_--which means
self-immolation by disembowelment. "Ripping the abdomen? How
absurd!"--so cry those to whom the name is new. Absurdly odd as it may
sound at first to foreign ears, it can not be so very foreign to
students of Shakespeare, who puts these words in Brutus' mouth--"Thy
(Caesar's) spirit walks abroad and turns our swords into our proper
entrails." Listen to a modern English poet, who in his _Light of Asia_,
speaks of a sword piercing the bowels of a queen:--none blames him for
bad English or breach of modesty. Or, to take still another example,
look at Guercino's painting of Cato's death, in the Palazzo Rossa in
Genoa. Whoever has read the swan-song which Addison makes Cato sing,
will not jeer at the sword half-buried in his abdomen. In our minds this
mode of death is associated with instances of noblest deeds and of most
touching pathos, so that nothing repugnant, much less ludicrous, mars
our conception of it. So wonderful is the transforming power of virtue,
of greatness, of tenderness, that the vilest form of death assumes a
sublimity and becomes a symbol of new life, or else--the sign which
Constantine beheld would not conquer the world!

Not for extraneous associations only does _seppuku_ lose in our mind any
taint of absurdity; for the choice of this particular part of the body
to operate upon, was based on an old anatomical belief as to the seat of
the soul and of the affections. When Moses wrote of Joseph's "bowels
yearning upon his brother," or David prayed the Lord not to forget his
bowels, or when Isaiah, Jeremiah and other inspired men of old spoke of
the "sounding" or the "troubling" of bowels, they all and each endorsed
the belief prevalent among the Japanese that in the abdomen was
enshrined the soul. The Semites habitually spoke of the liver and
kidneys and surrounding fat as the seat of emotion and of life. The term
_hara_ was more comprehensive than the Greek _phren_ or _thumos_ and
the Japanese and Hellenese alike thought the spirit of man to dwell
somewhere in that region. Such a notion is by no means confined to the
peoples of antiquity. The French, in spite of the theory propounded by
one of their most distinguished philosophers, Descartes, that the soul
is located in the pineal gland, still insist in using the term _ventre_
in a sense, which, if anatomically too vague, is nevertheless
physiologically significant. Similarly _entrailles_ stands in their
language for affection and compassi