life’s sole arbiter, the magic Laby’rinth’s single clue: Worlds lie above, beyond its ken ”