A Japanese miscellany - University of Oregon

In a Japanese Hospital 303
II
The memory of icons naturally evoked remem-
brance of those powers which icons do but sym-
bolize; and presently I found myself thinking
that, to the vision of a God, the entire course of
a human life would appear much like the incident
which I had just witnessed, — a coming, a crying
and struggling, and a sudden vanishing of per-
sonality under the resistless anaesthetic of death.
(1 am not speaking of a cosmic divinity, to whom
the interval between the kindling and the extinc-
tion of a sun would seem as brief as seems to us
the flash of a firefly in the night: I mean an
anthropomorphic God.) According to Herbert
Spencer, the tiny consciousness of a gnat can dis-
tinguish intervals of time representing something
between the ten-thousandth and the fifteen-
thousandth part of a second. For a being as
mentally superior to man as man to the gnat,
would not the time of a generation appear but an
instant ? Would such a being perceive our human
existence at all, except as a budding and a wither-
ing,— a ceaseless swift succession of apparitions
and disparitions, — a mere phenomenon of fer-
mentation peculiar to the surface of a cooling