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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1409 ***
+
+THE SOUL OF THE FAR EAST
+
+By Percival Lowell
+
+
+Contents
+
+     Chapter 1. Individuality
+
+     Chapter 2. Family
+
+     Chapter 3. Adoption
+
+     Chapter 4. Language
+
+     Chapter 5. Nature and Art
+
+     Chapter 6. Art
+
+     Chapter 7. Religion
+
+     Chapter 8. Imagination
+
+
+
+
+Chapter 1. Individuality.
+
+The boyish belief that on the other side of our globe all things are
+of necessity upside down is startlingly brought back to the man when he
+first sets foot at Yokohama. If his initial glance does not, to be sure,
+disclose the natives in the every-day feat of standing calmly on their
+heads, an attitude which his youthful imagination conceived to be a
+necessary consequence of their geographical position, it does at least
+reveal them looking at the world as if from the standpoint of that
+eccentric posture. For they seem to him to see everything topsy-turvy.
+Whether it be that their antipodal situation has affected their brains,
+or whether it is the mind of the observer himself that has hitherto been
+wrong in undertaking to rectify the inverted pictures presented by
+his retina, the result, at all events, is undeniable. The world stands
+reversed, and, taking for granted his own uprightness, the stranger
+unhesitatingly imputes to them an obliquity of vision, a state of mind
+outwardly typified by the cat-like obliqueness of their eyes.
+
+If the inversion be not precisely of the kind he expected, it is none
+the less striking, and impressibly more real. If personal experience has
+definitely convinced him that the inhabitants of that under side of our
+planet do not adhere to it head downwards, like flies on a ceiling,--his
+early a priori deduction,--they still appear quite as antipodal,
+mentally considered. Intellectually, at least, their attitude sets
+gravity at defiance. For to the mind's eye their world is one huge,
+comical antithesis of our own. What we regard intuitively in one way
+from our standpoint, they as intuitively observe in a diametrically
+opposite manner from theirs. To speak backwards, write backwards, read
+backwards, is but the a b c of their contrariety. The inversion extends
+deeper than mere modes of expression, down into the very matter of
+thought. Ideas of ours which we deemed innate find in them no home,
+while methods which strike us as preposterously unnatural appear to
+be their birthright. From the standing of a wet umbrella on its handle
+instead of its head to dry to the striking of a match away in place
+of toward one, there seems to be no action of our daily lives, however
+trivial, but finds with them its appropriate reaction--equal but
+opposite. Indeed, to one anxious of conforming to the manners and
+customs of the country, the only road to right lies in following
+unswervingly that course which his inherited instincts assure him to be
+wrong.
+
+Yet these people are human beings; with all their eccentricities they
+are men. Physically we cannot but be cognizant of the fact, nor mentally
+but be conscious of it. Like us, indeed, and yet so unlike are they
+that we seem, as we gaze at them, to be viewing our own humanity in
+some mirth-provoking mirror of the mind,--a mirror that shows us our own
+familiar thoughts, but all turned wrong side out. Humor holds the glass,
+and we become the sport of our own reflections. But is it otherwise at
+home? Do not our personal presentments mock each of us individually
+our lives long? Who but is the daily dupe of his dressing-glass, and
+complacently conceives himself to be a very different appearing person
+from what he is, forgetting that his right side has become his left, and
+vice versa? Yet who, when by chance he catches sight in like manner of
+the face of a friend, can keep from smiling at the caricatures which the
+mirror's left-for-right reversal makes of the asymmetry of that
+friend's features,--caricatures all the more grotesque for being utterly
+unsuspected by their innocent original? Perhaps, could we once see
+ourselves as others see us, our surprise in the case of foreign peoples
+might be less pronounced.
+
+Regarding, then, the Far Oriental as a man, and not simply as
+a phenomenon, we discover in his peculiar point of view a new
+importance,--the possibility of using it stereoptically. For his
+mind-photograph of the world can be placed side by side with ours, and
+the two pictures combined will yield results beyond what either alone
+could possibly have afforded. Thus harmonized, they will help us
+to realize humanity. Indeed it is only by such a combination of two
+different aspects that we ever perceive substance and distinguish
+reality from illusion. What our two eyes make possible for material
+objects, the earth's two hemispheres may enable us to do for mental
+traits. Only the superficial never changes its expression; the
+appearance of the solid varies with the standpoint of the observer.
+In dreamland alone does everything seem plain, and there all is
+unsubstantial.
+
+To say that the Japanese are not a savage tribe is of course
+unnecessary; to repeat the remark, anything but superfluous, on the
+principle that what is a matter of common notoriety is very apt to
+prove a matter about which uncommonly little is known. At present we
+go halfway in recognition of these people by bestowing upon them a
+demi-diploma of mental development called semi-civilization, neglecting,
+however, to specify in what the fractional qualification consists.
+If the suggestion of a second moiety, as of something directly
+complementary to them, were not indirectly complimentary to ourselves,
+the expression might pass; but, as it is, the self-praise is rather too
+obvious to carry conviction. For Japan's claim to culture is not based
+solely upon the exports with which she supplements our art, nor upon the
+paper, china, and bric-a-brac with which she adorns our rooms; any more
+than Western science is adequately represented in Japan by our popular
+imports there of kerosene oil, matches, and beer. Only half civilized
+the Far East presumably is, but it is so rather in an absolute than a
+relative sense; in the sense of what might have been, not of what is. It
+is so as compared, not with us, but with the eventual possibilities of
+humanity. As yet, neither system, Western nor Eastern, is perfect enough
+to serve in all things as standard for the other. The light of truth
+has reached each hemisphere through the medium of its own mental
+crystallization, and this has polarized it in opposite ways, so that now
+the rays that are normal to the eyes of the one only produce darkness
+to those of the other. For the Japanese civilization in the sense of not
+being savagery is the equal of our own. It is not in the polish that the
+real difference lies; it is in the substance polished. In politeness, in
+delicacy, they have as a people no peers. Art has been their mistress,
+though science has never been their master. Perhaps for this very reason
+that art, not science, has been the Muse they courted, the result has
+been all the more widespread. For culture there is not the attainment
+of the few, but the common property of the people. If the peaks of
+intellect rise less eminent, the plateau of general elevation stands
+higher. But little need be said to prove the civilization of a land
+where ordinary tea-house girls are models of refinement, and common
+coolies, when not at work, play chess for pastime.
+
+If Japanese ways look odd at first sight, they but look more odd on
+closer acquaintance. In a land where, to allow one's understanding the
+freer play of indoor life, one begins, not by taking off his hat, but by
+removing his boots, he gets at the very threshold a hint that humanity
+is to be approached the wrong end to. When, after thus entering a
+house, he tries next to gain admittance to the mind of its occupant, the
+suspicion becomes a certainty. He discovers that this people talk, so
+to speak, backwards; that before he can hope to comprehend them, or
+make himself understood in return, he must learn to present his thoughts
+arranged in inverse order from the one in which they naturally suggest
+themselves to his mind. His sentences must all be turned inside out. He
+finds himself lost in a labyrinth of language. The same seems to be true
+of the thoughts it embodies. The further he goes the more obscure the
+whole process becomes, until, after long groping about for some means of
+orienting himself, he lights at last upon the clue. This clue consists
+in "the survival of the unfittest."
+
+In the civilization of Japan we have presented to us a most interesting
+case of partially arrested development; or, to speak esoterically,
+we find ourselves placed face to face with a singular example of a
+completed race-life. For though from our standpoint the evolution of
+these people seems suddenly to have come to an end in mid-career,
+looked at more intimately it shows all the signs of having fully run its
+course. Development ceased, not because of outward obstruction, but from
+purely intrinsic inability to go on. The intellectual machine was not
+shattered; it simply ran down. To this fact the phenomenon owes its
+peculiar interest. For we behold here in the case of man the same
+spectacle that we see cosmically in the case of the moon, the spectacle
+of a world that has died of old age. No weak spot in their social
+organism destroyed them from within; no epidemic, in the shape of
+foreign hordes, fell upon them from without. For in spite of the fact
+that China offers the unique example of a country that has simply lived
+to be conquered, mentally her masters have invariably become her pupils.
+Having ousted her from her throne as ruler, they proceeded to sit at
+her feet as disciples. Thus they have rather helped than hindered her
+civilization.
+
+Whatever portion of the Far East we examine we find its mental history
+to be the same story with variations. However unlike China, Korea, and
+Japan are in some respects, through the careers of all three we can
+trace the same life-spirit. It is the career of the river Jordan rising
+like any other stream from the springs among the mountains only to fall
+after a brief existence into the Dead Sea. For their vital force
+had spent itself more than a millennium ago. Already, then, their
+civilization had in its deeper developments attained its stature, and
+has simply been perfecting itself since. We may liken it to some stunted
+tree, that, finding itself prevented from growth, bastes the more
+luxuriantly to put forth flowers and fruit. For not the final but the
+medial processes were skipped. In those superficial amenities with
+which we more particularly link our idea of civilization, these peoples
+continued to grow. Their refinement, if failing to reach our standard
+in certain respects, surpasses ours considering the bare barbaric
+basis upon which it rests. For it is as true of the Japanese as of
+the proverbial Russian, though in a more scientific sense, that if you
+scratch him you will find the ancestral Tartar. But it is no less true
+that the descendants of this rude forefather have now taken on a polish
+of which their own exquisite lacquer gives but a faint reflection. The
+surface was perfected after the substance was formed. Our word finish,
+with its double meaning, expresses both the process and the result.
+
+There entered, to heighten the bizarre effect, a spirit common in minds
+that lack originality--the spirit of imitation. Though consequent enough
+upon a want of initiative, the results of this trait appear anything but
+natural to people of a more progressive past. The proverbial collar and
+pair of spurs look none the less odd to the stranger for being a mental
+instead of a bodily habit. Something akin to such a case of unnatural
+selection has there taken place. The orderly procedure of natural
+evolution was disastrously supplemented by man. For the fact that in
+the growth of their tree of knowledge the branches developed out of all
+proportion to the trunk is due to a practice of culture-grafting.
+
+From before the time when they began to leave records of their actions
+the Japanese have been a nation of importers, not of merchandise, but of
+ideas. They have invariably shown the most advanced free-trade spirit
+in preferring to take somebody else's ready-made articles rather than
+to try to produce any brand-new conceptions themselves. They continue
+to follow the same line of life. A hearty appreciation of the things of
+others is still one of their most winning traits. What they took they
+grafted bodily upon their ancestral tree, which in consequence came to
+present a most unnaturally diversified appearance. For though not unlike
+other nations in wishing to borrow, if their zeal in the matter was
+slightly excessive, they were peculiar in that they never assimilated
+what they took. They simply inserted it upon the already existing
+growth. There it remained, and throve, and blossomed, nourished by that
+indigenous Japanese sap, taste. But like grafts generally, the foreign
+boughs were not much modified by their new life-blood, nor was the tree
+in its turn at all affected by them. Connected with it only as separable
+parts of its structure, the cuttings might have been lopped off again
+without influencing perceptibly the condition of the foster-parent stem.
+The grafts in time grew to be great branches, but the trunk remained
+through it all the trunk of a sapling. In other words, the nation grew
+up to man's estate, keeping the mind of its childhood.
+
+What is thus true of the Japanese is true likewise of the Koreans and of
+the Chinese. The three peoples, indeed, form so many links in one long
+chain of borrowing. China took from India, then Korea copied China, and
+lastly Japan imitated Korea. In this simple manner they successively
+became possessed of a civilization which originally was not the property
+of any one of them. In the eagerness they all evinced in purloining
+what was not theirs, and in the perfect content with which they then
+proceeded to enjoy what they had taken, they remind us forcibly of
+that happy-go-lucky class in the community which prefers to live on
+questionable loans rather than work itself for a living. Like those same
+individuals, whatever interest the Far Eastern people may succeed in
+raising now, Nature will in the end make them pay dearly for their lack
+of principal.
+
+The Far Eastern civilization resembles, in fact, more a mechanical
+mixture of social elements than a well differentiated chemical compound.
+For in spite of the great variety of ingredients thrown into its
+caldron of destiny, as no affinity existed between them, no combination
+resulted. The power to fuse was wanting. Capability to evolve anything
+is not one of the marked characteristics of the Far East. Indeed, the
+tendency to spontaneous variation, Nature's mode of making experiments,
+would seem there to have been an enterprising faculty that was exhausted
+early. Sleepy, no doubt, from having got up betimes with the dawn, these
+dwellers in the far lands of the morning began to look upon their day
+as already well spent before they had reached its noon. They grew old
+young, and have remained much the same age ever since. What they were
+centuries ago, that at bottom they are to-day. Take away the European
+influence of the last twenty years, and each man might almost be his
+own great-grandfather. In race characteristics he is yet essentially the
+same. The traits that distinguished these peoples in the past have been
+gradually extinguishing them ever since. Of these traits, stagnating
+influences upon their career, perhaps the most important is the great
+quality of impersonality.
+
+If we take, through the earth's temperate zone, a belt of country
+whose northern and southern edges are determined by certain limiting
+isotherms, not more than half the width of the zone apart, we shall find
+that we have included in a relatively small extent of surface almost
+all the nations of note in the world, past or present. Now if we examine
+this belt, and compare the different parts of it with one another, we
+shall be struck by a remarkable fact. The peoples inhabiting it grow
+steadily more personal as we go west. So unmistakable is this gradation
+of spirit, that one is tempted to ascribe it to cosmic rather than
+to human causes. It is as marked as the change in color of the human
+complexion observable along any meridian, which ranges from black at
+the equator to blonde toward the pole. In like manner, the sense of
+self grows more intense as we follow in the wake of the setting sun, and
+fades steadily as we advance into the dawn. America, Europe, the Levant,
+India, Japan, each is less personal than the one before. We stand at the
+nearer end of the scale, the Far Orientals at the other. If with us the
+I seems to be of the very essence of the soul, then the soul of the Far
+East may be said to be Impersonality.
+
+Curious as this characteristic is as a fact, it is even more interesting
+as a factor. For what it betokens of these peoples in particular may
+suggest much about man generally. It may mark a stride in theory, if a
+standstill in practice. Possibly it may help us to some understanding
+of ourselves. Not that it promises much aid to vexed metaphysical
+questions, but as a study in sociology it may not prove so vain.
+
+And for a thing which is always with us, its discussion may be said to
+be peculiarly opportune just now. For it lies at the bottom of the most
+pressing questions of the day. Of the two great problems that stare the
+Western world in the face at the present moment, both turn to it for
+solution. Agnosticism, the foreboding silence of those who think,
+socialism, communism, and nihilism, the petulant cry of those who do
+not, alike depend ultimately for the right to be upon the truth or the
+falsity of the sense of self.
+
+For if there be no such actual thing as individuality, if the feeling
+we call by that name be naught but the transient illusion the Buddhists
+would have us believe it, any faith founded upon it as basis vanishes as
+does the picture in a revolving kaleidoscope,--less enduring even than
+the flitting phantasmagoria of a dream. If the ego be but the passing
+shadow of the material brain, at the disintegration of the gray matter
+what will become of us? Shall we simply lapse into an indistinguishable
+part of the vast universe that compasses us round? At the thought we
+seem to stand straining our gaze, on the shore of the great sea of
+knowledge, only to watch the fog roll in, and hide from our view even
+those headlands of hope that, like beseeching hands, stretch out into
+the deep.
+
+So more materially. If individuality be a delusion of the mind, what
+motive potent enough to excite endeavor in the breast of an ordinary
+mortal remains? Philosophers, indeed, might still work for the
+advancement of mankind, but mankind itself would not continue long to
+labor energetically for what should profit only the common weal. Take
+away the stimulus of individuality, and action is paralyzed at once.
+For with most men the promptings of personal advantage only afford
+sufficient incentive to effort. Destroy this force, then any
+consideration due it lapses, and socialism is not only justified, it
+is raised instantly into an axiom of life. The community, in that case,
+becomes itself the unit, the indivisible atom of existence. Socialism,
+then communism, then nihilism, follow in inevitable sequence. That even
+the Far Oriental, with all his numbing impersonality, has not touched
+this goal may at least suggest that individuality is a fact.
+
+But first, what do we know about its existence ourselves?
+
+Very early in the course of every thoughtful childhood an event takes
+place, by the side of which, to the child himself, all other events sink
+into insignificance. It is not one that is recognized and chronicled
+by the world, for it is wholly unconnected with action. No one but the
+child is aware of its occurrence, and he never speaks of it to others.
+Yet to that child it marks an epoch. So intensely individual does it
+seem that the boy is afraid to avow it, while in reality so universal
+is it that probably no human being has escaped its influence. Though
+subjective purely, it has more vividness than any external event;
+and though strictly intrinsic to life, it is more startling than any
+accident of fate or fortune. This experience of the boy's, at once so
+singular and yet so general, is nothing less than the sudden revelation
+to him one day of the fact of his own personality.
+
+Somewhere about the time when sensation is giving place to sensitiveness
+as the great self-educator, and the knowledge gained by the five bodily
+senses is being fused into the wisdom of that mental one we call common
+sense, the boy makes a discovery akin to the act of waking up. All at
+once he becomes conscious of himself; and the consciousness has about
+it a touch of the uncanny. Hitherto he has been aware only of matter;
+he now first realizes mind. Unwarned, unprepared, he is suddenly ushered
+before being, and stands awe-struck in the presence of--himself.
+
+If the introduction to his own identity was startling, there is nothing
+reassuring in the feeling that this strange acquaintanceship must last.
+For continue it does. It becomes an unsought intimacy he cannot shake
+off. Like to his own shadow he cannot escape it. To himself a man cannot
+but be at home. For years this alter ego haunts him, for he imagines it
+an idiosyncrasy of his own, a morbid peculiarity he dare not confide
+to any one, for fear of being thought a fool. Not till long afterwards,
+when he has learned to live as a matter of course with his ever-present
+ghost, does he discover that others have had like familiars themselves.
+
+Sometimes this dawn of consciousness is preceded by a long twilight of
+soul-awakening; but sometimes, upon more sensitive and subtler natures,
+the light breaks with all the suddenness of a sunrise at the equator,
+revealing to the mind's eye an unsuspected world of self within. But in
+whatever way we may awake to it, the sense of personality, when first
+realized, appears already, like the fabled Goddess of Wisdom, full grown
+in the brain. From the moment when we first remember ourselves we seem
+to be as old as we ever seem to others afterwards to become. We grow,
+indeed, in knowledge, in wisdom, in experience, as our years increase,
+but deep down in our heart of hearts we are still essentially the same.
+To be sure, people pay us more deference than they did, which suggests
+a doubt at times whether we may not have changed; small boys of a
+succeeding generation treat us with a respect that causes us inwardly to
+smile, as we think how little we differ from them, if they but knew it.
+For at bottom we are not conscious of change from that morning, long
+ago, when first we realized ourselves. We feel just as young now as we
+felt old then. We are but amused at the world's discrimination where we
+can detect no difference.
+
+Every human being has been thus "twice born": once as matter, once as
+mind. Nor is this second birth the birthright only of mankind. All the
+higher animals probably, possibly even the lower too, have experienced
+some such realization of individual identity. However that may be,
+certainly to all races of men has come this revelation; only the degree
+in which they have felt its force has differed immensely. It is one
+thing to the apathetic, fatalistic Turk, and quite another matter to an
+energetic, nervous American. Facts, fancies, faiths, all show how wide
+is the variance in feelings. With them no introspective [greek]cnzhi
+seauton overexcites the consciousness of self. But with us; as with
+those of old possessed of devils, it comes to startle and stays to
+distress. Too apt is it to prove an ever-present, undesirable double.
+Too often does it play the part of uninvited spectre at the feast,
+whose presence no one save its unfortunate victim suspects. The haunting
+horror of his own identity is to natures far less eccentric than Kenelm
+Chillingly's only too common a curse. To this companionship, paradoxical
+though it sound, is principally due the peculiar loneliness of
+childhood. 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. With us the idea seems
+the bitter fruit of material philosophy; by them it was looked upon as
+the fairest flower of their faith. What is dreaded now as the impious
+suggestion of the godless four thousand years ago was reverenced as a
+sacred tenet of religion.
+
+Shorter even than his short threescore years and ten is that soul's life
+of which man is directly cognizant. Bounded by two seemingly impersonal
+states is the personal consciousness of which he is made aware: the one
+the infantile existence that precedes his boyish discovery, the other
+the gloom that grows with years,--two twilights that fringe the two
+borders of his day. But with the Far Oriental, life is all twilight. For
+in Japan and China both states are found together. There, side by side
+with the present unconsciousness of the babe exists the belief in a
+coming unconsciousness for the man. So inseparably blended are the two
+that the known truth of the one seems, for that very bond, to carry
+with it the credentials of the other. Can it be that the personal,
+progressive West is wrong, and the impersonal, impassive East right?
+Surely not. Is the other side of the world in advance of us in
+mind-development, even as it precedes us in the time of day; or just as
+our noon is its night, may it not be far in our rear? Is not its seeming
+wisdom rather the precociousness of what is destined never to go far?
+
+Brought suddenly upon such a civilization, after the blankness of a
+long ocean voyage, one is reminded instinctively of the feelings of that
+bewildered individual who, after a dinner at which he had eventually
+ceased to be himself, was by way of pleasantry left out overnight in a
+graveyard, on their way home, by his humorously inclined companions; and
+who, on awaking alone, in a still dubious condition, looked around
+him in surprise, rubbed his eyes two or three times to no purpose, and
+finally muttered in a tone of awe-struck conviction, "Well, either I'm
+the first to rise, or I'm a long way behind time!"
+
+Whether their failure to follow the natural course of evolution results
+in bringing them in at the death just the same or not, these people are
+now, at any rate, stationary not very far from the point at which we
+all set out. They are still in that childish state of development
+before self-consciousness has spoiled the sweet simplicity of nature. An
+impersonal race seems never to have fully grown up.
+
+Partly for its own sake, partly for ours, this most distinctive feature
+of the Far East, its marked impersonality, is well worthy particular
+attention; for while it collaterally suggests pregnant thoughts about
+ourselves, it directly underlies the deeper oddities of a civilization
+which is the modern eighth wonder of the world. We shall see this as we
+look at what these people are, at what they were, and at what they hope
+to become; not historically, but psychologically, as one might perceive,
+were he but wise enough, in an acorn, besides the nut itself, two oaks,
+that one from which it fell, and that other which from it will rise.
+These three states, which we may call its potential past, present, and
+future, may be observed and studied in three special outgrowths of a
+race's character: in its language, in its every-day thoughts, and in its
+religion. For in the language of a people we find embalmed the spirit
+of its past; in its every-day thoughts, be they of arts or sciences, is
+wrapped up its present life; in its religion lie enfolded its dreamings
+of a future. From out each of these three subjects in the Far East
+impersonality stares us in the face. Upon this quality as a foundation
+rests the Far Oriental character. It is individually rather than
+nationally that I propose to scan it now. It is the action of a
+particle in the wave of world-development I would watch, rather than
+the propagation of the wave itself. Inferences about the movement of the
+whole will follow of themselves a knowledge of the motion of its parts.
+
+But before we attack the subject esoterically, let us look a moment at
+the man as he appears in his relation to the community. Such a glance
+will suggest the peculiar atmosphere of impersonality that pervades the
+people.
+
+However lacking in cleverness, in merit, or in imagination a man may
+be, there are in our Western world, if his existence there be so much as
+noticed at all, three occasions on which he appears in print. His birth,
+his marriage, and his death are all duly chronicled in type, perhaps as
+sufficiently typical of the general unimportance of his life. Mention of
+one's birth, it is true, is an aristocratic privilege, confined to the
+world of English society. In democratic America, no doubt because all
+men there are supposed to be born free and equal, we ignore the first
+event, and mention only the last two episodes, about which our national
+astuteness asserts no such effacing equality.
+
+Accepting our newspaper record as a fair enough summary of the biography
+of an average man, let us look at these three momentous occasions in the
+career of a Far Oriental.
+
+
+
+Chapter 2. Family.
+
+In the first place, then, the poor little Japanese baby is ushered into
+this world in a sadly impersonal manner, for he is not even accorded the
+distinction of a birthday. He is permitted instead only the much less
+special honor of a birth-year. Not that he begins his separate existence
+otherwise than is the custom of mortals generally, at a definite instant
+of time, but that very little subsequent notice is ever taken of the
+fact. On the contrary, from the moment he makes his appearance he is
+spoken of as a year old, and this same age he continues to be considered
+in most simple ease of calculation, till the beginning of the next
+calendar year. When that epoch of general rejoicing arrives, he is
+credited with another year himself. So is everybody else. New Year's day
+is a common birthday for the community, a sort of impersonal anniversary
+for his whole world. A like reckoning is followed in China and Korea.
+Upon the disadvantages of being considered from one's birth up at least
+one year and possibly two older than one really is, it lies beyond our
+present purpose to expatiate. It is quite evident that woman has had no
+voice in the framing of such a chronology. One would hardly imagine
+that man had either, so astronomic is the system. A communistic age
+is however but an unavoidable detail of the general scheme whose most
+suggestive feature consists in the subordination of the actual birthday
+of the individual to the fictitious birthday of the community. For it is
+not so much the want of commemoration shown the subject as the character
+of the commemoration which is significant. Some slight notice is indeed
+paid to birthdays during early childhood, but even then their observance
+is quite secondary in importance to that of the great impersonal
+anniversaries of the third day of the third moon and the fifth day of
+the fifth moon. These two occasions celebrated the coming of humanity
+into the world with an impersonality worthy of the French revolutionary
+calendar. The first of them is called the festival of girls, and
+commemorates the birth of girls generally, the advent of the universal
+feminine, as one may say. The second is a corresponding anniversary for
+boys. Owing to its sex, the latter is the greater event of the two, and
+in consequence of its most conspicuous feature is styled the festival of
+fishes. The fishes are hollow paper images of the "tai" from four to six
+feet in length, tied to the top of a long pole planted in the ground and
+tipped with a gilded ball. Holes in the paper at the mouth and the
+tail enable the wind to inflate the body so that it floats about
+horizontally, swaying hither and thither, and tugging at the line after
+the manner of a living thing. The fish are emblems of good luck, and are
+set up in the courtyard of every house where a son has been born during
+the year. On this auspicious day Tokio is suddenly transformed into
+eighty square miles of aquarium.
+
+For any more personal purpose New Year's day eclipses all particular
+anniversaries. Then everybody congratulates everybody else upon
+everything in general, and incidentally upon being alive. Such
+substitution of an abstract for a concrete birthday, although
+exceedingly convenient for others, must at least conduce to
+self-forgetfulness on the part of its proper possessor, and tend
+inevitably to merge the identity of the individual in that of the
+community.
+
+It fares hardly better with the Far Oriental in the matter of marriage.
+Although he is, as we might think, the person most interested in the
+result, he is permitted no say in the affair whatever. In fact, it
+is not his affair at all, but his father's. His hand is simply made a
+cat's-paw of. The matter is entirely a business transaction, entered
+into by the parent and conducted through regular marriage brokers. In
+it he plays only the part of a marionette. His revenge for being thus
+bartered out of what might be the better half of his life, he takes
+eventually on the next succeeding generation.
+
+His death may be said to be the most important act of his whole life.
+For then only can his personal existence be properly considered to
+begin. By it he joins the great company of ancestors who are to these
+people of almost more consequence than living folk, and of much more
+individual distinction. Particularly is this the case in China and
+Korea, but the same respect, though in a somewhat less rigid form,
+is paid the dead in Japan. Then at last the individual receives that
+recognition which was denied him in the flesh. In Japan a mortuary
+tablet is set up to him in the house and duly worshipped; on the
+continent the ancestors are given a dwelling of their own, and even
+more devotedly reverenced. But in both places the cult is anything but
+funereal. For the ancestral tombs are temples and pleasure pavilions at
+the same time, consecrated not simply to rites and ceremonies, but to
+family gatherings and general jollification. And the fortunate defunct
+must feel, if he is still half as sentient as his dutiful descendants
+suppose, that his earthly life, like other approved comedies, has ended
+well.
+
+Important, however, as these critical points in his career may be
+reckoned by his relatives, they are scarcely calculated to prove equally
+epochal to the man himself. In a community where next to no note is
+ever taken of the anniversary of his birth, some doubt as to the special
+significance of that red-letter day may not unnaturally creep into
+his own mind. While in regard to his death, although it may be highly
+flattering for him to know that he will certainly become somebody when
+he shall have ceased, practically, to be anybody, such tardy recognition
+is scarcely timely enough to be properly appreciated. Human nature is so
+earth-tied, after all, that a post-mundane existence is very apt to seem
+immaterial as well as be so.
+
+With the old familiar landmarks of life obliterated in this wholesale
+manner, it is to be doubted whether one of us, placed in the midst of
+such a civilization, would know himself. He certainly would derive but
+scanty satisfaction from the recognition if he did. Even Nirvana might
+seem a happy limbo by comparison. With a communal, not to say a cosmic,
+birthday, and a conventional wife, he might well deem his separate
+existence the shadow of a shade and embrace Buddhism from mere force of
+circumstances.
+
+Further investigation would not shake his opinion. For a far-oriental
+career is thoroughly in keeping with these, its typical turning-points.
+From one end of its course to the other it is painfully impersonal.
+In its regular routine as in its more salient junctures, life presents
+itself to these races a totally different affair from what it seems to
+us. The cause lies in what is taken to be the basis of socio-biology, if
+one may so express it.
+
+In the Far East the social unit, the ultimate molecule of existence, is
+not the individual, but the family.
+
+We occidentals think we value family. We even parade our pretensions so
+prominently as sometimes to tread on other people's prejudices of a like
+nature. Yet we scarcely seem to appreciate the inheritance. For with a
+logic which does us questionable credit, we are proud of our ancestors
+in direct proportion to their remoteness from ourselves, thus permitting
+Democracy to revenge its insignificance by smiling at our self-imposed
+satire. To esteem a man in inverse ratio to the amount of remarkable
+blood he has inherited is, to say the least, bathetic. Others, again,
+make themselves objectionable by preferring their immediate relatives
+to all less connected companions, and cling to their cousins so closely
+that affection often culminates in matrimony, nature's remonstrances
+notwithstanding. But with all the pride or pleasure which we take in
+the members of our particular clan, our satisfaction really springs from
+viewing them on an autocentric theory of the social system. In our own
+eyes we are the star about which, as in Joseph's dream, our relatives
+revolve and upon which they help to shed an added lustre. Our Ptolemaic
+theory of society is necessitated by our tenacity to the personal
+standpoint. This fixed idea of ours causes all else seemingly to
+rotate about it. Such an egoistic conception is quite foreign to
+our longitudinal antipodes. However much appearances may agree, the
+fundamental principles upon which family consideration is based are
+widely different in the two hemispheres. For the far-eastern social
+universe turns on a patricentric pivot.
+
+Upon the conception of the family as the social and political unit
+depends the whole constitution of China. The same theory somewhat
+modified constitutes the life-principle of Korea, of Japan, and of their
+less advanced cousins who fill the vast centre of the Asiatic continent.
+From the emperor on his throne to the common coolie in his hovel it is
+the idea of kinship that knits the entire body politic together. The
+Empire is one great family; the family is a little empire.
+
+The one developed out of the other. The patriarchal is, as is well
+known, probably the oldest political system in the world. All nations
+may be said to have experienced such a paternal government, but most
+nations outgrew it.
+
+Now the interesting fact about the yellow branch of the human race is,
+not that they had so juvenile a constitution, but that they have it;
+that it has persisted practically unchanged from prehistoric ages. It
+is certainly surprising in this kaleidoscopic world whose pattern is
+constantly changing as time merges one combination of its elements
+into another, that on the other side of the globe this set should have
+remained the same. Yet in spite of the lapse of years, in spite of
+the altered conditions of existence, in spite of an immense advance in
+civilization, such a primitive state of society has continued there to
+the present day, in all its essentials what it was when as nomads the
+race forefathers wandered peacefully or otherwise over the plains of
+Central Asia. The principle helped them to expand; it has simply cramped
+them ever since. For, instead of dissolving like other antiquated views,
+it has become, what it was bound to become if it continued to last,
+crystallized into an institution. It had practically reached this
+condition when it received a theoretical, not to say a theological
+recognition which gave it mundane immortality. A couple of millenniums
+ago Confucius consecrated filial duty by making it the basis of the
+Chinese moral code. His hand was the finishing touch of fossilification.
+For since the sage set his seal upon the system no one has so much as
+dreamt of changing it. The idea of confuting Confucius would be an
+act of impiety such as no Chinaman could possibly commit. Not that
+the inadmissibility of argument is due really to the authority of the
+philosopher, but that it lies ingrained in the character of the people.
+Indeed the genius of the one may be said to have consisted in divining
+the genius of the other. Confucius formulated the prevailing practice,
+and in so doing helped to make it perpetual. He gave expression to the
+national feeling, and like expressions, generally his, served to stamp
+the idea all the more indelibly upon the national consciousness.
+
+In this manner the family from a natural relation grew into a highly
+unnatural social anachronism. The loose ties of a roving life became
+fetters of a fixed conventionality. Bonds originally of mutual advantage
+hardened into restrictions by which the young were hopelessly tethered
+to the old. Midway in its course the race undertook to turn round and
+face backwards, as it journeyed on. Its subsequent advance could be
+nothing but slow.
+
+The head of a family is so now in something of a corporeal sense. From
+him emanate all its actions; to him are responsible all its parts. Any
+other member of it is as incapable of individual expression as is the
+hand, or the foot, or the eye of man. Indeed, Confucian doctors of
+divinity might appropriately administer psychically to the egoistic
+the rebuke of the Western physician to the too self-analytic youth who,
+finding that, after eating, his digestion failed to give him what he
+considered its proper sensations, had come to consult the doctor as to
+how it ought to feel. "Feel! young man," he was answered, "you ought
+not to be aware that you have a digestion." So with them, a normally
+constituted son knows not what it is to possess a spontaneity of his
+own. Indeed, this very word "own," which so long ago in our own tongue
+took to itself the symbol of possession, well exemplifies his dependent
+state. China furnishes the most conspicuous instance of the want
+of individual rights. A Chinese son cannot properly be said to own
+anything. The title to the land he tills is vested absolutely in the
+family, of which he is an undivided thirtieth, or what-not. Even the
+administration of the property is not his, but resides in the family,
+represented by its head. The outward symbols of ownership testify to the
+fact. The bourns that mark the boundaries of the fields bear the names
+of families, not of individuals. The family, as such, is the proprietor,
+and its lands are cultivated and enjoyed in common by all the
+constituents of the clan. In the tenure of its real estate, the Chinese
+family much resembles the Russian Mir. But so far as his personal state
+is concerned, the Chinese son outslaves the Slav. For he lives at home,
+under the immediate control of the paternal will--in the most complete
+of serfdoms, a filial one. Even existence becomes a communal affair.
+From the family mansion, or set of mansions, in which all its members
+dwell, to the family mausoleum, to which they will all eventually be
+borne, a man makes his life journey in strict company with his kin.
+
+A man's life is thus but an undivisible fraction of the family life. How
+essentially so will appear from the following slight sketch of it.
+
+To begin at the beginning, his birth is a very important event--for the
+household, at which no one fails to rejoice except the new-comer. He
+cries. The general joy, however, depends somewhat upon his sex. If the
+baby chances to be a boy, everybody is immensely pleased; if a girl,
+there is considerably less effusion shown. In the latter case the
+more impulsive relatives are unmistakably sorry; the more philosophic
+evidently hope for better luck next time. Both kinds make very pretty
+speeches, which not even the speakers believe, for in the babe lottery
+the family is considered to have drawn a blank. A delight so engendered
+proves how little of the personal, even in prospective, attaches to its
+object. The reason for the invidious distinction in the matter of sex
+lies of course in an inordinate desire for the perpetuation of the
+family line. The unfortunate infant is regarded merely in the light of
+a possible progenitor. A boy is already potentially a father; whereas a
+girl, if she marry at all, is bound to marry out of her own family into
+another, and is relatively lost. The full force of the deprivation is,
+however, to some degree tempered by the almost infinite possibilities of
+adoption. Daughters are, therefore, not utterly unmitigable evils.
+
+From the privacy of the domestic circle, the infant's entrance into
+public life is performed pick-a-back. Strapped securely to the shoulders
+of a slightly older sister, out he goes, consigned to the tender mercies
+of a being who is scarcely more than a baby herself. The diminutiveness
+of the nurse-perambulators is the most surprising part of the
+performance. The tiniest of tots may be seen thus toddling round with
+burdens half their own size. Like the dot upon the little i, the baby's
+head seems a natural part of their childish ego.
+
+An economy of the kind in the matter of nurses is highly suggestive.
+That it should be practicable thus to entrust one infant to another
+proves the precociousness of children. But this surprising maturity
+of the young implies by a law too well known to need explanation, the
+consequent immaturity of the race. That which has less to grow up
+to, naturally grows up to its limit sooner. It may even be questioned
+whether it does not do so with the more haste; on the same principle
+that a runner who has less distance to travel not only accomplishes his
+course quicker, but moves with relatively greater speed, or as a small
+planet grows old not simply sooner, but comparatively faster than a
+larger one. Jupiter is still in his fiery youth, while the moon is
+senile in decrepid old age, and yet his separate existence began
+long before hers. Either hypothesis will explain the abnormally
+early development of the Chinese race, and its subsequent career of
+inactivity. Meanwhile the youthful nurse, in blissful ignorance of
+the evidence which her present precocity affords against her future
+possibilities, pursues her sports with intermittent attention to her
+charge, whose poor little head lolls about, now on one side and now
+on the other, in a most distressingly loose manner, an uninterested
+spectator of the proceedings.
+
+As soon as the babe gets a trifle bigger he ceases to be ministered
+to and begins his long course of ministering to others. His home life
+consists of attentive subordination. The relation his obedience bears
+to that of children elsewhere is paralleled perhaps sufficiently by
+the comparative importance attached to precepts on the subject in the
+respective moral codes. The commandment "honor thy father" forms a tithe
+of the Mosaic law, while the same injunction constitutes at least one
+half of the Confucian precepts. To the Chinese child all the parental
+commands are not simply law to the letter, they are to be anticipated
+in the spirit. To do what he is told is but the merest fraction of his
+duty; theoretically his only thought is how to serve his sire. The pious
+Aeneas escaping from Troy exemplifies his conduct when it comes to
+a question of domestic precedence,--whose first care, it will be
+remembered, was for his father, his next for his son, and his last for
+his wife. He lost his wife, it may be noted in passing. Filial piety
+is the greatest of Chinese virtues. Indeed, an undutiful son is
+a monstrosity, a case of moral deformity. It could now hardly be
+otherwise. For a father sums up in propria persona a whole pedigree of
+patriarchs whose superimposed weight of authority is practically divine.
+This condition of servitude is never outgrown by the individual, as it
+has never been outgrown by the race.
+
+Our boy now begins to go to school; to a day school, it need hardly be
+specified, for a boarding school would be entirely out of keeping with
+the family life. Here, he is given the "Trimetrical Classic" to start
+on, that he may learn the characters by heart, picking up incidentally
+what ideas he may. This book is followed by the "Century of Surnames," a
+catalogue of all the clan names in China, studied like the last for the
+sake of the characters, although the suggestion of the importance of the
+family contained in it is probably not lost upon his youthful mind. Next
+comes the "Thousand Character Classic," a wonderful epic as a feat of
+skill, for of the thousand characters which it contains not a single
+one is repeated, an absence of tautology not properly appreciated by the
+enforced reader. Reminiscences of our own school days vividly depict the
+consequent disgust, instead of admiration, of the boy. Three more books
+succeed these first volumes, differing from one another in form, but
+in substance singularly alike, treating, as they all do, of history
+and ethics combined. For tales and morals are inseparably associated by
+pious antiquity. Indeed, the past would seem to have lived with special
+reference to the edification of the future. Chinamen were abnormally
+virtuous in those golden days, barring the few unfortunates whom fate
+needed as warning examples of depravity for succeeding ages. Except
+for the fact that instruction as to a future life forms no part of
+the curriculum, a far-eastern education may be said to consist of
+Sunday-school every day in the week. For no occasion is lost by the
+erudite authors, even in the most worldly portions of their work,
+for preaching a slight homily on the subject in hand. The dictum of
+Dionysius of Halicarnassus that "history is philosophy teaching by
+example" would seem there to have become modified into "history is
+filiosophy teaching by example." For in the instructive anecdotes every
+other form of merit is depicted as second to that of being a dutiful
+son. To the practice of that supreme virtue all other considerations are
+sacrificed. The student's aim is thus kept single. At every turn of the
+leaves, paragons of filial piety shame the youthful reader to the pitch
+of emulation by the epitaphic records of their deeds. Portraits of the
+past, possibly colored, present that estimable trait in so exalted
+a type that to any less filial a people they would simply deter
+competition. Yet the boy implicitly believes and no doubt resolves to
+rival what he reads. A specimen or two will amply suggest the rest. In
+one tale the hero is held up to the unqualified admiration of posterity
+for having starved to death his son, in an extreme case of family
+destitution, for the sake of providing food enough for his aged father.
+In another he unhesitatingly divorces his wife for having dared to poke
+fun, in the shape of bodkins, at some wooden effigies of his parents
+which he had had set up in the house for daily devotional contemplation.
+Finally another paragon actually sells himself in perpetuity as a slave
+that he may thus procure the wherewithal to bury with due honor his
+anything but worthy progenitor, who had first cheated his neighbors and
+then squandered his ill-gotten gains in riotous living. Of these tales,
+as of certain questionable novels in a slightly different line, the
+eventual moral is considered quite competent to redeem the general
+immorality of the plot.
+
+Along such a curriculum the youthful Chinaman is made to run. A very
+similar system prevails in Japan, the difference between the two
+consisting in quantity rather than quality. The books in the two cases
+are much the same, and the amount read differs surprisingly little when
+we consider that in the one case it is his own classics the student is
+reading, in the other the Chinaman's.
+
+If he belong to the middle class, as soon as his schooling is over he is
+set to learn his father's trade. To undertake to learn any trade but his
+father's would strike the family as simply preposterous. Why should
+he adopt another line of business? And, if he did, what other business
+should he adopt? Is his father's occupation not already there, a part
+of the existing order of things; and is he not the son of his father and
+heir therefore of the paternal skill? Not that such inherited aptness is
+recognized scientifically; it is simply taken for granted instinctively.
+It is but a halfhearted intuition, however, for the possibility of an
+inheritance from the mother's side is as out of the question as if her
+severance from her own family had an ex post facto effect. As for
+his individual predilection in the matter, nature has considerately
+conformed to custom by giving him none. He becomes a cabinet-maker,
+for instance, because his ancestors always have been cabinet-makers. He
+inherits the family business as a necessary part of the family name. He
+is born to his trade, not naturally selected because of his fitness for
+it. But he usually is amply qualified for the position, for generations
+of practice, if only on one side of the house, accumulate a vast deal
+of technical skill. The result of this system of clan guilds in all
+branches of industry is sufficiently noticeable. The almost infinite
+superiority of Japanese artisans over their European fellow-craftsmen
+is world-known. On the other hand the tendency of the occupation in the
+abstract to swallow up the individual in the concrete is as evident to
+theory as it is patent in practice. Eventually the man is lost in the
+manner. The very names of trades express the fact. The Japanese word for
+cabinet-maker, for example, means literally cutting-thing-house, and
+is now applied as distinctively to the man as to his shop. Nominally as
+well as practically the youthful Japanese artisan makes his introduction
+to the world, much after the manner of the hero of Lecocq's comic opera,
+the son of the house of Marasquin et Cie.
+
+If instead of belonging to the lower middle class our typical youth be
+born of bluer blood, or if he be filled with the same desires as if he
+were so descended, he becomes a student. Having failed to discover in
+the school-room the futility of his country's self-vaunted learning, he
+proceeds to devote his life to its pursuit. With an application which
+is eminently praiseworthy, even if its object be not, he sets to work to
+steep himself in the classics till he can perceive no merit in anything
+else. As might be suspected, he ends by discovering in the sayings
+of the past more meaning than the simple past ever dreamed of putting
+there. He becomes more Confucian than Confucius. Indeed, it is fortunate
+for the reputation of the sage that he cannot return to earth, for he
+might disagree to his detriment with his own commentators.
+
+Such is the state of things in China and Korea. Learning, however,
+is not dependent solely on individual interest for its wonderfully
+flourishing condition in the Middle Kingdom, for the government abets
+the practice to its utmost. It is itself the supreme sanction, for its
+posts are the prizes of proficiency. Through the study of the classics
+lies the only entrance to political power. To become a mandarin one must
+have passed a series of competitive examinations on these very subjects,
+and competition in this impersonal field is most keen. For while popular
+enthusiasm for philosophy for philosophy's sake might, among any people,
+eventually show symptoms of fatigue, it is not likely to flag where the
+outcome of it is so substantial. Erudition carries there all earthly
+emoluments in its train. For the man who can write the most scholastic
+essay on the classics is forthwith permitted to amass much honor and
+more wealth by wronging his less accomplished fellow-citizens. China
+is a student's paradise where the possession of learning is instantly
+convertible into unlimited pelf.
+
+In Japan the study of the classics was never pursued professionally.
+It was, however, prosecuted with much zeal en amateur. The Chinese
+bureaucratic system has been wanting. For in spite of her students,
+until within thirty years Japan slumbered still in the Knight-time of
+the Middle Ages, and so long as a man carried about with him continually
+two beautiful swords he felt it incumbent upon him to use them. The
+happy days of knight-errantry have passed. These same cavaliers
+of Samurai are now thankful to police the streets in spectacles
+necessitated by the too diligent study of German text, and arrest chance
+disturbers of the public peace for a miserably small salary per month.
+
+Our youth has now reached the flowering season of life, that brief
+May time when the whole world takes on the rose-tint, and when by all
+dramatic laws he ought to fall in love. He does nothing of the kind.
+Sad to say, he is a stranger to the feeling. Love, as we understand the
+word, is a thing unknown to the Far East; fortunately, indeed, for the
+possession there of the tender passion would be worse than useless. Its
+indulgence would work no end of disturbance to the community at large,
+beside entailing much misery upon its individual victim. Its exercise
+would probably be classed with kleptomania and other like excesses of
+purely personal consideration. The community could never permit the
+practice, for it strikes at the very root of their whole social system.
+
+The immense loss in happiness to these people in consequence of the
+omission by the too parsimonious Fates of that thread, which, with us,
+spins the whole of woman's web of life, and at least weaves the warp of
+man's, is but incidental to the present subject; the effect of the loss
+upon the individuality of the person himself is what concerns us now.
+
+If there is one moment in a man's life when his interest for the world
+at large pales before the engrossing character of his own emotions, it
+is assuredly when that man first falls in love. Then, if never before,
+the world within excludes the world without. For of all our human
+passions none is so isolating as the tenderest. To shut that one other
+being in, we must of necessity shut all the rest of mankind out; and we
+do so with a reckless trust in our own self-sufficiency which has about
+it a touch of the sublime. The other millions are as though they were
+not, and we two are alone in the earth, which suddenly seems to have
+grown unprecedentedly beautiful. Indeed, it only needs such judicious
+depopulation to make of any spot an Eden. Perhaps the early Jewish
+myth-makers had some such thought in mind when they wrote their idyl of
+the cosmogony. The human traits are true to-day. Then at last our souls
+throw aside their conventional wrappings to stand revealed as they
+really are. Certain of comprehension, the thoughts we have never dared
+breathe to any one before, find a tongue for her who seems fore-destined
+to understand. The long-closed floodgates of feeling are thrown wide,
+and our personality, pent up from the time of its inception for very
+mistrust, sweeps forth in one uncontrollable rush. For then the most
+reticent becomes confiding; the most self-contained expands. Then every
+detail of our past lives assumes an importance which even we had not
+divined. To her we tell them all,--our boyish beliefs, our youthful
+fancies, the foolish with the fine, the witty with the wise, the little
+with the great. Nothing then seems quite unworthy, as nothing seems
+quite worthy enough. Flowers and weeds that we plucked upon our pathway,
+we heap them in her lap, certain that even the poorest will not be
+tossed aside. Small wonder that we bring as many as we may when she
+bends her head so lovingly to each.
+
+As our past rises in reminiscence with all its oldtime reality, no less
+clearly does our future stand out to us in mirage. What we would be
+seems as realizable as what we were. Seen by another beside ourselves,
+our castles in the air take on something of the substance of
+stereoscopic sight. Our airiest fancies seem solid facts for their
+reality to her, and gilded by lovelight, they glitter and sparkle like
+a true palace of the East. For once all is possible; nothing lies beyond
+our reach. And as we talk, and she listens, we two seem to be floating
+off into an empyrean of our own like the summer clouds above our heads,
+as they sail dreamily on into the far-away depths of the unfathomable
+sky.
+
+It would be more than mortal not to believe in ourselves when another
+believes so absolutely in us. Our most secret thoughts are no longer
+things to be ashamed of, for she has sanctioned them. Whatever doubt may
+have shadowed us as to our own imaginings disappears before the smile
+of her appreciation. That her appreciation may be prejudiced is not a
+possibility we think of then. She understands us, or seems to do so to
+our own better understanding of ourselves. Happy the man who is thus
+understood! Happy even he who imagines that he is, because of her eager
+wish to comprehend; fortunate, indeed, if in this one respect he never
+comes to see too clearly.
+
+No such blissful infatuation falls to the lot of the Far Oriental.
+He never is the dupe of his own desire, the willing victim of his
+self-illusion. He is never tempted to reveal himself, and by thus
+revealing, realize. No loving appreciation urges him on toward the
+attainment of his own ideal. That incitement to be what he would seem to
+be, to become what she deems becoming, he fails to feel. Custom has so
+far fettered fancy that even the wish to communicate has vanished. He
+has now nothing to tell; she needs no ear to hear. For she is not his
+love; she is only his wife,--what is left of a romance when the romance
+is left out. Worse still, she never was anything else. He has not so
+much as a memory of her, for he did not marry her for love; he may not
+love of his own accord, nor for the matter of that does he wish to do
+so. If by some mischance he should so far forget to forget himself, it
+were much better for him had he not done so, for the choice of a bride
+is not his, nor of a bridegroom hers. Marriage to a Far Oriental is
+the most important mercantile transaction of his whole life. It is,
+therefore, far too weighty a matter to be entrusted to his youthful
+indiscretion; for although the person herself is of lamentably little
+account in the bargain, the character of her worldly circumstances is
+most material to it. So she is contracted for with the same care one
+would exercise in the choice of any staple business commodity. The
+particular sample is not vital to the trade, but the grade of goods is.
+She is selected much as the bride of the Vicar of Wakefield chose her
+wedding-gown, only that the one was at least cut to suit, while the
+other is not. It is certainly easier, if less fitting, to get a wife as
+some people do clothes, not to their own order, but ready made; all the
+more reason when the bargain is for one's son, not one's self. So the
+Far East, which looks at the thing from a strictly paternal standpoint
+and ignores such trifles as personal preferences, takes its boy to the
+broker's and fits him out. That the object of such parental care does
+not end by murdering his unfortunate spouse or making way with himself
+suggests how dead already is that individuality which we deem to be of
+the very essence of the thing.
+
+Marriage is thus a species of investment contracted by the existing
+family for the sake of the prospective one, the actual participants
+being only lay figures in the affair. Sometimes the father decides the
+matter himself; sometimes he or the relative who stands in loco parentis
+calls for a plebiscit on the subject; for such an extension of the
+suffrage has gradually crept even into patriarchal institutions. The
+family then assemble, sit in solemn conclave on the question, and
+decide it by vote. Of course the interested parties are not asked their
+opinion, as it might be prejudiced. The result of the conference must
+be highly gratifying. To have one's wife chosen for one by vote of one's
+relatives cannot but be satisfactory--to the electors. The outcome of
+this ballot, like that of universal suffrage elsewhere, is at the best
+unobjectionable mediocrity. Somehow such a result does not seem quite
+to fulfil one's ideal of a wife. It is true that the upper classes
+of impersonal France practise this method of marital selection, their
+conseils de famille furnishing in some sort a parallel. But, as is well
+known, matrimony among these same upper classes is largely form devoid
+of substance. It begins impressively with a dual ceremony, the civil
+contract, which amounts to a contract of civility between the parties,
+and a religious rite to render the same perpetual, and there it is too
+apt to end.
+
+So much for the immediate influence on the man; the eventual effect on
+the race remains to be considered. Now, if the first result be anything,
+the second must in the end be everything. For however trifling it be in
+the individual instance, it goes on accumulating with each successive
+generation, like compound interest. The choosing of a wife by family
+suffrage is not simply an exponent of the impersonal state of things, it
+is a power toward bringing such a state of things about. A hermit seldom
+develops to his full possibilities, and the domestic variety is no
+exception to the rule. A man who is linked to some one that toward him
+remains a cipher lacks surroundings inciting to psychological growth,
+nor is he more favorably circumstanced because all his ancestors have
+been similarly circumscribed.
+
+As if to make assurance doubly sure, natural selection here steps in
+to further the process. To prove this with all the rigidity of
+demonstration desirable is in the present state of erotics beyond our
+power. Until our family trees give us something more than mere skeletons
+of dead branches, we must perforce continue ignorant of the science
+of grafts. For the nonce we must be content to generalize from our own
+premises, only rising above them sufficiently to get a bird's-eye view
+of our neighbor's estates. Such a survey has at least one advantage: the
+whole field of view appears perfectly plain.
+
+Surveying the subject, then, from this ego-altruistic position, we can
+perceive why matrimony, as we practise it, should result in increasing
+the personality of our race: for the reason namely that psychical
+similarity determines the selection. At first sight, indeed, such
+a natural affinity would seem to have little or nothing to do with
+marriage. As far as outsiders are capable of judging, unlikes appear to
+fancy one another quite as gratuitously as do likes. Connubial couples
+are often anything but twin souls. Yet our own dual use of the word
+"like" bears historic witness to the contrary. For in this expression
+we have a record from early Gothic times that men liked others for being
+like themselves. Since then, our feelings have not changed materially,
+although our mode of showing them is slightly less intense. In those
+simple days stranger and enemy were synonymous terms, and their
+objects were received in a corresponding spirit. In our present refined
+civilization we hurl epithets instead of spears, and content ourselves
+with branding as heterodox the opinions of another which do not happen
+to coincide with our own. The instinct of self-development naturally
+begets this self-sided view. We insensibly find those persons congenial
+whose ideas resemble ours, and gravitate to them, as leaves on a pond do
+to one another, nearer and nearer till they touch. Is it likely, then,
+that in the most important case of all the rule should suddenly cease
+to hold? Is it to be presumed that even Socrates chose Xantippe for her
+remarkable contrariety to himself?
+
+Mere physical attraction is another matter. Corporeally considered, men
+not infrequently fall in love with their opposites, the phenomenally
+tall with the painfully short, the unnecessarily stout with the
+distressingly slender. But even such inartistic juxtapositions are much
+less common than we are apt at times to think. For it must never be
+forgotten that the exceptional character of the phenomena renders them
+conspicuous, the customary more consorted combinations failing to excite
+attention.
+
+Besides, there exists a reason for physical incongruity which does not
+hold psychically. Nature sanctions the one while she discountenances the
+other. Instead of the forethought she once bestowed upon the body, it
+receives at her hands now but the scantiest attention. Its development
+has ceased to be an object with her. For some time past almost all her
+care has been devoted to the evolution of the soul. The consequence is
+that physically man is much less specialized than many other animals.
+In other words, he is bodily less advanced in the race for competitive
+extermination. He belongs to an antiquated, inefficient type of mammal.
+His organism is still of the jack-of-all-trades pattern, such as
+prevailed generally in the more youthful stages of organic life--one not
+specially suited to any particular pursuit. Were it not for his cerebral
+convolutions he could not compete for an instant in the struggle for
+existence, and even the monkey would reign in his stead. But brain
+is more effective than biceps, and a being who can kill his opponent
+farther off than he can see him evidently needs no great excellence of
+body to survive his foe.
+
+The field of competition has thus been transferred from matter to mind,
+but the fight has lost none of its keenness in consequence. With the
+same zeal with which advantageous anatomical variations were seized upon
+and perpetuated, psychical ones are now grasped and rendered hereditary.
+Now if opposites were to fancy and wed one another, such fortunate
+improvements would soon be lost. They would be scattered over the
+community at large even it they escaped entire neutralization. To
+prevent so disastrous a result nature implants a desire for resemblance,
+which desire man instinctively acts upon.
+
+Complete compatibility of temperament is of course a thing not to be
+expected nor indeed to be desired, since it would defeat its own end
+by allowing no room for variation. A fairly broad basis of agreement,
+however, exists even when least suspected. This common ground of content
+consists of those qualities held to be most essential by the individuals
+concerned, although not necessarily so appearing to other people.
+Sometimes, indeed, these qualities are still in the larvae state of
+desires. They are none the less potent upon the man's personality on
+that account, for the wish is always father to its own fulfilment.
+
+The want of conjugal resemblance not only works mediately on the
+child, it works mutually on the parents; for companionship, as is well
+recognized, tends to similarity. Now companionship is the last thing to
+be looked for in a far-eastern couple. Where custom requires a wife to
+follow dutifully in the wake of her husband, whenever the two go out
+together, there is small opportunity for intercourse by the way, even
+were there the slightest inclination to it, which there is not.
+The appearance of the pair on an excursion is a walking satire on
+sociability, for the comicality of the connection is quite unperceived
+by the performers. In the privacy of the domestic circle the separation,
+if less humorous, is no less complete. Each lives in a world of his own,
+largely separate in fact in China and Korea, and none the less in fancy
+in Japan. On the continent a friend of the husband would see little or
+nothing of the wife, and even in Japan he would meet her much as we meet
+an upper servant in a friend's house. Such a semi-attached relationship
+does not conduce to much mutual understanding.
+
+The remainder of our hero's uneventful existence calls for no particular
+comment. As soon as he has children borne him he is raised ipso facto
+from the position of a common soldier to that of a subordinate officer
+in the family ranks. But his opportunities for the expression of
+individuality are not one whit increased. He has simply advanced a peg
+in a regular hierarchy of subjection. From being looked after himself
+he proceeds to look after others. Such is the extent of the change.
+Even should he chance to be the eldest son of the eldest son, and
+thus eventually end by becoming the head of the family, he cannot
+consistently consider himself. There is absolutely no place in his
+social cosmos for so particular a thing as the ego.
+
+With a certain grim humor suggestive of metaphysics, it may be said of
+his whole life that it is nothing but a relative affair after all.
+
+
+
+Chapter 3. Adoption.
+
+But one may go a step farther in this matter of the family, and by so
+doing fare still worse with respect to individuality. There are certain
+customs in vogue among these peoples which would seem to indicate that
+even so generic a thing as the family is too personal to serve them for
+ultimate social atom, and that in fact it is only the idea of the family
+that is really important, a case of abstraction of an abstract. These
+suggestive customs are the far-eastern practices of adoption and
+abdication.
+
+Adoption, with us, is a kind of domestic luxury, akin to the keeping
+of any other pets, such as lap-dogs and canaries. It is a species of
+self-indulgence which those who can afford it give themselves when
+fortune has proved unpropitious, an artificial method of counteracting
+the inequalities of fate. That such is the plain unglamoured view of the
+procedure is shown by the age at which the object is adopted. Usually
+the future son or daughter enters the adoptive household as an infant,
+intentionally so on the part of the would-be parents. His ignorance of
+a previous relationship largely increases his relative value; for the
+possibility of his making comparisons in his own mind between a former
+state of existence and the present one unfavorable to the latter is
+not pleasant for the adopters to contemplate. He is therefore acquired
+young. The amusement derived from his company is thus seen to be
+distinctly paramount to all other considerations. No one cares so
+heartily to own a dog which has been the property of another; a fortiori
+of a child. It is clearly, then, not as a necessity that the babe is
+adopted. If such were the case, if like the ancient Romans all a man
+wanted was the continuance of the family line, he would naturally wait
+until the last practicable moment; for he would thus save both care and
+expense. In the Far East adoption is quite a different affair. There
+it is a genealogical necessity--like having a father or mother. It is,
+indeed, of almost more importance. For the great desideratum to these
+peoples is not ancestors but descendants. Pedigrees in the land of
+the universal opposite are not matters of bequest but of posthumous
+reversion. A man is not beholden to the past, he looks forward to the
+future for inherited honors. No fame attaches to him for having had an
+illustrious grandfather. On the contrary, it is the illustrious grandson
+who reflects some of his own greatness back upon his grandfather. If
+a man therefore fail to attain eminence himself, he always has another
+chance in his descendants; for he will of necessity be ennobled through
+the merits of those who succeed him. Such is the immemorial law of the
+land. Fame is retroactive. This admirable system has only one objection:
+it is posthumous in its effect. An ambitious man who unfortunately lacks
+ability himself has to wait too long for vicarious recognition. The
+objection is like that incident to the making of a country seat out of
+a treeless plain by planting the same with saplings. About the time the
+trees begin to be worth having the proprietary landscape-gardener dies
+of old age. However, as custom permits a Far Oriental no ancestral
+growth of timber, he is obliged to lay the seeds of his own family
+trees. Natural offspring are on the whole easier to get, and more
+satisfactory when got. Hence the haste with which these peoples rush
+into matrimony. If in despite of his precipitation fate perversely
+refuse to grant him children, he must endeavor to make good the omission
+by artificial means. He proceeds to adopt somebody. True to instinct, he
+chooses from preference a collateral relative. In some far-eastern lands
+he must so restrict himself by law. In Korea, for instance, he can only
+adopt an agnate and one of a lower generation than his own. But in
+Japan his choice is not so limited. In so praiseworthy an act as the
+perpetuation of his unimportant family line, it is deemed unwise in that
+progressive land to hinder him from unconsciously bettering it by the
+way. He is consequently permitted to adopt anybody. As people are by no
+means averse to being adopted, the power to adopt whom he will gives him
+more voice in the matter of his unnatural offspring than he ever had in
+the selection of a more natural one.
+
+The adopted changes his name, of course, to take that of the family he
+enters. As he is very frequently grown up and extensively known at the
+time the adoption takes place, his change of cognomen occasions at first
+some slight confusion among his acquaintance. This would be no worse,
+however, than the change with us from the maid to the matron, and
+intercourse would soon proceed smoothly again if people would only rest
+content with one such domestic migration. But they do not. The fatal
+facility of the process tempts them to repeat it. The result is
+bewildering: a people as nomadic now in the property of their persons as
+their forefathers were in their real estate. A man adopts another to-day
+to unadopt him to-morrow and replace him by somebody else the day after.
+So profoundly unimportant to them is their social identity, that they
+bandy it about with almost farcical freedom. Perhaps it is fitting
+that there should be some slight preparation in this world for a future
+transmigration of souls. Still one fails to conceive that the practice
+can be devoid of disadvantages even to its beneficiaries. To foreigners
+it proves disastrously perplexing. For if you chance upon a man whom you
+have not met for some time, you can never be quite sure how to accost
+him. If you begin, "Well met, Green, how goes it?" as likely as not he
+replies, "Finely. But I am no longer Green; I have become Brown. I was
+adopted last month by my maternal grandfather." You of course apologize
+for your unfortunate mistake, carefully note his change of hue for a
+future occasion, and behold, on meeting him the next time you find he
+has turned Black. Such a chameleon-like cognomen is very unsettling to
+your idea of his identity, and can hardly prove reassuring to his own.
+The only persons who reap any benefit from the doubt are those, with us
+unhappy, individuals who possess the futile faculty of remembering faces
+without recalling their accompanying names.
+
+Girls, as a rule, are not adopted, being valueless genealogically. A
+niece or grandniece to whom one has taken a great fancy might of course
+be adopted there as elsewhere, but it would be distinctly out of the
+every-day run, as she could never be included in the household on strict
+business principles.
+
+The practice of adopting is not confined to childless couples. Others
+may find themselves in quite as unfortunate a predicament. A man may
+be the father of a large and thriving family and yet be as destitute
+patriarchally as if he had not a child to his name. His offspring may
+be of the wrong sex; they may all be girls. In this untoward event
+the father has something more on his hands than merely a houseful of
+daughters to dispose of. In addition to securing sons-in-law, he must,
+unless he would have his ancestral line become extinct, provide
+himself with a son. The simplest procedure in such a case is to combine
+relationships in a single individual, and the most self-evident person
+to select for the dual capacity is the husband of the eldest daughter.
+This is the course pursued. Some worthy young man is secured as spouse
+for the senior sister; he is at the same time formally taken in as a son
+by the family whose cognomen he assumes, and eventually becomes the head
+of the house. Strange to say, this vista of gradually unfolding honors
+does not seem to prove inviting. Perhaps the new-comer objects to
+marrying the whole family, a prejudice not without parallel elsewhere.
+Certainly the opportunity is not appreciated. Indeed, to "go out as a
+son-in-law," as the Japanese idiom hath it, is considered demeaning
+to the matrimonial domestic. Like other household help he wears too
+patently the badge of servitude. "If you have three koku of rice to your
+name, don't do it," is the advice of the local proverb--a proverb whose
+warning against marrying for money is the more suggestive for being
+launched in a land where marrying for love is beyond the pale of
+respectability. To barter one's name in this mercenary manner is looked
+upon as derogatory to one's self-respect, although, as we have seen, to
+part with it for any less direct remuneration is not attended with the
+slightest loss of personal prestige. As practically the unfortunate had
+none to lose in either event, it would seem to be a case of taking away
+from a man that which he hath not. So contumacious a thing is custom.
+It is indeed lucky that popular prejudice interposes some limit to this
+fictitious method of acquiring children. A trifling predilection for the
+real thing in sonships is absolutely vital, even to the continuance of
+the artificial variety. For if one generation ever went in exclusively
+for adoption, there would be no subsequent generation to adopt.
+
+As it to give the finishing touch to so conventional a system of
+society, a man can leave it under certain circumstances with even
+greater ease than he entered it. He can become as good as dead without
+the necessity of making way with himself. Theoretically, he can cease to
+live while still practically existing; for it is always open to the head
+of a family to abdicate.
+
+The word abdicate has to our ears a certain regal sound. We
+instinctively associate the act with a king. Even the more democratic
+expression resign suggests at once an office of public or quasi public
+character. To talk of abdicating one's private relationships sounds
+absurd; one might as well talk of electing his parents, it would seem to
+us. Such misunderstanding of far-eastern social possibilities comes from
+our having indulged in digressions from our more simple nomadic habits.
+If in imagination we will return to our ancestral muttons and the then
+existing order of things, the idea will not strike us as so strange; for
+in those early bucolic days every father was a king. Family economics
+were the only political questions in existence then. The clan was the
+unit. Domestic disputes were state disturbances, and clan-claims the
+only kind of international quarrels. The patriarch was both father to
+his people and king.
+
+As time widened the family circle it eventually reached a point where
+cohesion ceased to be possible. The centrifugal tendency could no
+longer be controlled by the centripetal force. It split up into separate
+bodies, each of them a family by itself. In their turn these again
+divided, and so the process went on. This principle has worked
+universally, the only difference in its action among different races
+being the greater or less degree of the evolving motion. With us the
+social system has been turning more and more rapidly with time. In the
+Far East its force, instead of increasing, would seem to have decreased,
+enabling the nebula of its original condition to keep together as a
+single mass, so that to-day a whole nation, resembling a nebula indeed
+in homogeneity, is swayed by a single patriarchal principle. Here, on
+the contrary, so rapid has the motion become that even brethren find
+themselves scattered to the four winds.
+
+An Occidental father and an Oriental head of a family are no longer
+really correlative terms. The latter more closely resembles a king
+in his duties, responsibilities, and functions generally. Now, in the
+Middle Ages in Europe, when a king grew tired of affairs of state, he
+abdicated. So in the Far East, when the head of a family has had enough
+of active life, he abdicates, and his eldest son reigns in his stead.
+
+From that moment he ceases to belong to the body politic in any active
+sense. Not that he is no longer a member of society nor unamenable to
+its general laws, but that he has become a respectable declasse, as it
+were. He has entered, so to speak, the social nirvana, a not unfitting
+first step, as he regards it, toward entering the eventual nirvana
+beyond. Such abdication now takes place without particular cause. After
+a certain time of life, and long before a man grows old, it is the
+fashion thus to make one's bow.
+
+
+
+Chapter 4. Language.
+
+A man's personal equation, as astronomers call the effect of his
+individuality, is kin, for all its complexity, to those simple
+algebraical problems which so puzzled us at school. To solve either we
+must begin by knowing the values of the constants that enter into its
+expression. Upon the a b c's of the one, as upon those of the other,
+depend the possibilities of the individual x.
+
+Now the constants in any man's equation are the qualities that he has
+inherited from the past. What a man does follows from what he is, which
+in turn is mostly dependent upon what his ancestors have been; and
+of all the links in the long chain of mind-evolution, few are more
+important and more suggestive than language. Actions may at the moment
+speak louder than words, but methods of expression have as tell-tale a
+tongue for bygone times as ways of doing things.
+
+If it should ever fall to my lot to have to settle that exceedingly
+vexed Eastern question,--not the emancipation of ancient Greece from the
+bondage of the modern Turk, but the emancipation of the modern college
+student from the bond of ancient Greek,--I should propose, as a solution
+of the dilemma, the addition of a course in Japanese to the college list
+of required studies. It might look, I admit, like begging the question
+for the sake of giving its answer, but the answer, I think, would
+justify itself.
+
+It is from no desire to parade a fresh hobby-horse upon the university
+curriculum that I offer the suggestion, but because I believe that a
+study of the Japanese language would prove the most valuable of ponies
+in the academic pursuit of philology. In the matter of literature,
+indeed, we should not be adding very much to our existing store, but we
+should gain an insight into the genesis of speech that would put us
+at least one step nearer to being present at the beginnings of human
+conversation. As it is now, our linguistic learning is with most of us
+limited to a knowledge of Aryan tongues, and in consequence we not only
+fall into the mistake of thinking our way the only way, which is bad
+enough, but, what is far worse, by not perceiving the other possible
+paths we quite fail to appreciate the advantages or disadvantages of
+following our own. We are the blind votaries of a species of ancestral
+language-worship, which, with all its erudition, tends to narrow our
+linguistic scope. A study of Japanese would free us from the fetters of
+any such family infatuation. The inviolable rules and regulations of our
+mother-tongue would be found to be of relative application only. For we
+should discover that speech is a much less categorical matter than
+we had been led to suppose. We should actually come to doubt
+the fundamental necessity of some of our most sacred grammatical
+constructions; and even our reverenced Latin grammars would lose that
+air of awful absoluteness which so impressed us in boyhood.
+
+An encouraging estimate of a certain missionary puts the amount of
+study needed by the Western student for the learning of Japanese as
+sufficient, if expended nearer home, to equip him with any three modern
+European languages. It is certainly true that a completely strange
+vocabulary, an utter inversion of grammar, and an elaborate system of
+honorifics combine to render its acquisition anything but easy. In its
+fundamental principles, however, it is alluringly simple.
+
+In the first place, the Japanese language is pleasingly destitute of
+personal pronouns. Not only is the obnoxious "I" conspicuous only by
+its absence; the objectionable antagonistic "you" is also entirely
+suppressed, while the intrusive "he" is evidently too much of a third
+person to be wanted. Such invidious distinctions of identity apparently
+never thrust their presence upon the simple early Tartar minds. I,
+you, and he, not being differences due to nature, demanded, to their
+thinking, no recognition of man.
+
+There is about this vagueness of expression a freedom not without its
+charm. It is certainly delightful to be able to speak of yourself as if
+you were somebody else, choosing mentally for the occasion any one
+you may happen to fancy, or, it you prefer, the possibility of soaring
+boldly forth into the realms of the unconditioned.
+
+To us, at first sight, however, such a lack of specification appears
+wofully incompatible with any intelligible transmission of ideas. So
+communistic a want of discrimination between the meum and the tuum--to
+say nothing of the claims of a possible third party--would seem to be
+as fatal to the interchange of thoughts as it proves destructive to the
+trafficking in commodities. Such, nevertheless, is not the result. On
+the contrary, Japanese is as easy and as certain of comprehension as is
+English. On ninety occasions out of a hundred, the context at once makes
+clear the person meant.
+
+In the very few really ambiguous cases, or those in which, for the sake
+of emphasis, a pronoun is wanted, certain consecrated expressions are
+introduced for the purpose. For eventually the more complex social
+relations of increasing civilization compelled some sort of distant
+recognition. Accordingly, compromises with objectionable personality
+were effected by circumlocutions promoted to a pronoun's office,
+becoming thus pro-pronouns, as it were. Very noncommittal expressions
+they are, most of them, such as: "the augustness," meaning you; "that
+honorable side," or "that corner," denoting some third person, the exact
+term employed in any given instance scrupulously betokening the relative
+respect in which the individual spoken of is held; while with a candor,
+an indefiniteness, or a humility worthy so polite a people, the I is
+known as "selfishness," or "a certain person," or "the clumsy one."
+
+Pronominal adjectives are manufactured in the same way. "The stupid
+father," "the awkward son," "the broken-down firm," are "mine." Were
+they "yours," they would instantly become "the august, venerable
+father," "the honorable son," "the exalted firm." [1]
+
+Even these lame substitutes for pronouns are paraded as sparingly as
+possible. To the Western student, who brings to the subject a brain
+throbbing with personality, hunting in a Japanese sentence for personal
+references is dishearteningly like "searching in the dark for a black
+hat which is n't there;" for the brevet pronouns are commonly not on
+duty. To employ them with the reckless prodigality that characterizes
+our conversation would strike the Tartar mind like interspersing his
+talk with unmeaning italics. He would regard such discourse much as we
+do those effusive epistles of a certain type of young woman to her
+most intimate girl friends, in which every other word is emphatically
+underlined.
+
+For the most part, the absolutely necessary personal references are
+introduced by honorifics; that is, by honorary or humble expressions.
+Such is a portion of the latter's duty. They do a great deal of
+unnecessary work besides.
+
+These honorifics are, taken as a whole, one of the most interesting
+peculiarities of Japanese, as also of Korean, just as, taken in detail,
+they are one of its most dangerous pitfalls. For silence is indeed
+golden compared with the chagrin of discovering that a speech which you
+had meant for a compliment was, in fact, an insult, or the vexation of
+learning that you have been industriously treating your servant with the
+deference due a superior,--two catastrophes sure to follow the attempts
+of even the most cautious of beginners. The language is so thoroughly
+imbued with the honorific spirit that the exposure of truth in all its
+naked simplicity is highly improper. Every idea requires to be more or
+less clothed in courtesy before it is presentable; and the garb demanded
+by etiquette is complex beyond conception. To begin with, there are
+certain preliminary particles which are simply honorific, serving no
+other purpose whatsoever. In addition to these there are for every
+action a small infinity of verbs, each sacred to a different degree
+of respect. For instance, to our verb "to give" corresponds a complete
+social scale of Japanese verbs, each conveying the idea a shade more
+politely than its predecessor; only the very lowest meaning anything
+so plebeian as simply "to give." Sets of laudatory or depreciatory
+adjectives are employed in the same way. Lastly, the word for "is,"
+which strictly means "exists," expresses this existence under three
+different forms,--in a matter-of-fact, a flowing, or an inflated style;
+the solid, liquid, and gaseous states of conversation, so to speak, to
+suit the person addressed. But three forms being far too few for the
+needs of so elaborate a politeness, these are supplemented by many
+interpolated grades.
+
+Terms of respect are applied not only to those mortals who are held in
+estimation higher than their fellows, but to all men indiscriminately as
+well. The grammatical attitude of the individual toward the speaker is
+of as much importance as his social standing, I being beneath contempt,
+and you above criticism.
+
+Honorifics are used not only on all possible occasions for courtesy, but
+at times, it would seem, upon impossible ones; for in some instances the
+most subtle diagnosis fails to reveal in them a relevancy to anybody.
+That the commonest objects should bear titles because of their
+connection with some particular person is comprehensible, but what
+excuse can be made for a phrase like the following, "It respectfully
+does that the august seat exists," all of which simply means "is," and
+may be applied to anything, being the common word--in Japanese it is all
+one word now--for that apparently simple idea. It would seem a sad
+waste of valuable material. The real reason why so much distinguished
+consideration is shown the article in question lies in the fact that
+it is treated as existing with reference to the person addressed, and
+therefore becomes ipso facto august.
+
+Here is a still subtler example. You are, we will suppose, at a
+tea-house, and you wish for sugar. The following almost stereotyped
+conversation is pretty sure to take place. I translate it literally,
+simply prefacing that every tea-house girl, usually in the first
+blush of youth, is generically addressed as "elder sister,"--another
+honorific, at least so considered in Japan.
+
+ You clap your hands.  (Enter tea-house maiden.)
+
+ You.  Hai, elder sister, augustly exists there sugar?
+
+ The T. H. M.  The honorable sugar, augustly is it?
+
+ You.  So, augustly.
+
+ The T. H. M. He (indescribable expression of assent).
+ (Exit tea-house maiden to fetch the sugar.)
+
+Now, the "augustlies" go almost without saying, but why is the sugar
+honorable? Simply because it is eventually going to be offered to you.
+But she would have spoken of it by precisely the same respectful title,
+if she had been obliged to inform you that there was none, in which case
+it never could have become yours. Such is politeness. We may note,
+in passing, that all her remarks and all yours, barring your initial
+question, meant absolutely nothing. She understood you perfectly from
+the first, and you knew she did; but then, if all of us were to say only
+what were necessary, the delightful art of conversation would soon be
+nothing but a science.
+
+The average Far Oriental, indeed, talks as much to no purpose as his
+Western cousin, only in his chit-chat politeness replaces personalities.
+With him, self is suppressed, and an ever-present regard for others is
+substituted in its stead.
+
+A lack of personality is, as we have seen, the occasion of this
+courtesy; it is also its cause.
+
+That politeness should be one of the most marked results of
+impersonality may appear surprising, yet a slight examination will show
+it to be a fact. Looked at a posteriori, we find that where the one
+trait exists the other is most developed, while an absence of the second
+seems to prevent the full growth of the first. This is true both in
+general and in detail. Courtesy increases, as we travel eastward round
+the world, coincidently with a decrease in the sense of self. Asia is
+more courteous than Europe, Europe than America. Particular races show
+the same concomitance of characteristics. France, the most impersonal
+nation of Europe, is at the same time the most polite.
+
+Considered a priori, the connection between the two is not far to seek.
+Impersonality, by lessening the interest in one's self, induces one
+to take an interest in others. Introspection tends to make of man a
+solitary animal, the absence of it a social one. The more impersonal
+the people, the more will the community supplant the individual in the
+popular estimation. The type becomes the interesting thing to man, as
+it always is to nature. Then, as the social desires develop, politeness,
+being the means to their enjoyment, develops also.
+
+A second omission in Japanese etymology is that of gender. That words
+should be credited with sex is a verbal anthropomorphism that would seem
+to a Japanese exquisitely grotesque, if so be that it did not strike him
+as actually immodest. For the absence of gender is simply symptomatic
+of a much more vital failing, a disregard of sex. Originally, as their
+language bears witness, the Japanese showed a childish reluctance
+to recognizing sex at all. Usually a single sexless term was held
+sufficient for a given species, and did duty collectively for both
+sexes. Only where a consideration of sex thrust itself upon them, beyond
+the possibility of evasion, did they employ for the male and the female
+distinctive expressions. The more intimate the relation of the object
+to man, the more imperative the discriminating name. Hence human beings
+possessed a fair number of such special appellatives; for a man is
+a palpably different sort of person from his grandmother, and a
+mother-in-law from a wife. But it is noteworthy that the artificial
+affinities of society were as carefully differentiated as the
+distinctions due to sex, while ancestral relationships were deemed more
+important than either.
+
+Animals, though treated individually most humanely, are vouchsafed but
+scant recognition on the score of sex. With them, both sexes share one
+common name, and commonly, indeed, this answers quite well enough. In
+those few instances where sex enters into the question in a manner not
+to be ignored, particles denoting "male" or "female" are prefixed to the
+general term. How comparatively rare is the need of such specification
+can be seen from the way in which, with us, in many species, the name of
+one sex alone does duty indifferently for both. That of the male is the
+one usually selected, as in the case of the dog or horse. If, however,
+it be the female with which man has most to do, she is allowed to bestow
+her name upon her male partner. Examples of the latter description occur
+in the use of "cows" for "cattle," and "hens" for "fowls." A Japanese
+can say only "fowl," defined, if absolutely necessary, as "he-fowl" or
+"she-fowl."
+
+Now such a slighting of one of the most potent springs of human action,
+sex, with all that the idea involves, is not due to a pronounced
+misogynism on the part of these people, but to a much more effective
+neglect, a great underlying impersonality. Indifference to woman is
+but included in a much more general indifference to mankind. The fact
+becomes all the more evident when we descend from sex to gender. That
+Father Ocean does not, in their verbal imagery, embrace Mother Earth,
+with that subtle suggestion of humanity which in Aryan speech the gender
+of the nouns hints without expressing, is not due to any lack of poesy
+in the Far Oriental speaker, but to the essential impersonality of
+his mind, embodied now in the very character of the words he uses. A
+Japanese noun is a crystallized concept, handed down unchanged from
+the childhood of the Japanese race. So primitive a conception does it
+represent that it is neither a total nor a partial symbol, but rather
+the outcome of a first vague generality. The word "man," for instance,
+means to them not one man, still less mankind, but that indefinite
+idea which struggles for embodiment in the utterance of the infant. It
+represents not a person, but a thing, a material fact quite innocent
+of gender. This early state of semi-consciousness the Japanese never
+outgrew. The world continued to present itself to their minds as a
+collection of things. Nor did their subsequent Chinese education change
+their view. Buddhism simply infused all things with the one universal
+spirit.
+
+As to inanimate objects, the idea of supposing sex where there is not
+even life is altogether too fanciful a notion for the Far Eastern mind.
+
+Impersonality first fashioned the nouns, and then the nouns, by their
+very impersonality, helped keep impersonal the thought and fettered
+fancy. All those temptings to poesy which to the Aryan imagination lie
+latent in the sex with which his forefathers humanized their words,
+never stir the Tartar nor the Chinese soul. They feel the poetry
+of nature as much as, indeed much more than, we; but it is a poetry
+unassociated with man. And this, too, curiously enough, in spite of the
+fact that to explain the cosmos the Chinamen invented, or perhaps only
+adapted, a singularly sexual philosophy. For possibly, like some other
+portions of their intellectual wealth, they stole it from India. The
+Chinese conception of the origin of the world is based on the idea of
+sex. According to their notions the earth was begotten. It is true
+that with them the cosmos started in an abstract something, which
+self-produced two great principles; but this pair once obtained, matters
+proceeded after the analogy of mankind. The two principles at work were
+themselves abstract enough to have satisfied the most unimpassioned of
+philosophers. They were simply a positive essence and a negative one,
+correlated to sunshine and shadow, but also correlated to male and
+female forces. Through their mutual action were born the earth and the
+air and the water; from these, in turn, was begotten man. The cosmical
+modus operandi was not creative nor evolutionary, but sexual. The whole
+scheme suggests an attempt to wed abstract philosophy with primitive
+concrete mythology.
+
+The same sexuality distinguishes the Japanese demonology. Here the
+physical replaces the philosophical; instead of principles we find
+allegorical personages, but they show just the same pleasing propensity
+to appear in pairs.
+
+This attributing of sexes to the cosmos is not in the least incompatible
+with an uninterested disregard of sex where it really exists. It is
+one thing to admit the fact as a general law of the universe, and quite
+another to dwell upon it as an important factor in every-day affairs.
+
+How slight is the Tartar tendency to personification can be seen from
+a glance at these same Japanese gods. They are a combination of defunct
+ancestors and deified natural phenomena. The evolving of the first half
+required little imagination, for fate furnished the material ready made;
+while in conjuring up the second moiety, the spirit-evokers showed even
+less originality. Their results were neither winsome nor sublime. The
+gods whom they created they invested with very ordinary humanity,
+the usual endowment of aboriginal deity, together with the customary
+superhuman strength. If these demigods differed from others of their
+class, it was only in being more commonplace, and in not meddling much
+with man. Even such personification of natural forces, simple enough
+to be self-suggested, quickly disappeared. The various awe-compelling
+phenomena soon ceased to have any connection with the anthropomorphic
+noumena they had begotten. For instance, the sun-goddess, we are
+informed, was one day lured out of a cavern, where she was sulking in
+consequence of the provoking behavior of her younger brother, by her
+curiosity at the sight of her own face in a mirror, ingeniously placed
+before the entrance for the purpose. But no Japanese would dream now of
+casting any such reflections, however flattering, upon the face of the
+orb of day. The sun has become not only quite sexless to him, but
+as devoid of personality as it is to any Western materialist. Lesser
+deities suffered a like unsubstantial transformation. The thunder-god,
+with his belt of drums, upon which he beats a devil's tattoo until he
+is black in the face, is no longer even indirectly associated with the
+storm. As for dryads and nymphs, the beautiful creatures never inhabited
+Eastern Asia. Anthropoid foxes and raccoons, wholly lacking in those
+engaging qualities that beget love, and through love remembrance, take
+their place. Even Benten, the naturalized Venus, who, like her Hellenic
+sister, is said to have risen from the sea, is a person quite incapable
+of inspiring a reckless infatuation.
+
+Utterly unlike was this pantheon to the pantheon of the Greeks, the
+personifying tendency of whose Aryan mind was forever peopling nature
+with half-human inhabitants. Under its quickening fancy the very clods
+grew sentient. Dumb earth awoke at the call of its desire, and the
+beings its own poesy had begotten made merry companionship for man. Then
+a change crept over the face of things. Faith began to flicker, for want
+of facts to feed its flame. Little by little the fires of devotion burnt
+themselves out. At last great Pan died. The body of the old belief
+was consumed. But though it perished, its ashes preserved its form, an
+unsubstantial presentment of the past, to crumble in a twinkling at
+the touch of science, but keeping yet to the poet's eye the lifelike
+semblance of what once had been. The dead gods still live in our
+language and our art. Even to-day the earth about us seems semiconscious
+to the soul, for the memories they have left.
+
+But with the Far Oriental the exorcising feeling was fear. He never fell
+in love with his own mythological creations, and so he never embalmed
+their memories. They were to him but explanations of facts, and had no
+claims upon his fancy. His ideal world remained as utterly impersonal as
+if it had never been born.
+
+The same impersonality reappears in the matter of number. Grammatically,
+number with them is unrecognized. There exist no such things as plural
+forms. This singularity would be only too welcome to the foreign
+student, were it not that in avoiding the frying-pan the Tartars fell
+into the fire. For what they invented in place of a plural was quite
+as difficult to memorize, and even more cumbrous to express. Instead
+of inflecting the noun and then prefixing a number, they keep the noun
+unchanged and add two numerals; thus at times actually employing more
+words to express the objects than there are objects to express. One
+of these numerals is a simple number; the other is what is known as an
+auxiliary numeral, a word as singular in form as in function. Thus, for
+instance, "two men" become amplified verbally into "man two individual,"
+or, as the Chinaman puts it, in pidgin English, "two piecey man." For in
+this respect Chinese resembles Japanese, though in very little else,
+and pidgin English is nothing but the literal translation of the
+Chinese idiom into Anglo-Saxon words. The necessity for such elaborate
+qualification arises from the excessive simplicity of the Japanese
+nouns. As we have seen, the noun is so indefinite a generality that
+simply to multiply it by a number cannot possibly produce any definite
+result. No exact counterpart of these nouns exists in English, but
+some idea of the impossibility of the process may be got from our
+word "cattle," which, prolific though it may prove in fact, remains
+obstinately incapable of verbal multiplication. All Japanese nouns being
+of this indefinite description, all require auxiliary numerals. But
+as each one has its own appropriate numeral, about which a mistake is
+unpardonable, it takes some little study merely to master the etiquette
+of these handles to the names of things.
+
+Nouns are not inflected, their cases being expressed by postpositions,
+which, as the name implies, follow, in becoming Japanese inversion,
+instead of preceding the word they affect. To make up, nevertheless, for
+any lack of perplexity due to an absence of inflections, adjectives, en
+revanche, are most elaborately conjugated. Their protean shapes are as
+long as they are numerous, representing not only times, but conditions.
+There are, for instance, the root form, the adverbial form, the
+indefinite form, the attributive form, and the conclusive form, the two
+last being conjugated through all the various voices, moods, and tenses,
+to say nothing of all the potential forms. As one change is superposed
+on another, the adjective ends by becoming three or four times its
+original length. The fact is, the adjective is either adjective, adverb,
+or verb, according to occasion. In the root form it also helps to make
+nouns; so that it is even more generally useful than as a journalistic
+epithet with us. As a verb, it does duty as predicate and copula
+combined. For such an unnecessary part of speech as a real copula does
+not exist in Japanese. In spite of the shock to the prejudices of the
+old school of logicians, it must be confessed that the Tartars get on
+very well without any such couplings to their trains of thought. But
+then we should remember that in their sentences the cart is always put
+before the horse, and so needs only to be pushed, not pulled along.
+
+The want of a copula is another instance of the primitive character of
+the tongue. It has its counterpart in our own baby-talk, where a quality
+is predicated of a thing simply by placing the adjective in apposition
+with the noun.
+
+That the Japanese word which is commonly translated "is" is in no sense
+a copula, but an ordinary intransitive verb, referring to a natural
+state, and not to a logical condition, is evident in two ways. In
+the first place, it is never used to predicate a quality directly. A
+Japanese does not say, "The scenery is fine," but simply, "Scenery,
+fine." Secondly, wherever this verb is indirectly employed in such a
+manner, it is followed, not by an adjective, but by an adverb. Not "She
+is beautiful," but "She exists beautifully," would be the Japanese way of
+expressing his admiration. What looks at first, therefore, like a copula
+turns out to be merely an impersonal intransitive verb.
+
+A negative noun is, of course, an impossibility in any language, just
+as a negative substantive, another name for the same thing, is a direct
+contradiction in terms. No matter how negative the idea to be given, it
+must be conveyed by a positive expression. Even a void is grammatically
+quite full of meaning, although unhappily empty in fact. So much is
+common to all tongues, but Japanese carries its positivism yet further.
+Not only has it no negative nouns, it has not even any negative pronouns
+nor pronominal adjectives,--those convenient keepers of places for
+the absent. "None" and "nothing" are unknown words in its vocabulary,
+because the ideas they represent are not founded on observed facts,
+but upon metaphysical abstractions. Such terms are human-born, not
+earth-begotten concepts, and so to the Far Oriental, who looks at things
+from the point of view of nature, not of man, negation takes another
+form. Usually it is introduced by the verbs, because the verbs, for the
+most part, relate to human actions, and it is man, not nature, who is
+responsible for the omission in question. After all, it does seem more
+fitting to say, "I am ignorant of everything," than "I know nothing." It
+is indeed you who are wanting, not the thing.
+
+The question of verbs leads us to another matter bearing on the subject
+of impersonality; namely, the arrangement of the words in a Japanese
+sentence. The Tartar mode of grammatical construction is very nearly
+the inverse of our own. The fundamental rule of Japanese syntax is, that
+qualifying words precede the words they qualify; that is, an idea is
+elaborately modified before it is so much as expressed. This practice
+places the hearer at some awkward preliminary disadvantage, inasmuch as
+the story is nearly over before he has any notion what it is all about;
+but really it puts the speaker to much more trouble, for he is obliged
+to fashion his whole sentence complete in his brain before he starts
+to speak. This is largely in consequence of two omissions in Tartar
+etymology. There are in Japanese no relative pronouns and no temporal
+conjunctions; conjunctions, that is, for connecting consecutive events.
+The want of these words precludes the admission of afterthoughts.
+Postscripts in speech are impossible. The functions of relatives are
+performed by position, explanatory or continuative clauses being made
+to precede directly the word they affect. Ludicrous anachronisms, not
+unlike those experienced by Alice in her looking-glass journey, are
+occasioned by this practice. For example, "The merry monarch who ended
+by falling a victim to profound melancholia" becomes "To profound
+melancholia a victim by falling ended merry monarch," and
+the sympathetic hearer weeps first and laughs afterward, when
+chronologically he should be doing precisely the opposite.
+
+A like inversion of the natural order of things results from the absence
+of temporal conjunctions. In Japanese, though nouns can be added,
+actions cannot; you can say "hat and coat," but not "dressed and came."
+Conjunctions are used only for space, never for time. Objects that
+exist together can be joined in speech, but it is not allowable thus
+to connect consecutive events. "Having dressed, came" is the Japanese
+idiom. To speak otherwise would be to violate the unities. For a
+Japanese sentence is a single rounded whole, not a bunch of facts
+loosely tied together. It is as much a unit in its composition as
+a novel or a drama is with us. Such artistic periods, however, are
+anything but convenient. In their nicely contrived involution they
+strikingly resemble those curious nests of Chinese boxes, where
+entire shells lie closely packed one within another,--a very marvel
+of ingenious and perfectly unnecessary construction. One must be
+antipodally comprehensive to entertain the idea; as it is, the idea
+entertains us.
+
+On the same general plan, the nouns precede the verbs in the sentence,
+and are in every way the more important parts of speech. The consequence
+is that in ordinary conversation the verbs come so late in the day that
+they not infrequently get left out altogether. For the Japanese are much
+given to docking their phrases, a custom the Germans might do well to
+adopt. Now, nouns denote facts, while verbs express action, and action,
+as considered in human speech, is mostly of human origin. In this
+precedence accorded the impersonal element in language over the
+personal, we observe again the comparative importance assigned the two.
+In Japanese estimation, the first place belongs to nature, the second
+only to man.
+
+As if to mark beyond a doubt the insignificance of the part man plays
+in their thought, sentences are usually subjectless. Although it is a
+common practice to begin a phrase with the central word of the idea,
+isolated from what follows by the emphasizing particle "wa" (which
+means "as to," the French "quant a"), the word thus singled out for
+distinction is far more likely to be the object of the sentence than
+its subject. The habit is analogous to the use of our phrase "speaking
+of,"--that is, simply an emphatic mode of introducing a fresh thought;
+only that with them, the practice being the rule and not the exception,
+no correspondingly abrupt effect is produced by it. Ousted thus from
+the post of honor, the subject is not even permitted the second place.
+Indeed, it usually fails to put in an appearance anywhere. You may
+search through sentence after sentence without meeting with the
+slightest suggestion of such a thing. When so unusual an anomaly as a
+motive cause is directly adduced, it owes its mention, not to the fact
+of being the subject, but because for other reasons it happens to be the
+important word of the thought. The truth is, the Japanese conception of
+events is only very vaguely subjective. An action is looked upon more
+as happening than as being performed, as impersonally rather than
+personally produced. The idea is due, however, to anything but
+philosophic profundity. It springs from the most superficial of childish
+conceptions. For the Japanese mind is quite the reverse of abstract. Its
+consideration of things is concrete to a primitive degree. The language
+reflects the fact. The few abstract ideas these people now possess are
+not represented, for the most part, by pure Japanese, but by imported
+Chinese expressions. The islanders got such general notions from their
+foreign education, and they imported idea and word at the same time.
+
+Summing up, as it were, in propria persona the impersonality of Japanese
+speech, the word for "man," "hito," is identical with, and probably
+originally the same word as "hito," the numeral "one;" a noun and a
+numeral, from which Aryan languages have coined the only impersonal
+pronoun they possess. On the one hand, we have the German "mann;" on
+the other, the French "on". While as if to give the official seal to
+the oneness of man with the universe, the word mono, thing, is applied,
+without the faintest implication of insult, to men.
+
+Such, then, is the mould into which, as children, these people learn
+to cast their thought. What an influence it must exert upon their
+subsequent views of life we have but to ask of our own memories to know.
+With each one of us, if we are to advance beyond the steps of the last
+generation, there comes a time when our growing ideas refuse any longer
+to fit the childish grooves in which we were taught to let them run. How
+great the wrench is when this supreme moment arrives we have all felt
+too keenly ever to forget. We hesitate, we delay, to abandon the beliefs
+which, dating from the dawn of our being, seem to us even as a part of
+our very selves. From the religion of our mother to the birth of our
+boyish first love, all our early associations send down roots so deep
+that long after our minds have outgrown them our hearts refuse to give
+them up. Even when reason conquers at last, sentiment still throbs at
+the voids they necessarily have left.
+
+In the Far East, this fondness for the old is further consecrated by
+religion. The worship of ancestors sets its seal upon the traditions of
+the past, to break which were impious as well as sad. The golden age,
+that time when each man himself was young, has lingered on in the
+lands where it is always morning, and where man has never passed to
+his prosaic noon. Befitting the place is the mind we find there. As its
+language so clearly shows, it still is in that early impersonal state
+to which we all awake first before we become aware of that something we
+later know so well as self.
+
+Particularly potent with these people is their language, for a reason
+that also lends it additional interest to us,--because it is their own.
+Among the mass of foreign thought the Japanese imitativeness has caused
+the nation to adopt, here is one thing which is indigenous. Half of the
+present speech, it is true, is of Chinese importation, but conservatism
+has kept the other half pure. From what it reveals we can see how each
+man starts to-day with the same impersonal outlook upon life the race
+had reached centuries ago, and which it has since kept unchanged. The
+man's mind has done likewise.
+
+
+[1] Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain: The Japanese Language.
+
+
+
+Chapter 5. Nature and Art.
+
+We have seen how impersonal is the form which Far Eastern thought
+assumes when it crystallizes into words. Let us turn now to a
+consideration of the thoughts themselves before they are thus
+stereotyped for transmission to others, and scan them as they find
+expression unconsciously in the man's doings, or seek it consciously in
+his deeds.
+
+To the Far Oriental there is one subject which so permeates and pervades
+his whole being as to be to him, not so much a conscious matter of
+thought as an unconscious mode of thinking. For it is a thing which
+shapes all his thoughts instead of constituting the substance of one
+particular set of them. That subject is art. To it he is born as to
+a birthright. Artistic perception is with him an instinct to which he
+intuitively conforms, and for which he inherits the skill of countless
+generations. From the tips of his fingers to the tips of his toes, in
+whose use he is surprisingly proficient, he is the artist all over.
+Admirable, however, as is his manual dexterity, his mental altitude
+is still more to be admired; for it is artistic to perfection. His
+perception of beauty is as keen as his comprehension of the cosmos is
+crude; for while with science he has not even a speaking acquaintance,
+with art he is on terms of the most affectionate intimacy.
+
+To the whole Far Eastern world science is a stranger. Such nescience is
+patent even in matters seemingly scientific. For although the Chinese
+civilization, even in the so-called modern inventions, was already old
+while ours lay still in the cradle, it was to no scientific spirit that
+its discoveries were due. Notwithstanding the fact that Cathay was the
+happy possessor of gunpowder, movable type, and the compass before
+such things were dreamt of in Europe, she owed them to no knowledge of
+physics, chemistry, or mechanics. It was as arts, not as sciences, they
+were invented. And it speaks volumes for her civilization that she burnt
+her powder for fireworks, not for firearms. To the West alone belongs
+the credit of manufacturing that article for the sake of killing people
+instead of merely killing time.
+
+The scientific is not the Far Oriental point of view. To wish to know
+the reasons of things, that irrepressible yearning of the Western
+spirit, is no characteristic of the Chinaman's mind, nor is it a Tartar
+trait. Metaphysics, a species of speculation that has usually proved
+peculiarly attractive to mankind, probably from its not requiring any
+scientific capital whatever, would seem the most likely place to seek
+it. But upon such matters he has expended no imagination of his own,
+having quietly taken on trust from India what he now professes. As for
+science proper, it has reached at his hands only the quasimorphologic
+stage; that is, it consists of catalogues concocted according to the
+ingenuity of the individual and resembles the real thing about as much
+as a haphazard arrangement of human bones might be expected to resemble
+a man. Not only is the spirit of the subject left out altogether,
+but the mere outward semblance is misleading. For pseudo-scientific
+collections of facts which never rise to be classifications of phenomena
+forms to his idea the acme of erudition. His mathematics, for example,
+consists of a set of empiric rules, of which no explanation is ever
+vouchsafed the taught for the simple reason that it is quite unknown to
+the teacher. It is not even easy to decide how much of what there is
+is Jesuitical. Of more recent sciences he has still less notion,
+particularly of the natural ones. Physics, chemistry, geology, and the
+like are matters that have never entered his head. Even in studies more
+immediately connected with obvious everyday life, such as language,
+history, customs, it is truly remarkable how little he possesses the
+power of generalization and inference. His elaborate lists of facts are
+imposing typographically, but are not even formally important, while his
+reasoning about them is as exquisite a bit of scientific satire as could
+well be imagined.
+
+But with the arts it is quite another matter. While you will search in
+vain, in his civilization, for explanations of even the most simple
+of nature's laws, you will meet at every turn with devices for the
+beautifying of life, which may stand not unworthily beside the products
+of nature's own skill. Whatever these people fashion, from the toy of
+an hour to the triumphs of all time, is touched by a taste unknown
+elsewhere. To stroll down the Broadway of Tokio of an evening is a
+liberal education in everyday art. As you enter it there opens out in
+front of you a fairy-like vista of illumination. Two long lines of gayly
+lighted shops, stretching off into the distance, look out across two
+equally endless rows of torch-lit booths, the decorous yellow gleam
+of the one contrasting strangely with the demoniacal red flare of the
+other. This perspective of pleasure fulfils its promise. As your feet
+follow your eyes you find yourself in a veritable shoppers' paradise,
+the galaxy of twinkle resolving into worlds of delight. Nor do you long
+remain a mere spectator; for the shops open their arms to you. No
+cold glass reveals their charms only to shut you off. Their wares lie
+invitingly exposed to the public, seeming to you already half your own.
+At the very first you come to you stop involuntarily, lost in admiration
+over what you take to be bric-a-brac. It is only afterwards you learn
+that the object of your ecstasy was the commonest of kitchen crockery.
+Next door you halt again, this time in front of some leathern
+pocket-books, stamped with designs in color to tempt you instantly to
+empty your wallet for more new ones than you will ever have the means to
+fill. If you do succeed in tearing yourself away purse-whole, it is
+only to fall a victim to some painted fans of so exquisite a make and
+decoration that escape short of possession is impossible. Opposed as
+stubbornly as you may be to idle purchase at home, here you will find
+yourself the prey of an acute case of shopping fever before you know it.
+Nor will it be much consolation subsequently to discover that you have
+squandered your patrimony upon the most ordinary articles of every-day
+use. If in despair you turn for refuge to the booths, you will but
+have delivered yourself into the embrace of still more irresistible
+fascinations. For the nocturnal squatters are there for the express
+purpose of catching the susceptible. The shops were modestly attractive
+from their nature, but the booths deliberately make eyes at you, and
+with telling effect. The very atmosphere is bewitching. The lurid
+smurkiness of the torches lends an appropriate weirdness to the figure
+of the uncouthly clad pedlar who, with the politeness of the arch-fiend
+himself, displays to an eager group the fatal fascinations of some new
+conceit. Here the latest thing in inventions, a gutta-percha rat, which,
+for reasons best known to the vender, scampers about squeaking with a
+mimicry to shame the original, holds an admiring crowd spellbound with
+mingled trepidation and delight. There a native zoetrope, indefatigable
+round of pleasure, whose top fashioned after the type of a turbine wheel
+enables a candle at the centre ingeniously to supply both illumination
+and motive power at the same time, affords to as many as can find room
+on its circumference a peep at the composite antics of a consecutively
+pictured monkey in the act of jumping a box. Beyond this "wheel of life"
+lies spread out on a mat a most happy family of curios, the whole of
+which you are quite prepared to purchase en bloc. While a little farther
+on stands a flower show which seems to be coyly beckoning to you as the
+blossoms nod their heads to an imperceptible breeze. So one attraction
+fairly jostles its neighbor for recognition from the gay thousands that
+like yourself stroll past in holiday delight. Chattering children in
+brilliant colors, voluble women and talkative men in quieter but no less
+picturesque costumes, stream on in kaleidoscopic continuity. And you,
+carried along by the current, wander thus for miles with the tide of
+pleasure-seekers, till, late at night, when at last you turn reluctantly
+homeward, you feel as one does when wakened from some too delightful
+dream.
+
+Or instead of night, suppose it day and the place a temple. With those
+who are entering you enter too through the outer gateway into the
+courtyard. At the farther end rises a building the like of which for
+richness of effect you have probably never beheld or even imagined. In
+front of you a flight of white stone steps leads up to a terrace
+whose parapet, also of stone, is diapered for half its height and open
+latticework the rest. This piazza gives entrance to a building or set
+of buildings whose every detail challenges the eye. Twelve pillars of
+snow-white wood sheathed in part with bronze, arranged in four rows,
+make, as it were, the bones of the structure. The space between the
+centre columns lies open. The other triplets are webbed in the middle
+and connected, on the sides and front, by grilles of wood and bronze
+forming on the outside a couple of embrasures on either hand the
+entrance in which stand the guardian Nio, two colossal demons, Gog
+and Magog. Instead of capitals, a frieze bristling with Chinese lions
+protects the top of the pillars. Above this in place of entablature
+rises tier upon tier of decoration, each tier projecting beyond the one
+beneath, and the topmost of all terminating in a balcony which encircles
+the whole second story. The parapet of this balcony is one mass of
+ornament, and its cornice another row of lions, brown instead of white.
+The second story is no less crowded with carving. Twelve pillars make
+its ribs, the spaces between being filled with elaborate woodwork, while
+on top rest more friezes, more cornices, clustered with excrescences of
+all colors and kinds, and guarded by lions innumerable. To begin to tell
+the details of so multi-faceted a gem were artistically impossible. It
+is a jewel of a thousand rays, yet whose beauties blend into one as the
+prismatic tints combine to white. And then, after the first dazzle of
+admiration, when the spirit of curiosity urges you to penetrate the
+centre aisle, lo and behold it is but a gate! The dupe of unexpected
+splendor, you have been paying court to the means of approach. It is
+only a portal after all. For as you pass through, you catch a glimpse
+of a building beyond more gorgeous still. Like in general to the first,
+unlike it in detail, resembling it only as the mistress may the maid.
+But who shall convince of charm by enumerating the features of a face!
+From the tiles of its terrace to the encrusted gables that drape it as
+with some rich bejewelled mantle falling about it in the most graceful
+of folds, it is the very eastern princess of a building standing in the
+majesty of her court to give you audience.
+
+A pebbly path, a low flight of stone steps, a pause to leave your shoes
+without the sill, and you tread in the twilight of reverence upon the
+moss-like mats within. The richness of its outer ornament, so impressive
+at first, is, you discover, but prelude to the lavish luxury of its
+interior. Lacquer, bronze, pigments, deck its ceiling and its sides
+in such profusion that it seems to you as if art had expanded, in the
+congenial atmosphere, into a tropical luxuriance of decoration, and grew
+here as naturally on temples as in the jungle creepers do on trees. Yet
+all is but setting to what the place contains; objects of bigotry and
+virtue that appeal to the artistic as much as to the religious instincts
+of the devout. More sacred still are the things treasured in the sanctum
+of the priests. There you will find gems of art for whose sake only
+the most abnormal impersonality can prevent you from breaking the
+tenth commandment. Of the value set upon them you can form a distant
+approximation from the exceeding richness and the amazing number of the
+silk cloths and lacquered boxes in which they are so religiously kept.
+As you gaze thus, amid the soul-satisfying repose of the spot, at some
+masterpiece from the brush of Motonobu, you find yourself wondering, in
+a fanciful sort of way, whether Buddhist contemplation is not after all
+only another name for the contemplation of the beautiful, since devotees
+to the one are ex officio such votaries of the other.
+
+Dissimilar as are these two glimpses of Japanese existence, in one point
+the bustling street and the hushed temple are alike,--in the nameless
+grace that beautifies both.
+
+This spirit is even more remarkable for its all-pervasiveness than
+for its inherent excellence. Both objectively and subjectively its
+catholicity is remarkable. It imbues everything, and affects everybody.
+So universally is it applied to the daily affairs of life that there may
+be said to be no mechanical arts in Japan simply because all such
+have been raised to the position of fine arts. The lowest artisan is
+essentially an artist. Modern French nomenclature on the subject, in
+spite of the satire to which the more prosaic Anglo-Saxon has subjected
+it, is peculiarly applicable there. To call a Japanese cook, for
+instance, an artist would be but the barest acknowledgment of fact, for
+Japanese food is far more beautiful to look at than agreeable to eat;
+while Tokio tailors are certainly masters of drapery, if they are
+sublimely oblivious to the natural modelings of the male or female form.
+
+On the other hand, art is sown, like the use of tobacco, broadcast among
+the people. It is the birthright of the Far East, the talent it never
+hides. Throughout the length and breadth of the land, and from the
+highest prince to the humblest peasant, art reigns supreme.
+
+Now such a prevalence of artistic feeling implies of itself
+impersonality in the people. At first sight it might seem as if science
+did the same, and that in this respect the one hemisphere offset the
+other, and that consequently both should be equally impersonal. But in
+the first place, our masses are not imbued with the scientific spirit,
+as theirs are with artistic sensibility. Who would expect of a mason
+an impersonal interest in the principles of the arch, or of a plumber
+a non-financial devotion to hydraulics? Certainly one would be wrong in
+crediting the masses in general or European waiters in particular with
+much abstract love of mathematics, for example. In the second place,
+there is an essential difference in the attitude of the two subjects
+upon personality. Emotionally, science appeals to nobody, art to
+everybody. Now the emotions constitute the larger part of that complex
+bundle of ideas which we know as self. A thought which is not tinged to
+some extent with feeling is not only not personal; properly speaking, it
+is not even distinctively human, but cosmical. In its lofty superiority
+to man, science is unpersonal rather than impersonal. Art, on the other
+hand, is a familiar spirit. Through the windows of the senses she finds
+her way into the very soul of man, and makes for herself a home there.
+But it is to his humanity, not to his individuality, that she whispers,
+for she speaks in that universal tongue which all can understand.
+
+Examples are not wanting to substantiate theory. It is no mere
+coincidence that the two most impersonal nations of Europe and Asia
+respectively, the French and the Japanese, are at the same time the most
+artistic. Even politeness, which, as we have seen, distinguishes both,
+is itself but a form of art,--the social art of living agreeably with
+one's fellows.
+
+This impersonality comes out with all the more prominence when we pass
+from the consideration of art in itself to the spirit which actuates
+that art, and especially when we compare their spirit with our own.
+The mainsprings of Far Eastern art may be said to be three: Nature,
+Religion, and Humor. Incongruous collection that they are, all
+three witness to the same trait. For the first typifies concrete
+impersonality, the second abstract impersonality, while the province of
+the last is to ridicule personality generally. Of the trio the first is
+altogether the most important. Indeed, to a Far Oriental, so fundamental
+a part of himself is his love of Nature that before we view its mirrored
+image it will be well to look the emotion itself in the face. The Far
+Oriental lives in a long day-dream of beauty. He muses rather than
+reasons, and all musing, so the word itself confesses, springs from
+the inspiration of a Muse. But this Muse appears not to him, as to the
+Greeks, after the fashion of a woman, nor even more prosaically after
+the likeness of a man. Unnatural though it seem to us, his inspiration
+seeks no human symbol. His Muse is not kin to mankind. She is too
+impersonal for any personification, for she is Nature.
+
+That poet whose name carries with it a certain presumption of
+infallibility has told us that "the proper study of mankind is man;" and
+if material advancement in consequence be any criterion of the fitness
+of a particular mental pursuit, events have assuredly justified the
+saying. Indeed, the Levant has helped antithetically to preach the same
+lesson, in showing us by its own fatal example that the improper
+study of mankind is woman, and that they who but follow the fair will
+inevitably degenerate.
+
+The Far Oriental knows nothing of either study, and cares less. The
+delight of self-exploration, or the possibly even greater delight of
+losing one's self in trying to fathom femininity, is a sensation equally
+foreign to his temperament. Neither the remarkable persistence of one's
+own characteristics, not infrequently matter of deep regret to their
+possessor, nor the charmingly unaccountable variability of the fairer
+sex, at times quite as annoying, is a phenomenon sufficient to stir his
+curiosity. Accepting, as he does, the existing state of things more as
+a material fact than as a phase in a gradual process of development, he
+regards humanity as but a small part of the great natural world, instead
+of considering it the crowning glory of the whole. He recognizes man
+merely as a fraction of the universe,--one might almost say as a vulgar
+fraction of it, considering the low regard in which he is held,--and
+accords him his proportionate share of attention, and no more.
+
+In his thought, nature is not accessory to man. Worthy M. Perichon, of
+prosaic, not to say philistinic fame, had, as we remember, his travels
+immortalized in a painting where a colossal Perichon in front almost
+completely eclipsed a tiny Mont Blanc behind. A Far Oriental
+thinks poetry, which may possibly account for the fact that in his
+mind-pictures the relative importance of man and mountain stands
+reversed. "The matchless Fuji," first of motifs in his art, admits no
+pilgrim as its peer.
+
+Nor is it to woman that turn his thoughts. Mother Earth is fairer, in
+his eyes, than are any of her daughters. To her is given the heart that
+should be theirs. The Far Eastern love of Nature amounts almost to a
+passion. To the study of her ever varying moods her Japanese admirer
+brings an impersonal adoration that combines oddly the aestheticism of
+a poet with the asceticism of a recluse. Not that he worships in secret,
+however. His passion is too genuine either to find disguise or seek
+display. With us, unfortunately, the love of Nature is apt to be
+considered a mental extravagance peculiar to poets, excusable in exact
+ratio to the ability to give it expression. For an ordinary mortal to
+feel a fondness for Mother Earth is a kind of folly, to be carefully
+concealed from his fellows. A sort of shamefacedness prevents him from
+avowing it, as a boy at boarding-school hides his homesickness, or a lad
+his love. He shrinks from appearing less pachydermatous than the rest.
+Or else he flies to the other extreme, and affects the odd; pretends,
+poses, parades, and at last succeeds half in duping himself, half in
+deceiving other people. But with Far Orientals the case is different.
+Their love has all the unostentatious assurance of what has received the
+sanction of public opinion. Nor is it still at that doubtful, hesitating
+stage when, by the instrumentality of a third, its soul-harmony can
+suddenly be changed from the jubilant major key into the despairing
+minor. No trace of sadness tinges his delight. He has long since passed
+this melancholy phase of erotic misery, if so be that the course of his
+true love did not always run smooth, and is now well on in matrimonial
+bliss. The very look of the land is enough to betray the fact. In Japan
+the landscape has an air of domesticity about it, patent even to the
+most casual observer. Wherever the Japanese has come in contact with
+the country he has made her unmistakably his own. He has touched her to
+caress, not injure, and it seems as if Nature accepted his fondness as
+a matter of course, and yielded him a wifely submission in return.
+His garden is more human, even, than his house. Not only is everything
+exquisitely in keeping with man, but natural features are actually
+changed, plastic to the imprint of their lord and master's mind. Bushes,
+shrubs, trees, forget to follow their original intent, and grow as he
+wills them to; now expanding in wanton luxuriance, now contracting into
+dwarf designs of their former selves, all to obey his caprice and please
+his eye. Even stubborn rocks lose their wildness, and come to seem a
+part of the almost sentient life around them. If the description of such
+dutifulness seems fanciful, the thing itself surpasses all supposition.
+Hedges and shrubbery, clipped into the most fantastic shapes, accept the
+suggestion of the pruning-knife as if man's wishes were their own whims.
+Manikin maples, Tom Thumb trees, a foot high and thirty years old, with
+all the gnarls and knots and knuckles of their fellows of the forest,
+grow in his parterres, their native vitality not a whit diminished. And
+they are not regarded as monstrosities but only as the most natural of
+artificialities; for they are a part of a horticultural whole. To walk
+into a Japanese garden is like wandering of a sudden into one of those
+strange worlds we see reflected in the polished surface of a concave
+mirror, where all but the observer himself is transformed into a
+fantastic miniature of the reality. In that quaint fairyland diminutive
+rivers flow gracefully under tiny trees, past mole-hill mountains,
+till they fall at last into lilliputian lakes, almost smothered for the
+flowers that grow upon their banks; while in the extreme distance of a
+couple of rods the cone of a Fuji ten feet high looks approvingly down
+upon a scene which would be nationally incomplete without it.
+
+But besides the delights of domesticity which the Japanese enjoys daily
+in Nature's company, he has his acces de tendresse, too. When he feels
+thus specially stirred, he invites a chosen few of his friends, equally
+infatuated, and together they repair to some spot noted for its scenery.
+It may be a waterfall, or some dreamy pond overhung by trees, or the
+distant glimpse of a mountain peak framed in picture-wise between the
+nearer hills; or, at their appropriate seasons, the blossoming of
+the many tree flowers, which in eastern Asia are beautiful beyond
+description. For he appreciates not only places, but times. One spot is
+to be seen at sunrise, another by moonlight; one to be visited in the
+spring-time, another in the fall. But wherever or whenever it be, a
+tea-house, placed to command the best view of the sight, stands ready to
+receive him. For nature's beauties are too well recognized to remain
+the exclusive property of the first chance lover. People flock to view
+nature as we do to see a play, and privacy is as impossible as it is
+unsought. Indeed, the aversion to publicity is simply a result of the
+sense of self, and therefore necessarily not a feature of so
+impersonal a civilization. Aesthetic guidebooks are written for
+the nature-enamoured, descriptive of these views which the Japanese
+translator quaintly calls "Sceneries," and which visitors come not only
+from near but from far to gaze upon. In front of the tea-house proper
+are rows of summer pavilions, in one of which the party make themselves
+at home, while gentle little tea-house girls toddle forth to serve them
+the invariable preliminary tea and confections. Each man then produces
+from up his sleeve, or from out his girdle, paper, ink, and brush, and
+proceeds to compose a poem on the beauty of the spot and the feelings
+it calls up, which he subsequently reads to his admiring companions.
+Hot sake is next served, which is to them what beer is to a German or
+absinthe to a blouse; and there they sit, sip, and poetize, passing
+their couplets, as they do their cups, in honor to one another. At
+last, after drinking in an hour or two of scenery and sake combined, the
+symposium of poets breaks up.
+
+Sometimes, instead of a company of friends, a man will take his family,
+wife, babies, and all, on such an outing, but the details of his holiday
+are much the same as before. For the scenery is still the centre of
+attraction, and in the attendant creature comforts Far Eastern etiquette
+permits an equal enjoyment to man, woman, and child.
+
+This love of nature is quite irrespective of social condition. All
+classes feel its force, and freely indulge the feeling. Poor as well as
+rich, low as well as high, contrive to gratify their poetic instincts
+for natural scenery. As for flowers, especially tree flowers, or
+those of the larger plants, like the lotus or the iris, the Japanese
+appreciation of their beauty is as phenomenal as is that beauty itself.
+Those who can afford the luxury possess the shrubs in private; those who
+cannot, feast their eyes on the public specimens. From a sprig in a vase
+to a park planted on purpose, there is no part of them too small or
+too great to be excluded from Far Oriental affection. And of the two
+"drawing-rooms" of the Mikado held every year, in April and November,
+both are garden-parties: the one given at the time and with the title of
+"the cherry blossoms," and the other of "the chrysanthemum."
+
+These same tree flowers deserve more than a passing notice, not simply
+because of their amazing beauty, which would arrest attention anywhere,
+but for the national attitude toward them. For no better example of the
+Japanese passion for nature could well be cited. If the anniversaries
+of people are slightingly treated in the land of the sunrise, the same
+cannot be said of plants. The yearly birthdays of the vegetable world
+are observed with more than botanic enthusiasm. The regard in which
+they are held is truly emotional, and it not actually individual in
+its object, at least personal to the species. Each kind of tree as its
+season brings it into flower is made the occasion of a festival. For the
+beauty of the blossoming receives the tribute of a national admiration.
+From peers to populace mankind turns out to witness it. Nor are these
+occasions few. Spring in the Far East is one long chain of flower fetes,
+and as spring begins by the end of January and lasts till the middle of
+June, opportunities for appreciating each in turn are not half spoiled
+by a common contemporaneousness. People have not only occasion but time
+to admire. Indeed, spring itself is suitably respected by being dated
+conformably to fact. Far Orientals begin their year when Nature begins
+hers, instead of starting anachronously as we do in the very middle of
+the dead season, much as our colleges hold their commencements, on the
+last in place at on the first day of the academic term. So previous
+has the haste of Western civilization become. The result is that our
+rejoicing partakes of the incongruity of humor. The new year exists only
+in name. In the Far East, on the other band, the calendar is made to fit
+the time. Men begin to reckon their year some three weeks later than the
+Western world, just as the plum-tree opens its pink white petals, as it
+were, in rosy reflection of the snow that lies yet upon the ground.
+But the coldness of the weather does not in the least deter people from
+thronging the spot in which the trees grow, where they spend hours in
+admiration, and end by pinning appropriate poems on the twigs for later
+comers to peruse. Fleeting as the flowers are in fact, they live forever
+in fancy. For they constitute one of the commonest motifs of both
+painting and poetry. A branch just breaking into bloom seen against the
+sunrise sky, or a bough bending its blossoms to the bosom of a stream,
+is subject enough for their greatest masters, who thus wed, as it
+were, two arts in one,--the spirit of poesy with pictorial form. This
+plum-tree is but a blossom. Precocious harbinger of a host of flowers,
+its gay heralding over, it vanishes not to be recalled, for it bears no
+edible fruit.
+
+The next event in the series might fairly be called phenomenal. Early in
+April takes place what is perhaps as superb a sight as anything in this
+world, the blossoming of the cherry-trees. Indeed, it is not easy to do
+the thing justice in description. If the plum invited admiration, the
+cherry commands it; for to see the sakura in flower for the first time
+is to experience a new sensation. Familiar as a man may be with cherry
+blossoms at home, the sight there bursts upon him with the dazzling
+effect of a revelation. Such is the profusion of flowers that the tree
+seems to have turned into a living mass of rosy light. No leaves break
+the brilliance. The snowy-pink petals drape the branches entirely, yet
+so delicately, one deems it all a veil donned for the tree's nuptials
+with the spring. For nothing could more completely personify the spirit
+of the spring-time. You can almost fancy it some dryad decked for her
+bridal, in maidenly day-dreaming too lovely to last. For like the plum
+the cherry fails in its fruit to fulfil the promise of its flower.
+
+It would be strange indeed if so much beauty received no recognition,
+but it is even more strange that recognition should be so complete and
+so universal as it is. Appreciation is not confined to the cultivated
+few; it is shown quite as enthusiastically by the masses. The popularity
+of the plants is all-embracing. The common people are as sensitive to
+their beauty as are the upper classes. Private gratification, roseate
+as it is, pales beside the public delight. Indeed, not content with what
+revelation Nature makes of herself of her own accord, man has multiplied
+her manifestations. Spots suitable to their growth have been peopled by
+him with trees. Sometimes they stand in groups like star-clusters, as in
+Oji, crowning a hill; sometimes, as at Mukojima, they line an avenue
+for miles, dividing the blue river on the one hand from the blue-green
+rice-fields on the other,--a floral milky way of light. But wherever the
+trees may be, there at their flowering season are to be found throngs
+of admirers. For in crowds people go out to see the sight, multitudes
+streaming incessantly to and fro beneath their blossoms as the time of
+day determines the turn of the human tide. To the Occidental stranger
+such a gathering suggests some social loadstone; but none exists. In the
+cherry-trees alone lies the attraction.
+
+For one week out of the fifty-two the cherry-tree stands thus glorified,
+a vision of beauty prolonged somewhat by the want of synchronousness
+of the different kinds. Then the petals fall. What was a nuptial veil
+becomes a winding-sheet, covering the sod as with winter's winding-sheet
+of snow, destined itself to disappear, and the tree is nothing but a
+common cherry-tree once more.
+
+But flowers are by no means over because the cherry blossoms are past. A
+brief space, and the same crowds that flocked to the cherry turn to the
+wistaria. Gardens are devoted to the plants, and the populace greatly
+given to the gardens. There they go to sit and gaze at the grape-like
+clusters of pale purple flowers that hang more than a cubit long over
+the wooden trellis, and grow daily down toward their own reflections in
+the pond beneath, vying with one another in Narcissus-like endeavor.
+And the people, as they sip their tea on the veranda opposite, behold a
+doubled delight, the flower itself and its mirrored image stretching to
+kiss.
+
+After the wistaria comes the tree-peony, and then the iris, with its
+trefoil flowers broader than a man may span, and at all colors under the
+sky. To one who has seen the great Japanese fleur-de-lis, France looks
+ludicrously infelicitous in her choice of emblem.
+
+But the list grows too long, limited as it is only by its own annual
+repetition. We have as yet reached but the first week in June; the
+summer and autumn are still to come, the first bringing the lotus for
+its crown, and the second the chrysanthemum. And lazily grand the lotus
+is, itself the embodiment of the spirit of the drowsy August air, the
+very essence of Buddha-like repose. The castle moats are its special
+domain, which in this its flowering season it wrests wholly from their
+more proper occupant--the water. A dense growth of leather-like leaves,
+above which rise in majestic isolation the solitary flowers, encircles
+the outer rampart, shutting the castle in as it might be the palace of
+the Sleeping Beauty. In the delightful dreaminess that creeps over one
+as he stands thus before some old daimyo's former abode in the heart of
+Japan, he forgets all his metaphysical difficulties about Nirvana, for
+he fancies he has found it, one long Lotus afternoon.
+
+And then last, but in some sort first, since it has been taken for the
+imperial insignia, comes the chrysanthemum. The symmetry of its shape
+well fits it to symbolize the completeness of perfection which the
+Mikado, the son of heaven, mundanely represents. It typifies, too, the
+fullness of the year; for it marks, as it were, the golden wedding of
+the spring, the reminiscence in November of the nuptials of the May. Its
+own color, however, is not confined to gold. It may be of almost any
+hue and within the general limits of a circle of any form. Now it is a
+chariot wheel with petals for spokes; now a ball of fire with lambent
+tongues of flame; while another kind seems the button of some natural
+legion of honor, and still another a pin-wheel in Nature's own
+day-fireworks.
+
+Admired as a thing of beauty for its own sake, it is also used merely
+as a material for artistic effects; for among the quaintest of such
+conceits are the Japanese Jarley chrysanthemum works. Every November in
+the florists' gardens that share the temple grounds at Asakusa may be
+seen groups of historical and mythological figures composed entirely
+of chrysanthemum flowers. These effigies are quite worthy of comparison
+with their London cousins, being sufficiently life-like to terrify
+children and startle anybody. To come suddenly, on turning a
+corner, upon a colossal warrior, deterrently uncouth and frightfully
+battle-clad, in the act of dispatching a fallen foe, is a sensation
+not instantly dispelled by the fact that he is made of flowers. The
+practice, at least, bears witness to an artistic ingenuity of no mean
+merit, and to a horticulture ably carried on, if somewhat eccentrically
+applied.
+
+From the passing of the chrysanthemum dates the dead season. But it is
+suitably short-lived. Sometimes as early as November, the plum-tree is
+already blossoming again.
+
+Even from so imperfectly gathered a garland it will be seen that the
+Japanese do not lack for opportunities to admire, nor do they turn
+coldly away from what they are given. Indeed, they may be said to live
+in a chronic state of flower-fever; but in spite of the vast amount of
+admiration which they bestow on plants, it is not so much the quantity
+of that admiration as the quality of it which is remarkable. The intense
+appreciation shown the subject by the Far Oriental is something whose
+very character seems strange to us, and when in addition we consider
+that it permeates the entire people from the commonest coolie to the
+most aesthetic courtier, it becomes to our comprehension a state of
+things little short of inexplicable. To call it artistic sensibility is
+to use too limited a term, for it pervades the entire people; rather
+is it a sixth sense of a natural, because national description; for the
+trait differs from our corresponding feeling in degree, and especially
+in universality enough to merit the distinction. Their care for tree
+flowers is not confined to a cultivation, it is a cult. It approaches
+to a sort of natural nature-worship, an adoration in which nothing is
+personified. For the emotion aroused in the Far Oriental is just
+as truly an emotion as it was to the Greek; but whereas the Greek
+personified its object, the Japanese admires that object for what it is.
+To think of the cherry-tree, for instance, as a woman, would be to his
+mind a conception transcending even the limits of the ludicrous.
+
+
+
+Chapter 6. Art.
+
+That nature, not man, is their beau ideal, the source of inspiration
+to them, is evident again on looking at their art. The same spirit that
+makes of them such wonderful landscape gardeners and such wonder-full
+landscape gazers shows itself unmistakably in their paintings.
+
+The current impression that Japanese pictorial ambition, and consequent
+skill, is confined to the representation of birds and flowers, though
+entirely erroneous as it stands, has a grain of truth behind it. This
+idea is due to the attitude of the foreign observers, and was in fact a
+tribute to Japanese technique rather than an appreciation of Far Eastern
+artistic feeling. The truth is, the foreigners brought to the subject
+their own Western criteria of merit, and judged everything by these
+standards. Such works naturally commended themselves most as had least
+occasion to deviate from their canons. The simplest pictures, therefore,
+were pronounced the best. Paintings of birds and flowers were thus
+admitted to be fine, because their realism spoke for itself. Of the
+exquisite poetic feeling of their landscape paintings the foreign
+critics were not at first conscious, because it was not expressed in
+terms with which they were familiar.
+
+But first impressions, here as elsewhere, are valuable. One is very apt
+to turn to them again from the reasoning of his second thoughts. Flora
+and fauna are a conspicuous feature of Far Asiatic art, because they
+enter as details of the subject-matter of the artist's thoughts and
+day-dreams. These birds and flowers are his sujets de genre. Where we
+should select a phase of human life for effective isolation, they choose
+instead a bit of nature. A spray of grass or a twig of cherry-blossoms
+is motif enough for them. To their thought its beauty is amply
+suggestive. For to the Far Oriental all nature is sympathetically
+sentient. His admiration, instead of being centred on man, embraces the
+universe. His art reflects it.
+
+Leaving out of consideration, for the moment, minor though still
+important distinctions in tone, treatment, and technique, the great
+fundamental difference between Western and Far Eastern art lies in its
+attitude toward humanity.
+
+With us, from the time of the Greeks to the present day, man has been
+the cynosure of artistic eyes; with them he has never been vouchsafed
+more than a casual, not to say a cursory glance, even woman failing
+to rivet his attention. One of our own writers has said that, without
+passing the bounds of due respect, a man is permitted two looks at
+any woman he may meet, one to recognize, one to admire. A Japanese
+ordinarily never dreams of taking but one,--if indeed he goes so far as
+that,--the first. It is the omitting to take that second look that has
+left him what he is. Not that Fortune has been unpropitious; only blind.
+Fate has offered him opportunity enough; too much, perhaps. For in Japan
+the exposure of the female form is without a parallel in latitude. Never
+nude, it is frequently naked. The result artistically is much the same,
+though the cause be different. For it is a fatal mistake to suppose the
+Japanese an immodest people. According to their own standards, they are
+exceedingly modest. No respectable Japanese woman would, for instance,
+ever for a moment turn out her toes in walking. It is considered
+immodest to do so. Their code is, however, not so whimsical as this bit
+of etiquette might suggest. The intent is with them the touchstone of
+propriety. In their eyes a state of nature is not a state of indecency.
+Whatever exposure is required for convenience is right; whatever
+unnecessary, wrong. Such an Eden-like condition of society would seem to
+be the very spot for a something like the modern French school of art to
+have developed in. And yet it is just that study of the nude which has
+from immemorial antiquity been entirely neglected in the Far East. An
+ancient Greek, to say nothing of a modern Parisian, would have shocked a
+Japanese. Yet we are shocked by them. We are astounded at the sights we
+see in their country villages, while they in their turn marvel at the
+exhibitions they witness in our city theatres. At their watering-places
+the two sexes bathe promiscuously together in all the simplicity
+of nature; but for a Japanese woman to appear on the stage in any
+character, however proper, would be deemed indecent. The difference
+between the two hemispheres may be said to consist in an artless liberty
+on the one hand, and artistic license on the other. Their unwritten code
+of propriety on the subject seems to be, "You must see, but you may not
+observe."
+
+These people live more in accordance with their code of propriety
+than we do with ours. All classes alike conform to it. The adjective
+"respectable," used above as a distinction in speaking of woman, was in
+reality superfluous, for all women there, as far as appearance goes, are
+respectable. Even the most abandoned creature does not betray her status
+by her behavior. The reason of this uniformity and its psychological
+importance I shall discuss later.
+
+This form of modesty, a sort of want of modesty of form, has no
+connection whatever with sex. It applies with equal force to the
+male figure, which is even more exposed than the female, and offers
+anatomical suggestions invaluable alike to the artistic and medical
+professions,--suggestions that are equally ignored by both. The coolies
+are frequently possessed of physiques which would have delighted Michael
+Angelo; and as for the phenomenal corpulency of the wrestlers, it would
+have made of the place a very paradise for Rubens. In regard to the
+doctors,--for to call them surgeons would be to give a name to what does
+not exist,--a lack of scientific zeal has been the cause of their not
+investigating what tempts too seductively, we should imagine, to be
+ignored. Acupuncture, or the practice of sticking long pins into any
+part of the patient's body that may happen to be paining him, pretty
+much irrespective of anatomical position, is the nearest approach to
+surgery of which they are guilty, and proclaims of itself the in corpore
+vili character of the thing operated upon.
+
+Nor does the painter owe anything to science. He represents humanity
+simply as he sees it in its every-day costume; and it betokens the
+highest powers of generalized observation that he produces the results
+he does. In his drawings, man is shown, not as he might look in the
+primitive, or privitive, simplicity of his ancestral Garden of Eden, but
+as he does look in the ordinary wear and tear of his present garments.
+Civilization has furnished him with clothes, and he prefers, when he has
+his picture taken, to keep them on.
+
+In dealing with man, the Far Oriental artist is emphatically a realist;
+it is when he turns to nature that he becomes ideal. But by ideal is not
+meant here conventional. That term of reproach is a misnomer, founded
+upon a mistake. His idealism is simply the outcome of his love, which,
+like all human love, transfigures its object. The Far Oriental has
+plenty of this, which, if sometimes a delusion, seems also second
+sight, but it is peculiarly impersonal. His color-blindness to the warm,
+blood-red end of the spectrum of life in no wise affects his perception
+of the colder beauty of the great blues and greens of nature. To their
+poetry he is ever sensitive. His appreciation of them is something
+phenomenal, and his power of presentation worthy his appreciation.
+
+A Japanese painting is a poem rather than a picture. It portrays an
+emotion called up by a scene, and not the scene itself in all its
+elaborate complexity. It undertakes to give only so much of it as is
+vital to that particular feeling, and intentionally omits all irrelevant
+details. It is the expression caught from a glimpse of the soul of
+nature by the soul of man; the mirror of a mood, passing, perhaps, in
+fact, but perpetuated thus to fancy. Being an emotion, its intensity
+is directly proportional to the singleness with which it possesses the
+thoughts. The Far Oriental fully realizes the power of simplicity. This
+principle is his fundamental canon of pictorial art. To understand his
+paintings, it is from this standpoint they must be regarded; not as
+soulless photographs of scenery, but as poetic presentations of the
+spirit of the scenes. The very charter of painting depends upon its
+not giving us charts. And if with us a long poem be a contradiction in
+terms, a full picture is with them as self-condemnatory a production.
+From the contemplation of such works of art as we call finished, one is
+apt, after he has once appreciated Far Eastern taste, to rise with an
+unpleasant feeling of satiety, as if he has eaten too much at the feast.
+
+Their paintings, by comparison, we call sketches. Is not our would-be
+slight unwittingly the reverse? Is not a sketch, after all, fuller of
+meaning, to one who knows how to read it, than a finished affair, which
+is very apt to end with itself, barren of fruit? Does not one's own
+imagination elude one's power to portray it? Is it not forever flitting
+will-o'-the-wisp-like ahead of us just beyond exact definition? For
+the soul of art lies in what art can suggest, and nothing is half so
+suggestive as the half expressed, not even a double entente. To hint
+a great deal by displaying a little is more vital to effect than the
+cleverest representation of the whole. The art of partially revealing
+is more telling, even, than the ars celare artem. Who has not suspected
+through a veil a fairer face than veil ever hid? Who has not been
+delightedly duped by the semi-disclosures of a dress? The principle
+is just as true in any one branch of art as it is of the attempted
+developments by one of the suggestions of another. Yet who but has thus
+felt its force? Who has not had a shock of day-dream desecration on
+chancing upon an illustrated edition of some book whose story he had
+lain to heart? Portraits of people, pictures of places, he does not
+know, and yet which purport to be his! And I venture to believe that to
+more than one of us the exquisite pathos of the Bride of Lammermoor is
+gone when Lucia warbles her woes, be it never so entrancingly, to an
+admiring house. It almost seems as if the garish publicity of using her
+name for operatic title were a special intervention of the Muse, that we
+might the less connect song with story,--two sensations that, like two
+lights, destroy one another by mutual interference.
+
+Against this preference shown the sketch it may be urged that to
+appreciate such suggestions presupposes as much art in the public as in
+the painter. But the ability to appreciate a thing when expressed is but
+half that necessary to express it. Some understanding must exist in
+the observer for any work to be intelligible. It is only a question of
+degree. The greater the art-sense in the person addressed, the more had
+better be left to it. Now in Japan the public is singularly artistic.
+In fact, the artistic appreciation of the masses there is something
+astonishing to us, accustomed to our immense intellectual differences
+between man and man. Sketches are thus peculiarly fitting to such a
+land.
+
+Besides, there is a quiet modesty about the sketch which is itself
+taking. To attempt the complete even in a fractional bit of the cosmos,
+like a picture, has in it a difficulty akin to the logical one
+of proving a universal negative. The possibilities of failure are
+enormously increased, and failure is less forgiven for the assumption.
+Art might perhaps not unwisely follow the example of science in such
+matters where an exhaustive work, which takes the better part of a
+lifetime to produce, is invariably entitled by its erudite author an
+Elementary Treatise on the subject in hand.
+
+To aid the effect due to simplicity of conception steps in the Far
+Oriental's wonderful technique. His brush-strokes are very few in
+number, but each one tells. They are laid on with a touch which is
+little short of marvelous, and requires heredity to explain its skill.
+For in his method there is no emending, no super-position, no change
+possible. What he does is done once and for all. The force of it
+grows on you as you gaze. Each stroke expresses surprisingly much, and
+suggests more. Even omissions are made significant. In his painting it
+is visibly true that objects can be rendered conspicuous by their very
+absence. You are quite sure you see what on scrutiny you discover to
+be only the illusion of inevitable inference. The Far Oriental artist
+understands the power of suggestion well; for imagination always fills
+in the picture better than the brush, however perfect be its skill.
+
+Even the neglect of certain general principles which we consider vital
+to effect, such as the absence of shadows and the lack of perspective,
+proves not to be of the importance we imagine. We discover in these
+paintings how immaterial, artistically, was Peter Schlimmel's sad loss,
+and how perfectly possible it is to make bits of discontinuous distance
+take the place effectively of continuous space.
+
+Far Eastern pictures are epigrams rather than descriptions. They present
+a bit of nature with the terseness of a maxim of La Rochefoucault, and
+they delight as aphorisms do by their insight and the happy conciseness
+of its expression. Few aphorisms are absolutely true, but then boldness
+more than makes up for what they lack in verity. So complex a subject is
+life that to state a truth with all its accompanying limitations is to
+weaken it at once. Exceptions, while demonstrating the rule, do not tend
+to emphasize it. And though the whole truth is essential to science,
+such exhaustiveness is by no means a canon of art.
+
+Parallels are not wanting at home. What they do with space in their
+paintings do we not with time in the case of our comedies, those acted
+pictures of life? Should we not refuse to tolerate a play that insisted
+on furnishing us with a full perspective of its characters' past? And
+yet of the two, it is far perferable, artistically, to be given too much
+in sequence than too much at once. The Chinese, who put much less into
+a painting than what we deem indispensable, delight in dramas that last
+six weeks.
+
+To give a concluding touch of life to my necessarily skeleton-like
+generalities, memory pictures me a certain painting of Okio's which I
+fell in love with at first sight. It is of a sunrise on the coast of
+Japan. A long line of surf is seen tumbling in to you from out a bank
+of mist, just piercing which shows the blood-red disk of the rising sun,
+while over the narrow strip of breaking rollers three cranes are slowly
+sailing north. And that is all you see. You do not see the shore; you do
+not see the main; you are looking but at the border-land of that great
+unknown, the heaving ocean still slumbering beneath its chilly coverlid
+of mist, out of which come the breakers, and the sun, and the cranes.
+
+So much for the more serious side of Japanese fancy; a look at the
+lighter leads to the same conclusion.
+
+Hand in hand with his keen poetic sensibility goes a vivid sense of
+humor,--two traits that commonly, indeed, are found Maying together over
+the meadows of imagination. For, as it might be put,
+
+  "The heart that is soonest awake to the flowers
+   Is also the first to be touched by the fun."
+
+The Far Oriental well exemplifies this fact. His art, wherever fun is
+possible, fairly bubbles over with laughter. From the oldest masters
+down to Hokusai, it is constantly welling up in the drollest conceits.
+It is of all descriptions, too. Now it lurks in merry ambush, like the
+faint suggestion of a smile on an otherwise serious face, so subtile
+that the observer is left wondering whether the artist could have meant
+what seems more like one's own ingenious discovery; now it breaks out
+into the broadest of grins, absurd juxtapositions of singularly happy
+incongruities. For Hokusai's caricatures and Hendschel's sketches might
+be twins. If there is a difference, it lies not so much in the artist's
+work as in the greater generality of its appreciation. Humor flits
+easily there at the sea-level of the multitude. For the Japanese
+temperament is ever on the verge of a smile which breaks out with
+catching naivete at the first provocation. The language abounds in puns
+which are not suffered to lie idle, and even poetry often hinges on
+certain consecrated plays on words. From the very constitution of the
+people there is of course nothing selfish in the national enjoyment. A
+man is quite as ready to laugh at his own expense as at his neighbor's,
+a courtesy which his neighbor cordially returns.
+
+Now the ludicrous is essentially human in its application. The principle
+of the synthesis of contradictories, popularly known by the name of
+humor, is necessarily limited in its field to man. For whether it have
+to do wholly with actions, or partly with the words that express them,
+whether it be presented in the shape of a pun or a pleasantry, it is in
+incongruous contrasts that its virtue lies. It is the unexpected that
+provokes the smile. Now no such incongruity exists in nature; man enjoys
+a monopoly of the power of making himself ridiculous. So pleasant is
+pleasantry that we do indeed cultivate it beyond its proper pale. But
+it is only by personifying Nature, and gratuitously attributing to her
+errors of which she is incapable, that we can make fun of her; as, for
+instance, when we hold the weather up to ridicule by way of impotent
+revenge. But satires upon the clown-like character of our climate,
+which, after the lamest sort of a spring, somehow manages a capital
+fall, would in the Far East be as out of keeping with fancy as with
+fact. To a Japanese, who never personifies anything, such innocent irony
+is unmeaning. Besides, it would be also untrue. For his May carries no
+suggestion of unfulfilment in its name.
+
+Those Far Eastern paintings which have to do with man fall for the
+most part under one of two heads, the facetious and the historical. The
+latter implies no particularly intimate concern for man in himself, for
+the past has very little personality for the present. As for the former,
+its attention is, if anything, derogatory to him, for we are always shy
+of making fun of what we feel to be too closely a part of ourselves.
+But impersonality has prevented the Far Oriental from having much amour
+propre. He has no particular aversion to caricaturing himself. Few
+Europeans, perhaps, would have cared to perpetrate a self-portrait
+like one painted by the potter Kinsei, which was sold me one day as an
+amusing tour de force by a facetious picture-dealer. It is a composite
+picture of a new kind, a Japanese variety of type face. The great
+potter, who was also apparently no mean painter, has combined three
+aspects of himself in a single representation. At first sight the
+portrait appears to be simply a full front view of a somewhat moon-faced
+citizen; but as you continue to gaze, it suddenly dawns on you that
+there are two other individuals, one on either side, hob-nobbing in
+profile with the first, the lines of the features being ingeniously made
+to do double duty; and when this aspect of the thing has once struck
+you, you cannot look at the picture without seeing all three citizens
+simultaneously. The result is doubtless more effective as a composition
+than flattering as a likeness.
+
+Far Eastern sculpture, by its secondary importance among Far Eastern
+arts, witnesses again to the secondary importance assigned to man at our
+mental antipodes. In this art, owing to its necessary limitations, the
+representation of nature in its broader sense is impossible. For in the
+first place, whatever the subject, it must be such as it is possible
+to present in one continuous piece; disconnected adjuncts, as, for
+instance, a flock of birds flying, which might be introduced with great
+effect in painting, being here practically beyond the artist's reach.
+Secondly, the material being of uniform appearance, as a rule, color,
+or even shading, vital points in landscape portrayal, is out of the
+question, unless the piece were subsequently painted, as in Grecian
+sculptures, a custom which is not practised in China or Japan. Lastly,
+another fact fatal to the representation of landscape is the size. The
+reduced scale of the reproduction suggests falsity at once, a falsity
+whose belittlement the mind can neither forget nor forgive. Plain
+sculpture is therefore practically limited to statuary, either of men or
+animals. The result is that in their art, where landscape counts for
+so much, sculpture plays a very minor part. In what little there is,
+Nature's place is taken by Buddha. For there are two classes of statues,
+divided the one from the other by that step which separates the sublime
+from the ridiculous, namely, the colossal and the diminutive. There is
+no happy human mean. Of the first kind are the beautiful bronze
+figures of the Buddha, like the Kamakura Buddha, fifty feet high and
+ninety-seven feet round, in whose face all that is grand and noble lies
+sleeping, the living representation of Nirvana; and of the second, those
+odd little ornaments known as netsuke, comical carvings for the most
+part, grotesque figures of men and monkeys, saints and sinners, gods and
+devils. Appealing bits of ivory, bone, or wood they are, in which the
+dumb animals are as speaking likenesses as their human fellows.
+
+The other arts show the same motif in their decorations. Pottery and
+lacquer alike witness the respective positions assigned to the serious
+and the comic in Far Eastern feeling.
+
+The Far Oriental makes fun of man and makes love to Nature; and it
+almost seems as if Nature heard his silent prayer, and smiled upon him
+in acceptance; as if the love-light lent her face the added beauty
+that it lends the maid's. For nowhere in this world, probably, is
+she lovelier than in Japan: a climate of long, happy means and short
+extremes, months of spring and months of autumn, with but a few weeks
+of winter in between; a land of flowers, where the lotus and the cherry,
+the plum and wistaria, grow wantonly side by side; a land where
+the bamboo embosoms the maple, where the pine at last has found its
+palm-tree, and the tropic and the temperate zones forget their separate
+identity in one long self-obliterating kiss.
+
+
+
+Chapter 7. Religion.
+
+In regard to their religion, nations, like individuals, seem singularly
+averse to practising what they have preached. Whether it be that his
+self-constructed idols prove to the maker too suggestive of his own
+intellectual chisel to deceive him for long, or whether sacred soil,
+like less hallowed ground, becomes after a time incapable of responding
+to repeated sowings of the same seed, certain it is that in spiritual
+matters most peoples have grown out of conceit with their own
+conceptions. An individual may cling with a certain sentiment to the
+religion of his mother, but nations have shown anything but a foolish
+fondness for the sacred superstitions of their great-grandfathers. To
+the charm of creation succeeds invariably the bitter-sweet after-taste
+of criticism, and man would not be the progressive animal he is if he
+long remained in love with his own productions.
+
+What his future will be is too engrossing a subject, and one too deeply
+shrouded in mystery, not to be constantly pictured anew. No wonder that
+the consideration at that country toward which mankind is ever being
+hastened should prove as absorbing to fancy as contemplated earthly
+journeys proverbially are. Few people but have laid out skeleton tours
+through its ideal regions, and perhaps, as in the mapping beforehand of
+merely mundane travels, one element of attraction has always consisted
+in the possible revision of one's routes.
+
+Besides, there is a fascination about the foreign merely because it is
+such. Distance lends enchantment to the views of others, and never
+more so than when those views are religious visions. An enthusiast has
+certainly a greater chance of being taken for a god among a people who
+do not know him intimately as a man. So with his doctrines. The imported
+is apt to seem more important than the home-made; as the far-off
+bewitches more easily than the near. But just as castles in the air do
+not commonly become the property of their builders, so mansions in the
+skies almost as frequently have failed of direct inheritance. Rather
+strikingly has this proved the case with what are to-day the two most
+powerful religions of the world,--Buddhism and Christianity. Neither is
+now the belief of its founder's people. What was Aryan-born has become
+Turanian-bred, and what was Semitic by conception is at present Aryan by
+adoption. The possibilities of another's hereafter look so much rosier
+than the limitations of one's own present!
+
+Few pastimes are more delightful than tossing pebbles into some still,
+dark pool, and watching the ripples that rise responsive, as they run in
+ever widening circles to the shore. Most of us have felt its fascination
+second only to that of the dotted spiral of the skipping-stone, a
+fascination not outgrown with years. There is something singularly
+attractive in the subtle force that for a moment sways each particle
+only to pass on to the next, a motion mysterious in its immateriality.
+Some such pleasure must be theirs who have thrown their thoughts into
+the hearts of men, and seen them spread in waves of feeling, whose
+sphere time widens through the world. For like the mobile water is the
+mind of man,--quick to catch emotions, quick to transmit them. Of all
+waves of feeling, this is not the least true of religious ones, that,
+starting from their birthplace, pass out to stir others, who have but
+humanity in common with those who professed them first. Like the ripples
+in the pool, they leave their initial converts to sink back again into
+comparative quiescence, as they advance to throw into sudden tremors
+hordes of outer barbarians. In both of the great religions in question
+this wave propagation has been most marked, only the direction it
+took differed. Christianity went westward; Buddhism travelled east.
+Proselytes in Asia Minor, Greece, and Italy find counterparts in
+Eastern India, Burmah, and Thibet. Eventually the taught surpassed their
+teachers both in zeal and numbers. Jerusalem and Benares at last gave
+place to Rome and Lassa as sacerdotal centres. Still the movement
+journeyed on. Popes and Lhamas remained where their predecessors
+had founded sees, but the tide of belief surged past them in its
+irresistible advance. Farther yet from where each faith began are to
+be found to-day the greater part of its adherents. The home that the
+Western hemisphere seems to promise to the one, the extreme Orient
+affords the other. As Roman Catholicism now looks to America for its
+strength, so Buddhism to-day finds its worshippers chiefly in China and
+Japan.
+
+But though the Japanese may be said to be all Buddhists, Buddhist is by
+no means all that they are. At the time of their adoption of the great
+Indian faith, the Japanese were already in possession of a system of
+superstition which has held its own to this day. In fact, as the state
+religion of the land, it has just experienced a revival, a
+regalvanizing of its old-time energy, at the hands of some of the native
+archaeologists. Its sacred mirror, held up to Nature, has been burnished
+anew. Formerly this body of belief was the national faith, the Mikado,
+the direct descendant of the early gods, being its head on earth. His
+reinstatement to temporal power formed a very fitting first step toward
+reinvesting the cult with its former prestige; a curious instance,
+indeed, of a religious revival due to archaeological, not to religious
+zeal.
+
+This cult is the mythological inheritance of the whole eastern seaboard
+of Asia, from Siam to Kamtchatka. In Japan it is called Shintoism. The
+word "Shinto" means literally "the way of the gods," and the letter
+of its name is a true exponent of the spirit of the belief. For its
+scriptures are rather an itinerary of the gods' lives than a guide to
+that road by which man himself may attain to immortality. Thus with a
+certain fitness pilgrimages are its most noticeable rites. One cannot
+journey anywhere in the heart of Japan without meeting multitudes of
+these pilgrims, with their neat white leggings and their mushroom-like
+hats, nor rest at night at any inn that is not hung with countless
+little banners of the pilgrim associations, of which they all are
+members. Being a pilgrim there is equivalent to being a tourist here,
+only that to the excitement of doing the country is added a sustaining
+sense of the meritoriousness of the deed. Oftener than not the objective
+point of the devout is the summit of some noted mountain. For peaks
+are peculiarly sacred spots in the Shinto faith. The fact is perhaps an
+expression of man's instinctive desire to rise, as if the bodily act
+in some wise betokened the mental action. The shrine in so exalted
+a position is of the simplest: a rude hut, with or without the only
+distinctive emblems of the cult, a mirror typical of the god and the
+pendent gohei, or zigzag strips of paper, permanent votive offerings
+of man. As for the belief itself, it is but the deification of those
+natural elements which aboriginal man instinctively wonders at or fears,
+the sun, the moon, the thunder, the lightning, and the wind; all, in
+short, that he sees, hears, and feels, yet cannot comprehend. He clothes
+his terrors with forms which resemble the human, because he can conceive
+of nothing else that could cause the unexpected. But the awful shapes he
+conjures up have naught in common with himself. They are far too fearful
+to be followed. Their way is the "highway of the gods," but no Jacob's
+ladder for wayward man.
+
+In this externality to the human lies the reason that Shintoism and
+Buddhism can agree so well, and can both join with Confucianism in
+helping to form that happy family of faith which is so singular a
+feature of Far Eastern religious capability. It is not simply that the
+two contrive to live peaceably together; they are actually both of them
+implicitly believed by the same individual. Millions of Japanese
+are good Buddhists and good Shintoists at the same time. That such a
+combination should be possible is due to the essential difference in the
+character of the two beliefs. The one is extrinsic, the other intrinsic,
+in its relations to the human soul. Shintoism tells man but little about
+himself and his hereafter; Buddhism, little but about himself and
+what he may become. In examining Far Eastern religion, therefore, for
+personality, or the reverse, we may dismiss Shintoism as having no
+particular bearing upon the subject. The only effect it has is indirect
+in furthering the natural propensity of these people to an adoration of
+nature.
+
+In Korea and in China, again, Confucianism is the great moral law, as by
+reflection it is to a certain extent in Japan. But that in its turn
+may be omitted in the present argument; inasmuch as Confucius taught
+confessedly and designedly only a system of morals, and religiously
+abstained from pronouncing any opinion whatever upon the character or
+the career of the human soul.
+
+Taouism, the third great religion of China, resembles Shintoism to this
+extent, that it is a body of superstition, and not a form of philosophy.
+It undertakes to provide nostrums for spiritual ills, but is dumb as to
+the constitution of the soul for which it professes to prescribe.
+Its pills are to be swallowed unquestioningly by the patient, and are
+warranted to cure; and owing to the two great human frailties, fear
+and credulity, its practice is very large. Possessing, however, no
+philosophic diploma, it is without the pale of the present discussion.
+
+The demon-worship of Korea is a mild form of the same thing with the
+hierarchy left out, every man there being his own spiritual adviser.
+An ordinary Korean is born with an innate belief in malevolent spirits,
+whom he accordingly propitiates from time to time. One of nobler birth
+propitiates only the spirits of his own ancestors.
+
+We come, then, by a process of elimination to a consideration of
+Buddhism, the great philosophic faith of the whole Far East.
+
+Not uncommonly in the courtyard of a Japanese temple, in the solemn
+half-light of the sombre firs, there stands a large stone basin, cut
+from a single block, and filled to the brim with water. The trees, the
+basin, and a few stone lanterns--so called from their form, and not
+their function, for they have votive pebbles where we should look for
+wicks--are the sole occupants of the place. Sheltered from the
+wind, withdrawn from sound, and only piously approached by man, this
+antechamber of the god seems the very abode of silence and rest. It
+might be Nirvana itself, human entrance to an immortality like the god's
+within, so peaceful, so pervasive is its calm; and in its midst is the
+moss-covered monolith, holding in its embrace the little imprisoned pool
+of water. So still is the spot and so clear the liquid that you know the
+one only as the reflection of the other. Mirrored in its glassy surface
+appears everything around it. As you peer in, far down you see a tiny
+bit of sky, as deep as the blue is high above, across which slowly sail
+the passing clouds; then nearer stand the trees, arching overhead, as if
+bending to catch glimpses of themselves in that other world below; and
+then, nearer yet--yourself.
+
+Emblem of the spirit of man is this little pool to Far Oriental eyes.
+Subtile as the soul is the incomprehensible water; so responsive to
+light that it remains itself invisible; so clear that it seems illusion!
+Though portrayer so perfect of forms about it, all we know of the thing
+itself is that it is. Through none of the five senses do we perceive it.
+Neither sight, nor hearing, nor taste, nor smell, nor touch can tell us
+it exists; we feel it to be by the muscular sense alone, that blind and
+dumb analogue for the body of what consciousness is for the soul. Only
+when disturbed, troubled, does the water itself become visible, and then
+it is but the surface that we see. So to the Far Oriental this still
+little lake typifies the soul, the eventual purification of his own; a
+something lost in reflection, self-effaced, only the alter ego of the
+outer world.
+
+For contemplation, not action, is the Far Oriental's ideal of life. The
+repose of self-adjustment like that to which our whole solar system
+is slowly tending as its death,--this to him appears, though from no
+scientific deduction, the end of all existence. So he sits and ponders,
+abstractly, vaguely, upon everything in general,--synonym, alas, to
+man's finite mind, for nothing in particular,--till even the sense
+of self seems to vanish, and through the mist-like portal of
+unconsciousness he floats out into the vast indistinguishable sameness
+of Nirvana's sea.
+
+At first sight Buddhism is much more like Christianity than those of us
+who stay at home and speculate upon it commonly appreciate. As a system
+of philosophy it sounds exceedingly foreign, but it looks unexpectedly
+familiar as a faith. Indeed, the one religion might well pass for the
+counterfeit presentment of the other. The resemblance so struck the
+early Catholic missionaries that they felt obliged to explain the
+remarkable similarity between the two. With them ingenuous surprise
+instantly begot ingenious sophistry. Externally, the likeness was so
+exact that at first they could not bring themselves to believe that the
+Buddhist ceremonials had not been filched bodily from the practices of
+the true faith. Finding, however, that no known human agency had acted
+in the matter, they bethought them of introducing, to account for
+things, a deus ex machina in the shape of the devil. They were so
+pleased with this solution of the difficulty that they imparted it
+at once with much pride to the natives. You have indeed got, they
+graciously if somewhat gratuitously informed them, the outward semblance
+of the true faith, but you are in fact the miserable victims of an
+impious fraud. Satan has stolen the insignia of divinity, and is now
+masquerading before you as the deity; your god is really our devil,--a
+recognition of antipodal inversion truly worthy the Jesuitical mind!
+
+Perhaps it is not matter for great surprise that they converted but few
+of their hearers. The suggestion was hardly so diplomatic as might have
+been expected from so generally astute a body; for it could not make
+much difference what the all-presiding deity was called, if his actions
+were the same, since his motives were beyond human observation. Besides,
+the bare idea of a foreign bogus was not very terrifying. The Chinese
+possessed too many familiar devils of their own. But there was another
+and a much deeper reason, which we shall come to later, why Christianity
+made but little headway in the Far East.
+
+But it is by no means in externals only that the two religions are
+alike. If the first glance at them awakens that peculiar sensation which
+most of us have felt at some time or other, a sense of having seen all
+this before, further scrutiny reveals a deeper agreement than merely in
+appearances.
+
+In passing from the surface into the substance, it may be mentioned
+incidentally that the codes of morality of the two are about on a level.
+I say incidentally, for so far as its practice, certainly, is concerned,
+it not its preaching, morality has no more intimate connection with
+religion than it has with art or politics. If we doubt this, we have but
+to examine the facts. Are the most religious peoples the most moral? It
+needs no prolonged investigation to convince us that they are not. If
+proof of the want of a bond were required, the matter of truth-telling
+might be adduced in point. As this is a subject upon which a slight
+misconception exists in the minds of some evangelically persuaded
+persons, and because, what is more generally relevant, the presence of
+this quality, honesty in word and deed, has more than almost any other
+one characteristic helped to put us in the van of the world's advance
+to-day, it may not unfittingly be cited here.
+
+The argument in the case may be put thus. Have specially religious races
+been proportionally truth-telling ones? If not, has there been any
+other cause at work in the development of mankind tending to increase
+veracity? The answer to the first question has all the simplicity of
+a plain negative. No such pleasing concomitance of characteristics
+is observable to-day, or has been presented in the past. Permitting,
+however, the dead past to bury its shortcomings in oblivion, let us look
+at the world as we find it. We observe, then, that the religious spirit
+is quite as strong in Asia as it is in Europe; if anything, that at the
+present time it is rather stronger. The average Brahman, Mahometan,
+or Buddhist is quite as devout as the ordinary Roman Catholic or
+Presbyterian. If he is somewhat less given to propagandism, he is not
+a whit less regardful of his own salvation. Yet throughout the Orient
+truth is a thing unknown, lies of courtesy being de rigueur and lies
+of convenience de raison; while with us, fortunately, mendacity is
+generally discredited. But we need not travel so far for proof. The same
+is evident in less antipodal relations. Have the least religious nations
+of Europe been any less truthful than the most bigoted? Was fanatic
+Spain remarkable for veracity? Was Loyola a gentleman whose assertions
+carried conviction other than to the stake? Were the eminently mundane
+burghers whom he persecuted noted for a pious superiority to fact? Or,
+to narrow the field still further, and scan the circle of one's own
+acquaintance, are the most believing individuals among them worthy of
+the most belief? Assuredly not.
+
+We come, then, to the second point. Has there been any influence at work
+to differentiate us in this respect from Far Orientals? There has. Two
+separate causes, in fact, have conduced to the same result. The one is
+the development of physical science; the other, the extension of trade.
+The sole object of science being to discover truth, truth-telling is a
+necessity of its existence. Professionally, scientists are obliged to be
+truthful. Aliter of a Jesuit.
+
+So long as science was of the closet, its influence upon mankind
+generally was indirect and slight; but so soon as it proceeded to stalk
+into the street and earn its own living, its veracious character began
+to tell. When out of its theories sprang inventions and discoveries that
+revolutionized every-day affairs and changed the very face of things,
+society insensibly caught its spirit. Man awoke to the inestimable value
+of exactness. From scientists proper, the spirit filtered down through
+every stratum of education, till to-day the average man is born exact to
+a degree which his forefathers never dreamed of becoming. To-day, as
+a rule, the more intelligent the individual, the more truthful he is,
+because the more innately exact in thought, and thence in word and
+action. With us, to lie is a sign of a want of cleverness, not of an
+excess of it.
+
+The second cause, the extension of trade, has inculcated the same regard
+for veracity through the pocket. For with the increase of business
+transactions in both time and space, the telling of the truth has become
+a financial necessity. Without it, trade would come to a standstill at
+once. Our whole mercantile system, a modern piece of mechanism unknown
+to the East till we imported it thither, turns on an implicit belief
+in the word of one's neighbor. Our legal safeguards would snap like
+red tape were the great bond of mutual trust once broken. Western
+civilization has to be truthful, or perish.
+
+And now for the spirits of the two beliefs.
+
+The soul of any religion realizes in one respect the Brahman idea of the
+individual soul of man, namely, that it exists much after the manner of
+an onion, in many concentric envelopes. Man, they tell us, is composed
+not of a single body simply, but of several layers of body, each shell
+as it were respectively inclosing another. The outermost is the merely
+material body, of which we are so directly cognizant. This encases a
+second, more spiritual, but yet not wholly free from earthly affinities.
+This contains another, still more refined; till finally, inside of all
+is that immaterial something which they conceive to constitute the
+soul. This eventual residuum exemplifies the Franciscan notion of pure
+substance, for it is a thing delightfully devoid of any attributes
+whatever.
+
+We may, perhaps, not be aware of the existence of such an elaborate
+set of encasings to our own heart of hearts, nor of a something so
+very indefinite within, but the most casual glance at any religion will
+reveal its truth as regards the soul of a belief. We recognize the fact
+outwardly in the buildings erected to celebrate its worship. Not among
+the Jews alone was the holy of holies kept veiled, to temper the divine
+radiance to man's benighted understanding. Nor is the chancel-rail of
+Christianity the sole survivor of the more exclusive barriers of olden
+times, even in the Western world. In the Far East, where difficulty of
+access is deemed indispensable to dignity, the material approaches
+are still manifold and imposing. Court within court, building after
+building, isolate the shrine itself from the profane familiarity of
+the passers-by. But though the material encasings vary in number and
+in exclusiveness, according to the temperament of the particular
+race concerned, the mental envelopes exist, and must exist, in both
+hemispheres alike, so long as society resembles the crust of the earth
+on which it dwells,--a crust composed of strata that grow denser as one
+descends. What is clear to those on top seems obscure to those below;
+what are weighty arguments to the second have no force at all upon
+the first. There must necessarily be grades of elevation in individual
+beliefs, suited to the needs and cravings of each individual soul. A
+creed that fills the shallow with satisfaction leaves but an aching
+void in the deep. It is not of the slightest consequence how the belief
+starts; differentiated it is bound to become. The higher minds alone
+can rest content with abstract imaginings; the lower must have concrete
+realities on which to pin their faith. With them, inevitably, ideals
+degenerate into idols. In all religions this unavoidable debasement has
+taken place. The Roman Catholic who prays to a wooden image of Christ
+is not one whit less idolatrous than the Buddhist who worships a bronze
+statue of Amida Butzu. All that the common people are capable of seeing
+is the soul-envelope, for the soul itself they are unable to appreciate.
+Spiritually they are undiscerning, because imaginatively they are blind.
+
+Now the grosser soul-envelopes of the two great European and Asiatic
+faiths, though differing in detail, are in general parallel in
+structure. Each boasts its full complement of saints, whose congruent
+catalogues are equally wearisome in length. Each tells its circle of
+beads to help it keep count of similarly endless prayers. For in both,
+in the popular estimation, quantity is more effective to salvation
+than quality. In both the believer practically pictures his heaven for
+himself, while in each his hell, with a vividness that does like credit
+to its religious imagination, is painted for him by those of the cult
+who are themselves confident of escaping it. Into the lap of each mother
+church the pious believer drops his little votive offering with the same
+affectionate zeal, and in Asia, as in Europe, the mites of the many make
+the might of the mass.
+
+But behind all this is the religion of the few,--of those to whom
+sensuous forms cannot suffice to represent super-sensuous cravings;
+whose god is something more than an anthropomorphic creation; to whom
+worship means not the cramping of the body, but the expansion of the
+soul.
+
+The rays of the truth, like the rays of the sun, which universally seems
+to have been man's first adoration, have two properties equally inherent
+in their essence, warmth and light. And as for the life of all things
+on this globe both attributes of sunshine are necessary, so to the
+development of that something which constitutes the ego both qualities
+of the truth are vital. We sometimes speak of character as if it were
+a thing wholly apart from mind; but, in fact, the two things are so
+interwoven that to perceive the right course is the strongest possible
+of incentives to pursue it. In the end the two are one. Now, while
+clearness of head is all-important, kindness of heart is none the less
+so. The first, perhaps, is more needed in our communings with ourselves,
+the second in our commerce with others. For, dark and dense bodies
+that we are, we can radiate affection much more effectively than we can
+reflect views.
+
+That Christianity is a religion of love needs no mention; that Buddhism
+is equally such is perhaps not so generally appreciated. But just as the
+gospel of the disciple who loved and was loved the most begins its story
+by telling us of the Light that came into the world, so none the less
+surely could the Light of Asia but be also its warmth. Half of the
+teachings of Buddhism are spent in inculcating charity. Not only to men
+is man enjoined to show kindliness, but to all other animals as well.
+The people practise what their scriptures preach. The effect indirectly
+on the condition of the brutes is almost as marked as its more direct
+effect on the character of mankind. In heart, at least, Buddhism and
+Christianity are very close.
+
+But here the two paths to a something beyond an earthly life diverge. Up
+to this point the two religions are alike, but from this point on they
+are so utterly unlike that the very similarity of all that went before
+only suffices to make of the second the weird, life-counterfeiting
+shadow of the first. As in a silhouette, externally the contours are all
+there, but within is one vast blank. In relation to one's neighbor the
+two beliefs are kin, but as regards one's self, as far apart as the West
+is from the East. For here, at this idea of self, we are suddenly aware
+of standing on the brink of a fathomless abyss, gazing giddily down into
+that great gulf which divides Buddhism from Christianity. We cannot see
+the bottom. It is a separation more profound than death; it seems to
+necessitate annihilation. To cross it we must bury in its depths all we
+know as ourselves.
+
+Christianity is a personal religion; Buddhism, an impersonal one. In
+this fundamental difference lies the world-wide opposition of the two
+beliefs. Christianity tells us to purify ourselves that we may enjoy
+countless aeons of that bettered self hereafter; Buddhism would have us
+purify ourselves that we may lose all sense of self for evermore.
+
+For all that it preaches the essential vileness of the natural man,
+Christianity is a gospel of optimism. While it affirms that at present
+you are bad, it also affirms that this depravity is no intrinsic part
+of yourself. It unquestioningly asserts that it is something foreign
+to your true being. It even believes that in a more or less spiritual
+manner your very body will survive. It essentially clings to the ego.
+What it inculcates is really present endeavor sanctioned by the prospect
+of future bliss. It tacitly takes for granted the desirability
+of personal existence, and promises the certainty of personal
+immortality,--a terror to evildoers, and a sustaining sense of coming
+unalloyed happiness to the good. Through and through its teachings runs
+the feeling of the fullness of life, that desire which will not die,
+that wish of the soul which beats its wings against its earthly casement
+in its longing for expansion beyond the narrow confines of threescore
+years and ten.
+
+Buddhism, on the contrary, is the cri du coeur of pessimism. This life,
+it says, is but a chain of sorrows. To multiply days is only to multiply
+evil. These desires that urge us on are really cause of all our woe. We
+think they are ourselves. We are mistaken. They are all illusion, and
+we are victims of a mirage. This personality, this sense of self, is
+a cruel deception and a snare. Realize once the true soul behind it,
+devoid of attributes, therefore without this capacity for suffering, an
+indivisible part of the great impersonal soul of nature: then, and
+then only, will you have found happiness in the blissful quiescence of
+Nirvana.
+
+With a certain poetic fitness, misery and impersonality were both
+present in the occasion that gave the belief birth. Many have turned
+to the consolations of religion by reason of their own wretchedness;
+Gautama sought its help touched by the woes of others whom, in his own
+happy life journey, he chanced one day to come across. Shocked by the
+sight of human disease, old age, and death, sad facts to which hitherto
+he had been sedulously kept a stranger, he renounced the world that he
+might find for it an escape from its ills. But bliss, as he conceived
+it, lay not in wanting to be something he was not, but in actual want of
+being. His quest for mankind was immunity from suffering, not the active
+enjoyment of life. In this negative way of looking at happiness,
+he acted in strict conformity with the spirit of his world. For the
+doctrine of pessimism had already been preached. It underlay the whole
+Brahman philosophy, and everybody believed it implicitly. Already the
+East looked at this life as an evil, and had affirmed for the individual
+spirit extinction to be happier than existence. The wish for an end
+to the ego, the hope to be eventually nothing, Gautama accepted for a
+truism as undeniably as the Brahmans did. What he pronounced false was
+the Brahman prospectus of the way to reach this desirable impersonal
+state. Their road, be said, could not possibly land the traveller where
+it professed, since it began wrong, and ended nowhere. The way, he
+asserted, is within a man. He has but to realize the truth, and from
+that moment he will see his goal and the road that leads there. There
+is no panacea for human ills, of external application. The Brahman
+homoeopathic treatment of sin is folly. The slaughtering of men and
+bulls cannot possibly bring life to the soul. To mortify the body for
+the sins of the flesh is palpably futile, for in desire alone lies all
+the ill. Quench the desire, and the deeds will die of inanition. Man
+himself is sole cause of his own misery. Get rid, then, said the Buddha,
+of these passions, these strivings for the sake of self, that hold the
+true soul a prisoner. They have to do with things which we know are
+transitory: how can they be immortal themselves? We recognize them as
+subject to our will; they are, then, not the I.
+
+As a man, he taught, becomes conscious that he himself is something
+distinct from his body, so, if he reflect and ponder, he will come to
+see that in like manner his appetites, ambitions, hopes, are really
+extrinsic to the spirit proper. Neither heart nor head is truly the man,
+for he is conscious of something that stands behind both. Behind desire,
+behind even the will, lies the soul, the same for all men, one with the
+soul of the universe. When he has once realized this eternal truth,
+the man has entered Nirvana. For Nirvana is not an absorption of the
+individual soul into the soul of all things, since the one has always
+been a part of the other. Still less is it utter annihilation. It is
+simply the recognition of the eternal oneness of the two, back through
+an everlasting past on through an everlasting future.
+
+Such is the belief which the Japanese adopted, and which they profess
+to-day. Such to them is to be the dawn of death's to-morrow; a blessed
+impersonal immortality, in which all sense of self, illusion that it
+is, shall itself have ceased to be; a long dreamless sleep, a beatified
+rest, which no awakening shall ever disturb.
+
+Among such a people personal Christianity converts but few. They accept
+our material civilization, but they reject our creeds. To preach a
+prolongation of life appears to them like preaching an extension of
+sorrow. At most, Christianity succeeds only in making them doubters of
+what lies beyond this life. But though professing agnosticism while they
+live, they turn, when the shadows of death's night come on, to the bosom
+of that faith which teaches that, whatever may have been one's earthly
+share of happiness, "'tis something better not to be."
+
+Strange it seems at first that those who have looked so long to the
+rising sun for inspiration should be they who live only in a sort of
+lethargy of life, while those who for so many centuries have turned
+their faces steadily to the fading glory of the sunset should be the
+ones who have embodied the spirit of progress of the world. Perhaps the
+light, by its very rising, checks the desire to pursue; in its setting
+it lures one on to follow.
+
+Though this religion of impersonality is not their child, it is their
+choice. They embraced it with the rest that India taught them, centuries
+ago. But though just as eager to learn of us now as of India then,
+Christianity fails to commend itself. This is not due to the fact that
+the Buddhist missionaries came by invitation, and ours do not. Nor is it
+due to any want of personal character in these latter, but simply to an
+excess of it in their doctrines.
+
+For to-day the Far East is even more impersonal in its religion than are
+those from whom that religion originally came. India has returned again
+to its worship of Brahma, which, though impersonal enough, is less so
+than is the gospel of Gautama. For it is passively instead of actively
+impersonal.
+
+Buddhism bears to Brahmanism something like the relation that
+Protestantism does to Roman Catholicism. Both bishops and Brahmans
+undertake to save all who shall blindly commit themselves to
+professional guidance, while Buddhists and Protestants alike believe
+that a man's salvation must be brought about by the action of the man
+himself. The result is, that in the matter of individuality the two
+reformed beliefs are further apart than those against which they
+severally protested. For by the change the personal became more
+personal, and the impersonal more impersonal than before. The
+Protestant, from having tamely allowed himself to be led, began to take
+a lively interest in his own self-improvement; while the Buddhist,
+from a former apathetic acquiescence in the doctrine of the universally
+illusive, set to work energetically towards self-extinction. Curious
+labor for a mind, that of devoting all its strength to the thinking
+itself out of existence! Not content with being born impersonal, a Far
+Oriental is constantly striving to make himself more so.
+
+We have seen, then, how in trying to understand these peoples we
+are brought face to face with impersonality in each of those three
+expressions of the human soul, speech, thought, yearning. We have looked
+at them first from a social standpoint. We have seen how singularly
+little regard is paid the individual from his birth to his death. How
+he lives his life long the slave of patriarchal customs of so puerile
+a tendency as to be practically impossible to a people really grown up.
+How he practises a wholesale system of adoption sufficient of itself to
+destroy any surviving regard for the ego his other relations might
+have left. How in his daily life he gives the minimum of thought to
+the bettering himself in any worldly sense, and the maximum of polite
+consideration to his neighbor. How, in short, he acts toward himself as
+much as possible as if he were another, and to that other as if he
+were himself. Then, not content with standing stranger like upon the
+threshold, we have sought to see the soul of their civilization in its
+intrinsic manifestations. We have pushed our inquiry, as it were,
+one step nearer its home. And the same trait that was apparent
+sociologically has been exposed in this our antipodal phase of psychical
+research. We have seen how impersonal is his language, the principal
+medium of communication between one soul and another; how impersonal
+are the communings of his soul with itself. How the man turns to
+nature instead of to his fellowman in silent sympathy. And how, when he
+speculates upon his coming castles in the air, his most roseate desire
+is to be but an indistinguishable particle of the sunset clouds and
+vanish invisible as they into the starry stillness of all-embracing
+space.
+
+Now what does this strange impersonality betoken? Why are these peoples
+so different from us in this most fundamental of considerations to
+any people, the consideration of themselves? The answer leads to some
+interesting conclusions.
+
+
+
+Chapter 8. Imagination.
+
+If, as is the case with the moon, the earth, as she travelled round
+her orbit turned always the same face inward, we might expect to find,
+between the thoughts of that hemisphere which looked continually to the
+sun, and those of the other peering eternally out at the stars,
+some such difference as actually exists between ourselves and our
+longitudinal antipodes. For our conception of the cosmos is of a
+sunlit world throbbing with life, while their Nirvana finds not unfit
+expression in the still, cold, fathomless awe of the midnight sky. That
+we cannot thus directly account for the difference in local coloring
+serves but to make that difference of more human interest. The
+dissimilarity between the Western and the Far Eastern attitude of mind
+has in it something beyond the effect of environment. For it points to
+the importance of the part which the principle of individuality plays
+in the great drama daily enacting before our eyes, and which we know as
+evolution. It shows, as I shall hope to prove, that individuality bears
+the same relation to the development of mind that the differentiation
+of species does to the evolution of organic life: that the degree of
+individualization of a people is the self-recorded measure of its place
+in the great march of mind.
+
+All life, whether organic or inorganic, consists, as we know, in
+a change from a state of simple homogeneity to one of complex
+heterogeneity. The process is apparently the same in a nebula or a
+brachiopod, although much more intricate in the latter. The immediate
+force which works this change, the life principle of things, is, in the
+case of organic beings, a subtle something which we call spontaneous
+variation. What this mysterious impulse may be is beyond our present
+powers of recognition. As yet, the ultimates of all things lie hidden
+in the womb of the vast unknown. But just as in the case of a man we can
+tell what organs are vital, though we are ignorant what the vital spark
+may be, so in our great cosmical laws we can say in what their power
+resides, though we know not really what they are. Whether mind be but a
+sublimated form of matter, or, what amounts to the same thing, matter
+a menial kind of mind, or whether, which seems less likely, it be a
+something incomparable with substance, of one thing we are sure, the
+same laws of heredity govern both. In each a like chain of continuity
+leads from the present to the dim past, a connecting clue which we can
+follow backward in imagination. Now what spontaneous variation is to the
+material organism, imagination, apparently, is to the mental one. Just
+as spontaneous variation is constantly pushing the animal or the plant
+to push out, as a vine its tendrils, in all directions, while natural
+conditions are as constantly exercising over it a sort of unconscious
+pruning power, so imagination is ever at work urging man's mind out and
+on, while the sentiment of the community, commonly called common sense,
+which simply means the point already reached by the average, is as
+steadily tending to keep it at its own level. The environment helps, in
+the one case as in the other, to the shaping of the development. Purely
+physical in the first, it is both physical and psychical in the
+second, the two reacting on each other. But in either case it is only a
+constraining condition, not the divine impulse itself. Precisely, then,
+as in the organism, this subtle spirit checked in one direction finds
+a way to advance in another, and produces in consequence among an
+originally similar set of bodies a gradual separation into species
+which grow wider with time, so in brain evolution a like force for like
+reasons tends inevitably to an ever-increasing individualization.
+
+Now what evidence have we that this analogy holds? Let us look at the
+facts, first as they present themselves subjectively.
+
+The instinct of self-preservation, that guardian angel so persistent to
+appear when needed, owes its summons to another instinct no less strong,
+which we may call the instinct of individuality; for with the same
+innate tenacity with which we severally cling to life do we hold to
+the idea of our own identity. It is not for the philosophic desire of
+preserving a very small fraction of humanity at large that we take such
+pains to avoid destruction; it is that we insensibly regard death as
+threatening to the continuance of the ego, in spite of the theories of
+a future life which we have so elaborately developed. Indeed, the
+psychical shrinking is really the quintessence of the physical fear. We
+cleave to the abstract idea closer even than to its concrete embodiment.
+Sooner would we forego this earthly existence than surrender that
+something we know as self. For sufficient cause we can imagine courting
+death; we cannot conceive of so much as exchanging our individuality for
+another's, still less of abandoning it altogether; for gradually a man,
+as he grows older, comes to regard his body as, after all, separable
+from himself. It is the soul's covering, rendered indispensable by the
+climatic conditions of our present existence, one without which we
+could no longer continue to live here. To forego it does not necessarily
+negative, so far as we yet know, the possibility of living elsewhere.
+Some more congenial tropic may be the wandering spirit's fate. But to
+part with the sense of self seems to be like taking an eternal farewell
+of the soul. The Western mind shrinks before the bare idea of such a
+thought.
+
+The clinging to one's own identity, then, is now an instinct, whatever
+it may originally have been. It is a something we inherited from our
+ancestors and which we shall transmit more or less modified to our
+descendants. How far back this consciousness has been felt passes
+the possibilities of history to determine, since the recording of it
+necessarily followed the fact. All we know is that its mention is coeval
+with chronicle, and its origin lost in allegory. The Bible, one of the
+oldest written records in the world, begins with a bit of mythology of
+a very significant kind. When the Jews undertook to trace back their
+family tree to an idyllic garden of Eden, they mentioned as growing
+there beside the tree of life, another tree called the tree of
+knowledge. Of what character this knowledge was is inferable from the
+sudden self-consciousness that followed the partaking of it. So that if
+we please we may attribute directly to Eve's indiscretion the many
+evils of our morbid self-consciousness of the present day. But without
+indulging in unchivalrous reflections we may draw certain morals from it
+of both immediate and ultimate applicability.
+
+To begin with, it is a most salutary warning to the introspective, and
+in the second place it is a striking instance of a myth which is not
+a sun myth; for it is essentially of human regard, an attempt on man's
+part to explain that most peculiar attribute of his constitution,
+the all-possessing sense of self. It looks certainly as if he was not
+over-proud of his person that he should have deemed its recognition
+occasion for the primal curse, and among early races the person is for
+a good deal of the personality. What he lamented was not life but the
+unavoidable exertion necessary to getting his daily bread, for the
+question whether life were worth while was as futile then as now, and as
+inconceivable really as 4-dimensional space.
+
+We are then conscious of individuality as a force within ourselves. But
+our knowledge by no means ends there; for we are aware of it in the case
+of others as well.
+
+About certain people there exists a subtle something which leaves its
+impress indelibly upon the consciousness of all who come in contact
+with them. This something is a power, but a power of so indefinable a
+description that we beg definition by calling it simply the personality
+of the man. It is not a matter of subsequent reasoning, but of direct
+perception. We feel it. Sometimes it charms us; sometimes it repels. But
+we can no more be oblivious to it than we can to the temperature of
+the air. Its possessor has but to enter the room, and insensibly we are
+conscious of a presence. It is as if we had suddenly been placed in the
+field of a magnetic force.
+
+On the other hand there are people who produce no effect upon us
+whatever. They come and go with a like indifference. They are as
+unimportant psychically as if they were any other portion of the
+furniture. They never stir us. We might live with them for fifty years
+and be hardly able to tell, for any influence upon ourselves, whether
+they existed or not. They remind us of that neutral drab which certain
+religious sects assume to show their own irrelevancy to the world. They
+are often most estimable folk, but they are no more capable of inspiring
+a strong emotion than the other kind are incapable of doing so. And we
+say the difference is due to the personality or want of personality of
+the man. Now, in what does this so-called personality consist? Not in
+bodily presence simply, for men quite destitute of it possess the
+force in question; not in character only, for we often disapprove of a
+character whose attraction we are powerless to resist; not in intellect
+alone, for men more rational fail of stirring us as these unconsciously
+do. In what, then? In life itself; not that modicum of it, indeed, which
+suffices simply to keep the machine moving, but in the life principle,
+the power which causes psychical change; which makes the individual
+something distinct from all other individuals, a being capable of
+proving sufficient, if need be, unto himself; which shows itself, in
+short, as individuality. This is not a mere restatement of the case, for
+individuality is an objective fact capable of being treated by physical
+science. And as we know much more at present about physical facts than
+we do of psychological problems, we may be able to arrive the sooner at
+solution.
+
+Individuality, personality, and the sense of self are only three
+different aspects of one and the same thing. They are so many various
+views of the soul according as we regard it from an intrinsic, an
+altruistic, or an egoistic standpoint. For by individuality is not meant
+simply the isolation in a corporeal casing of a small portion of the
+universal soul of mankind. So far as mind goes, this would not be
+individuality at all, but the reverse. By individuality we mean that
+bundle of ideas, thoughts, and daydreams which constitute our separate
+identity, and by virtue of which we feel each one of us at home within
+himself. Now man in his mind-development is bound to become more and
+more distinct from his neighbor. We can hardly conceive a progress so
+uniform as not to necessitate this. It would be contrary to all we
+know of natural law, besides contradicting daily experience. For each
+successive generation bears unmistakable testimony to the fact. Children
+of the same parents are never exactly like either their parents or one
+another, and they often differ amazingly from both. In such instances
+they revert to type, as we say; but inasmuch as the race is steadily
+advancing in development, such reversion must resemble that of an estate
+which has been greatly improved since its previous possession. The
+appearance of the quality is really the sprouting of a seed whose
+original germ was in some sense coeval with the beginning of things.
+This mind-seed takes root in some cases and not in others, according to
+the soil it finds. And as certain traits develop and others do not,
+one man turns out very differently from his neighbor. Such inevitable
+distinction implies furthermore that the man shall be sensible of it.
+Consciousness is the necessary attribute of mental action. Not only is
+it the sole way we have of knowing mind; without it there would be no
+mind to know. Not to be conscious of one's self is, mentally speaking,
+not to be. This complex entity, this little cosmos of a world, the "I,"
+has for its very law of existence self-consciousness, while personality
+is the effect it produces upon the consciousness of others.
+
+But we may push our inquiry a step further, and find in imagination
+the cause of this strange force. For imagination, or the image-making
+faculty, may in a certain sense be said to be the creator of the world
+within. The separate senses furnish it with material, but to it alone is
+due the building of our castles, on premises of fact or in the air. For
+there is no impassable gulf between the two. Coleridge's distinction
+that imagination drew possible pictures and fancy impossible ones, is
+itself, except as a classification, an impossible distinction to draw;
+for it is only the inconceivable that can never be. All else is purely a
+matter of relation. We may instance dreams which are usually considered
+to rank among the most fanciful creations of the mind. Who has not in
+his dreams fallen repeatedly from giddy heights and invariably escaped
+unhurt? If he had attempted the feat in his waking moments he would
+assuredly have been dashed to pieces at the bottom. And so we say the
+thing is impossible. But is it? Only under the relative conditions of
+his mass and the earth's. If the world he happens to inhabit were not
+its present size, but the size of one of the tinier asteroids, no such
+disastrous results would follow a chance misstep. He could there walk
+off precipices when too closely pursued by bears--if I remember rightly
+the usual childish cause of the same--with perfect impunity. The
+bear could do likewise, unfortunately. We should have arrived at our
+conclusion even quicker had we decreased the size both of the man and
+his world. He would not then have had to tumble actually so far, and
+would therefore have arrived yet more gently at the foot. This turns
+out, then, to be a mere question of size. Decrease the scale of the
+picture, and the impossible becomes possible at once. All fancies are
+not so easily reducible to actual facts as the one we have taken, but
+all, perhaps, eventually may be explicable in the same general way.
+At present we certainly cannot affirm that anything may not be thus
+explained. For the actual is widening its field every day. Even in this
+little world of our own we are daily discovering to be fact what we
+should have thought fiction, like the sailor's mother the tale of
+the flying fish. Beyond it our ken is widening still more. Gulliver's
+travels may turn out truer than we think. Could we traverse the
+inter-planetary ocean of ether, we might eventually find in Jupiter
+the land of Lilliput or in Ceres some old-time country of the
+Brobdignagians. For men constituted muscularly like ourselves would have
+to be proportionately small in the big planet and big in the small
+one. Still stranger things may exist around other suns. In those bright
+particular stars--which the little girl thought pinholes in the dark
+canopy of the sky to let the glory beyond shine through--we are finding
+conditions of existence like yet unlike those we already know. To our
+groping speculations of the night they almost seem, as we gaze on them
+in their twinkling, to be winking us a sort of comprehension. Conditions
+may exist there under which our wildest fancies may be commonplace
+facts. There may be
+
+   "Some Xanadu where Kublai can
+    a stately pleasure dome decree,"
+
+and carry out his conceptions to his own disillusionment, perhaps. For
+if the embodiment of a fancy, however complete, left nothing further
+to be wished, imagination would have no incentive to work. Coleridge's
+distinction does very well to separate, empirically, certain kinds of
+imaginative concepts from certain others; but it has no real foundation
+in fact. Nor presumably did he mean it to have. But it serves, not
+inaptly, as a text to point out an important scientific truth, namely,
+that there are not two such qualities of the mind, but only one. For
+otherwise we might have supposed the fact too evident to need mention.
+Imagination is the single source of the new, the one mainspring of
+psychical advance; reason, like a balance-wheel, only keeping the
+action regular. For reason is but the touchstone of experience, our own,
+inherited, or acquired from others. It compares what we imagine with
+what we know, and gives us answer in terms of the here and the now,
+which we call the actual. But the actual is really nothing but the
+local. It does not mark the limits of the possible.
+
+That imagination has been the moving spirit of the psychical world is
+evident, whatever branch of human thought we are pleased to examine. We
+are in the habit, in common parlance, of making a distinction between
+the search after truth and the search after beauty, calling the
+one science and the other art. Now while we are not slow to impute
+imagination to art, we are by no means so ready to appreciate its
+connection with science. Yet contrary, perhaps, to exogeric ideas on the
+subject, it is science rather than art that demands imagination of her
+votaries. Not that art may not involve the quality to a high degree, but
+that a high degree of art is quite compatible with a very small amount
+of imagination. On the one side we may instance painting. Now painting
+begins its career in the humble capacity of copyist, a pretty poor
+copyist at that. At first so slight was its skill that the rudest
+symbols sufficed. "This is a man" was conventionally implied by a
+few scratches bearing a very distant relationship to the real thing.
+Gradually, owing to human vanity and a growing taste, pictures improved.
+Combinations were tried, a bit from one place with a piece from another;
+a sort of mosaic requiring but a slight amount of imagination. Not that
+imagination of a higher order has not been called into play, although
+even now pictures are often happy adaptations rather than creations
+proper. Some masters have been imaginative; others, unfortunately for
+themselves and still more for the public, have not. For that the art may
+attain a high degree of excellence for itself and much distinction for
+its professors, without calling in the aid of imagination, is evident
+enough on this side of the globe, without travelling to the other.
+
+Take, on the other hand, a branch of science which, to the average
+layman, seems peculiarly unimaginative, the science of mathematics.
+Yet at the risk of appearing to cast doubts upon the validity of its
+conclusions, it might be called the most imaginative product of
+human thought; for it is simply one vast imagination based upon a few
+so-called axioms, which are nothing more nor less than the results of
+experience. It is none the less imaginative because its discoveries
+always accord subsequently with fact, since man was not aware of them
+beforehand. Nor are its inevitable conclusions inevitable to any save
+those possessed of the mathematician's prophetic sight. Once discovered,
+it requires much less imagination to understand them. With the light
+coming from in front, it is an easy matter to see what lies behind one.
+
+So with other fabrics of human thought, imagination has been spinning
+and weaving them all. From the most concrete of inventions to the most
+abstract of conceptions the same force reveals itself upon examination;
+for there is no gulf between what we call practical and what we consider
+theoretical. Everything abstract is ultimately of practical use, and
+even the most immediately utilitarian has an abstract principle at
+its core. We are too prone to regard the present age of the world as
+preeminently practical, much as a middle-aged man laments the witching
+fancies of his boyhood. But, and there is more in the parallel than
+analogy, if the man be truly imaginative he is none the less so at
+forty-five than he was at twenty, if his imagination have taken on a
+more critical form; for this latter half of the nineteenth century is
+perhaps the most imaginative period the world's history has ever known.
+While with one hand we are contriving means of transit for our ideas,
+and even our very voices, compared to which Puck's girdle is anything
+but talismanic, with the other we are stretching out to grasp the action
+of mind on mind, pushing our way into the very realm of mind itself.
+
+History tells the same story in detail; for the history of mankind,
+imperfectly as we know it, discloses the fact that imagination, and not
+the power of observation nor the kindred capability of perception, has
+been the cause of soul-evolution.
+
+The savage is but little of an imaginative being. We are tempted, at
+times, to imagine him more so than he is, for his fanciful folk-lore.
+The proof of which overestimation is that we find no difficulty in
+imagining what he does, and even of imagining what he probably imagined,
+and finding our suppositions verified by discovery. Yet his powers of
+observation may be marvellously developed. The North American Indian
+tracks his foe through the forest by signs unrecognizable to a white
+man, and he reasons most astutely upon them, and still that very man
+turns out to be a mere child when put before problems a trifle out of
+his beaten path. And all because his forefathers had not the power to
+imagine something beyond what they actually saw. The very essence of the
+force of imagination lies in its ability to change a man's habitat for
+him. Without it, man would forever have remained, not a mollusk, to be
+sure, but an animal simply. A plant cannot change its place, an animal
+cannot alter its conditions of existence except within very narrow
+bounds; man is free in the sense nothing else in the world is.
+
+What is true of individuals has been true of races. The most imaginative
+races have proved the greatest factors in the world's advance.
+
+Now after this look at our own side of the world, let us turn to the
+other; for it is this very psychological fact that mental progression
+implies an ever-increasing individualization, and that imagination is
+the force at work in the process which Far Eastern civilization,
+taken in connection with our own, reveals. In doing this, it explains
+incidentally its own seeming anomalies, the most unaccountable of which,
+apparently, is its existence.
+
+We have seen how impressively impersonal the Far East is. Now if
+individuality be the natural measure of the height of civilization which
+a nation has reached, impersonality should betoken a relatively laggard
+position in the race. We ought, therefore, to find among these people
+certain other characteristics corroborative of a less advanced state of
+development. In the first place, if imagination be the impulse of which
+increase in individuality is the resulting motion, that quality should
+be at a minimum there. The Far Orientals ought to be a particularly
+unimaginative set of people. Such is precisely what they are. Their lack
+of imagination is a well-recognized fact. All who have been brought in
+contact with them have observed it, merchants as strikingly as students.
+Indeed, the slightest intercourse with them could not fail to make
+it evident. Their matter-of-fact way of looking at things is truly
+distressing, coming as it does from so artistic a people. One notices
+it all the more for the shock. To get a prosaic answer from a man whose
+appearance and surroundings betoken better things is not calculated to
+dull that answer's effect. Aston, in a pamphlet on the Altaic tongues,
+cites an instance which is so much to the point that I venture to repeat
+it here. He was a true Chinaman, he says, who, when his English master
+asked him what he thought of
+
+   "That orbed maiden
+    With white fires laden
+    Whom mortals call the moon,"
+
+replied, "My thinkee all same lamp pidgin" (pidgin meaning thing in the
+mongrel speech, Chinese in form and English in diction, which goes by
+the name of pidgin English).
+
+Their own tongues show the same prosaic character, picturesque as they
+appear to us at first sight. That effect is due simply to the novelty
+to us of their expressions. To talk of a pass as an "up-down" has a
+refreshing turn to our unused ear, but it is a much more descriptive
+than imaginative figure of speech. Nor is the phrase "the being (so)
+is difficult," in place of "thank you," a surprisingly beautiful bit of
+imagery, delightful as it sounds for a change. Our own tongue has, in
+its daily vocabulary, far more suggestive expressions, only familiarity
+has rendered us callous to their use. We employ at every instant words
+which, could we but stop to think of them, would strike us as poetic
+in the ideas they call up. As has been well said, they were once happy
+thoughts of some bright particular genius bequeathed to posterity
+without so much as an accompanying name, and which proved so popular
+that they soon became but symbols themselves.
+
+Their languages are paralleled by their whole life. A lack of any
+fanciful ideas is one of the most salient traits of all Far Eastern
+races, if indeed a sad dearth of anything can properly be spoken of as
+salient. Indirectly their want of imagination betrays itself in their
+every-day sayings and doings, and more directly in every branch of
+thought. Originality is not their strong point. Their utter ignorance of
+science shows this, and paradoxical as it may seem, their art, in
+spite of its merit and its universality, does the same. That art and
+imagination are necessarily bound together receives no very forcible
+confirmation from a land where, nationally speaking, at any rate, the
+first is easily first and the last easily last, as nations go. It is to
+quite another quality that their artistic excellence must be ascribed.
+That the Chinese and later the Japanese have accomplished results
+at which the rest of the world will yet live to marvel, is due to
+their--taste. But taste or delicacy of perception has absolutely nothing
+to do with imagination. That certain of the senses of Far Orientals are
+wonderfully keen, as also those parts of the brain that directly respond
+to them, is beyond question; but such sensitiveness does not in the
+least involve the less earth-tied portions of the intellect. A peculiar
+responsiveness to natural beauty, a sort of mental agreement with its
+earthly environment, is a marked feature of the Japanese mind.
+But appreciation, however intimate, is a very different thing from
+originality. The one is commonly the handmaid of the other, but the
+other by no means always accompanies the one.
+
+So much for the cause; now for the effect which we might expect to find
+if our diagnosis be correct.
+
+If the evolving force be less active in one race than in another, three
+relative results should follow. In the first place, the race in question
+will at any given moment be less advanced than its fellow; secondly, its
+rate of progress will be less rapid; and lastly, its individual members
+will all be nearer together, just as a stream, in falling from a cliff,
+starts one compact mass, then gradually increasing in speed, divides
+into drops, which, growing finer and finer and farther and farther
+apart, descend at last as spray. All three of these consequences are
+visible in the career of the Far Eastern peoples. The first result
+scarcely needs to be proved to us, who are only too ready to believe it
+without proof. It is, nevertheless, a fact. Viewed unprejudicedly, their
+civilization is not so advanced a one as our own. Although they are
+certainly our superiors in some very desirable particulars, their whole
+scheme is distinctly more aboriginal fundamentally. It is more finished,
+as far as it goes, but it does not go so far. Less rude, it is more
+rudimentary. Indeed, as we have seen, its surface-perfection really
+shows that nature has given less thought to its substance. One may say
+of it that it is the adult form of a lower type of mind-specification.
+
+The second effect is scarcely less patent. How slow their progress
+has been, if for centuries now it can be called progress at all,
+is world-known. Chinese conservatism has passed into a proverb. The
+pendulum of pulsation in the Middle Kingdom long since came to a stop
+at the medial point of rest. Centre of civilization, as they call
+themselves, one would imagine that their mind-machinery had got caught
+on their own dead centre, and now could not be made to move. Life, which
+elsewhere is a condition of unstable equilibrium, there is of a fatally
+stable kind. For the Chinaman's disinclination to progress is something
+more than vis inertiae; it has become an ardent devotion to the status
+quo. Jostled, he at once settles back to his previous condition again;
+much as more materially, after a lifetime spent in California, at his
+death his body is punctiliously embalmed and sent home across five
+thousand miles of sea for burial. With the Japanese the condition of
+affairs is somewhat different. Their tendency to stand still is of a
+purely passive kind. It is a state of neutral equilibrium, stationary
+of itself but perfectly responsive to an impulse from without. Left to
+their own devices, they are conservative enough, but they instantly
+copy a more advanced civilization the moment they get a chance. This
+proclivity on their part is not out of keeping with our theory. On the
+contrary, it is precisely what was to have been expected; for we see the
+very same apparent contradiction in characters we are thrown with every
+day. Imitation is the natural substitute for originality. The less
+strong a man's personality the more prone is he to adopt the ideas of
+others, on the same principle that a void more easily admits a foreign
+body than does space that is already occupied; or as a blank piece of
+paper takes a dye more brilliantly for not being already tinted itself.
+
+The third result, the remarkable homogeneity of the people, is not,
+perhaps, so universally appreciated, but it is equally evident on
+inspection, and no less weighty in proof. Indeed, the Far Eastern
+state of things is a kind of charade on the word; for humanity there
+is singularly uniform. The distance between the extremes of
+mind-development in Japan is much less than with us. This lack of
+divergence exists not simply in certain lines of thought, but in
+all those characteristics by which man is parted from the brutes. In
+reasoning power, in artistic sensibility, in delicacy of perception, it
+is the same story. If this were simply the impression at first sight,
+no deductions could be drawn from it, for an impression of racial
+similarity invariably marks the first stage of acquaintance of one
+people by another. Even in outward appearance it is so. We find it
+at first impossible to tell the Japanese apart; they find it equally
+impossible to differentiate us. But the present resemblance is not a
+matter of first impressions. The fact is patent historically. The men
+whom Japan reveres are much less removed from the common herd than is
+the case in any Western land. And this has been so from the earliest
+times. Shakspeares and Newtons have never existed there. Japanese
+humanity is not the soil to grow them. The comparative absence of genius
+is fully paralleled by the want of its opposite. Not only are the paths
+of preeminence untrodden; the purlieus of brutish ignorance are likewise
+unfrequented. On neither side of the great medial line is the departure
+of individuals far or frequent. All men there are more alike;--so much
+alike, indeed, that the place would seem to offer a sort of forlorn hope
+for disappointed socialists. Although religious missionaries have not
+met with any marked success among the natives, this less deserving class
+of enthusiastic disseminators of an all-possessing belief might do
+well to attempt it. They would find there a very virgin field of a most
+promisingly dead level. It is true, human opposition would undoubtedly
+prevent their tilling it, but Nature, at least, would not present quite
+such constitutional obstacles as she wisely does with us.
+
+The individual's mind is, as it were, an isolated bit of the race mind.
+The same set of traits will be found in each. Mental characteristics
+there are a sort of common property, of which a certain undifferentiated
+portion is indiscriminately allotted to every man at birth. One soul
+resembles another so much, that in view of the patriarchal system
+under which they all exist, there seems to the stranger a peculiar
+appropriateness in so strong a family likeness of mind. An idea of how
+little one man's brain differs from his neighbor's may be gathered from
+the fact, that while a common coolie in Japan spends his spare time
+in playing a chess twice as complicated as ours, the most advanced
+philosopher is still on the blissfully ignorant side of the pons
+asinorum.
+
+We find, then, that in all three points the Far East fulfils what our
+theory demanded.
+
+There is one more consideration worthy of notice. We said that the
+environment had not been the deus ex materia in the matter; but that the
+soul itself possessed the germ of its own evolution. This fact does
+not, however, preclude another, that the environment has helped in the
+process. Change of scene is beneficial to others besides invalids.
+How stimulating to growth a different habitat can prove, when at all
+favorable, is perhaps sufficiently shown in the case of the marguerite,
+which, as an emigrant called white-weed, has usurped our fields. The
+same has been no less true of peoples. Now these Far Eastern peoples, in
+comparison with our own forefathers, have travelled very little. A race
+in its travels gains two things: first it acquires directly a great
+deal from both places and peoples that it meets, and secondly it is
+constantly put to its own resources in its struggle for existence,
+and becomes more personal as the outcome of such strife. The changed
+conditions, the hostile forces it finds, necessitate mental ingenuity
+to adapt them and influence it unconsciously. To see how potent these
+influences prove we have but to look at the two great branches of the
+Aryan family, the one that for so long now has stayed at home, and the
+one that went abroad. Destitute of stimulus from without, the Indo-Aryan
+mind turned upon itself and consumed in dreamy metaphysics the
+imagination which has made its cousins the leaders in the world's
+progress to-day. The inevitable numbness of monotony crept over the
+stay-at-homes. The deadly sameness of their surroundings produced its
+unavoidable effect. The torpor of the East, like some paralyzing poison,
+stole into their souls, and they fell into a drowsy slumber only to
+dream in the land they had formerly wrested from its possessors. Their
+birthright passed with their cousins into the West.
+
+In the case of the Altaic races which we are considering, cause and
+effect mutually strengthened each other. That they did not travel more
+is due primarily to a lack of enterprise consequent upon a lack of
+imagination, and then their want of travel told upon their imagination.
+They were also unfortunate in their journeying. Their travels were
+prematurely brought to an end by that vast geographical Nirvana the
+Pacific Ocean, the great peaceful sea as they call it themselves. That
+they would have journeyed further is shown by the way their dreams went
+eastward still. They themselves could not for the preventing ocean, and
+the lapping of its waters proved a nation's lullaby.
+
+One thing, I think, then, our glance at Far Eastern civilization has
+more than suggested. The soul, in its progress through the world, tends
+inevitably to individualization. Yet the more we perceive of the cosmos
+the more do we recognize an all-pervading unity in it. Its soul must
+be one, not many. The divine power that made all things is not itself
+multifold. How to reconcile the ever-increasing divergence with
+an eventual similarity is a problem at present transcending our
+generalizations. What we know would seem to be opposed to what we
+must infer. But perception of how we shall merge the personal in the
+universal, though at present hidden from sight, may sometime come to
+us, and the seemingly irreconcilable will then turn out to involve no
+contradiction at all. For this much is certain: grand as is the great
+conception of Buddhism, majestic as is the idea of the stately rest it
+would lead us to, the road here below is not one the life of the world
+can follow. If earthly existence be an evil, then Buddhism will help us
+ignore it; but if by an impulse we cannot explain we instinctively crave
+activity of mind, then the great gospel of Gautama touches us not; for
+to abandon self--egoism, that is, not selfishness is the true vacuum
+which nature abhors. As for Far Orientals, they themselves furnish proof
+against themselves. That impersonality is not man's earthly goal they
+unwittingly bear witness; for they are not of those who will survive.
+Artistic attractive people that they are, their civilization is like
+their own tree flowers, beautiful blossoms destined never to bear fruit;
+for whatever we may conceive the far future of another life to be, the
+immediate effect of impersonality cannot but be annihilating. If these
+people continue in their old course, their earthly career is closed.
+Just as surely as morning passes into afternoon, so surely are these
+races of the Far East, if unchanged, destined to disappear before the
+advancing nations of the West. Vanish they will off the face of the
+earth and leave our planet the eventual possession of the dwellers where
+the day declines. Unless their newly imported ideas really take root, it
+is from this whole world that Japanese and Koreans, as well as Chinese,
+will inevitably be excluded. Their Nirvana is already being realized;
+already it has wrapped Far Eastern Asia in its winding-sheet, the shroud
+of those whose day was but a dawn, as if in prophetic keeping with the
+names they gave their homes,--the Land of the Day's Beginning, and the
+Land of the Morning Calm.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Soul of the Far East, by Percival Lowell
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1409 ***
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+  <head>
+    <title>
+      The Soul of the Far East, by Percival Lowell
+    </title>
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+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
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+  <body>
+<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1409 ***</div>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      THE SOUL OF THE FAR EAST
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      By Percival Lowell
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      Contents
+    </h2>
+    <table summary="" style="margin-right: auto; margin-left: auto">
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0001"> Chapter 1. Individuality. </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0002"> Chapter 2. Family. </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0003"> Chapter 3. Adoption. </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0004"> Chapter 4. Language. </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0005"> Chapter 5. Nature and Art. </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0006"> Chapter 6. Art. </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0007"> Chapter 7. Religion. </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0008"> Chapter 8. Imagination. </a>
+          </p>
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+    </table>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <a name="link2HCH0001" id="link2HCH0001">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter 1. Individuality.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The boyish belief that on the other side of our globe all things are of
+      necessity upside down is startlingly brought back to the man when he first
+      sets foot at Yokohama. If his initial glance does not, to be sure,
+      disclose the natives in the every-day feat of standing calmly on their
+      heads, an attitude which his youthful imagination conceived to be a
+      necessary consequence of their geographical position, it does at least
+      reveal them looking at the world as if from the standpoint of that
+      eccentric posture. For they seem to him to see everything topsy-turvy.
+      Whether it be that their antipodal situation has affected their brains, or
+      whether it is the mind of the observer himself that has hitherto been
+      wrong in undertaking to rectify the inverted pictures presented by his
+      retina, the result, at all events, is undeniable. The world stands
+      reversed, and, taking for granted his own uprightness, the stranger
+      unhesitatingly imputes to them an obliquity of vision, a state of mind
+      outwardly typified by the cat-like obliqueness of their eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If the inversion be not precisely of the kind he expected, it is none the
+      less striking, and impressibly more real. If personal experience has
+      definitely convinced him that the inhabitants of that under side of our
+      planet do not adhere to it head downwards, like flies on a ceiling,&mdash;his
+      early a priori deduction,&mdash;they still appear quite as antipodal,
+      mentally considered. Intellectually, at least, their attitude sets gravity
+      at defiance. For to the mind's eye their world is one huge, comical
+      antithesis of our own. What we regard intuitively in one way from our
+      standpoint, they as intuitively observe in a diametrically opposite manner
+      from theirs. To speak backwards, write backwards, read backwards, is but
+      the a b c of their contrariety. The inversion extends deeper than mere
+      modes of expression, down into the very matter of thought. Ideas of ours
+      which we deemed innate find in them no home, while methods which strike us
+      as preposterously unnatural appear to be their birthright. From the
+      standing of a wet umbrella on its handle instead of its head to dry to the
+      striking of a match away in place of toward one, there seems to be no
+      action of our daily lives, however trivial, but finds with them its
+      appropriate reaction&mdash;equal but opposite. Indeed, to one anxious of
+      conforming to the manners and customs of the country, the only road to
+      right lies in following unswervingly that course which his inherited
+      instincts assure him to be wrong.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet these people are human beings; with all their eccentricities they are
+      men. Physically we cannot but be cognizant of the fact, nor mentally but
+      be conscious of it. Like us, indeed, and yet so unlike are they that we
+      seem, as we gaze at them, to be viewing our own humanity in some
+      mirth-provoking mirror of the mind,&mdash;a mirror that shows us our own
+      familiar thoughts, but all turned wrong side out. Humor holds the glass,
+      and we become the sport of our own reflections. But is it otherwise at
+      home? Do not our personal presentments mock each of us individually our
+      lives long? Who but is the daily dupe of his dressing-glass, and
+      complacently conceives himself to be a very different appearing person
+      from what he is, forgetting that his right side has become his left, and
+      vice versa? Yet who, when by chance he catches sight in like manner of the
+      face of a friend, can keep from smiling at the caricatures which the
+      mirror's left-for-right reversal makes of the asymmetry of that friend's
+      features,&mdash;caricatures all the more grotesque for being utterly
+      unsuspected by their innocent original? Perhaps, could we once see
+      ourselves as others see us, our surprise in the case of foreign peoples
+      might be less pronounced.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Regarding, then, the Far Oriental as a man, and not simply as a
+      phenomenon, we discover in his peculiar point of view a new importance,&mdash;the
+      possibility of using it stereoptically. For his mind-photograph of the
+      world can be placed side by side with ours, and the two pictures combined
+      will yield results beyond what either alone could possibly have afforded.
+      Thus harmonized, they will help us to realize humanity. Indeed it is only
+      by such a combination of two different aspects that we ever perceive
+      substance and distinguish reality from illusion. What our two eyes make
+      possible for material objects, the earth's two hemispheres may enable us
+      to do for mental traits. Only the superficial never changes its
+      expression; the appearance of the solid varies with the standpoint of the
+      observer. In dreamland alone does everything seem plain, and there all is
+      unsubstantial.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To say that the Japanese are not a savage tribe is of course unnecessary;
+      to repeat the remark, anything but superfluous, on the principle that what
+      is a matter of common notoriety is very apt to prove a matter about which
+      uncommonly little is known. At present we go halfway in recognition of
+      these people by bestowing upon them a demi-diploma of mental development
+      called semi-civilization, neglecting, however, to specify in what the
+      fractional qualification consists. If the suggestion of a second moiety,
+      as of something directly complementary to them, were not indirectly
+      complimentary to ourselves, the expression might pass; but, as it is, the
+      self-praise is rather too obvious to carry conviction. For Japan's claim
+      to culture is not based solely upon the exports with which she supplements
+      our art, nor upon the paper, china, and bric-a-brac with which she adorns
+      our rooms; any more than Western science is adequately represented in
+      Japan by our popular imports there of kerosene oil, matches, and beer.
+      Only half civilized the Far East presumably is, but it is so rather in an
+      absolute than a relative sense; in the sense of what might have been, not
+      of what is. It is so as compared, not with us, but with the eventual
+      possibilities of humanity. As yet, neither system, Western nor Eastern, is
+      perfect enough to serve in all things as standard for the other. The light
+      of truth has reached each hemisphere through the medium of its own mental
+      crystallization, and this has polarized it in opposite ways, so that now
+      the rays that are normal to the eyes of the one only produce darkness to
+      those of the other. For the Japanese civilization in the sense of not
+      being savagery is the equal of our own. It is not in the polish that the
+      real difference lies; it is in the substance polished. In politeness, in
+      delicacy, they have as a people no peers. Art has been their mistress,
+      though science has never been their master. Perhaps for this very reason
+      that art, not science, has been the Muse they courted, the result has been
+      all the more widespread. For culture there is not the attainment of the
+      few, but the common property of the people. If the peaks of intellect rise
+      less eminent, the plateau of general elevation stands higher. But little
+      need be said to prove the civilization of a land where ordinary tea-house
+      girls are models of refinement, and common coolies, when not at work, play
+      chess for pastime.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If Japanese ways look odd at first sight, they but look more odd on closer
+      acquaintance. In a land where, to allow one's understanding the freer play
+      of indoor life, one begins, not by taking off his hat, but by removing his
+      boots, he gets at the very threshold a hint that humanity is to be
+      approached the wrong end to. When, after thus entering a house, he tries
+      next to gain admittance to the mind of its occupant, the suspicion becomes
+      a certainty. He discovers that this people talk, so to speak, backwards;
+      that before he can hope to comprehend them, or make himself understood in
+      return, he must learn to present his thoughts arranged in inverse order
+      from the one in which they naturally suggest themselves to his mind. His
+      sentences must all be turned inside out. He finds himself lost in a
+      labyrinth of language. The same seems to be true of the thoughts it
+      embodies. The further he goes the more obscure the whole process becomes,
+      until, after long groping about for some means of orienting himself, he
+      lights at last upon the clue. This clue consists in "the survival of the
+      unfittest."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the civilization of Japan we have presented to us a most interesting
+      case of partially arrested development; or, to speak esoterically, we find
+      ourselves placed face to face with a singular example of a completed
+      race-life. For though from our standpoint the evolution of these people
+      seems suddenly to have come to an end in mid-career, looked at more
+      intimately it shows all the signs of having fully run its course.
+      Development ceased, not because of outward obstruction, but from purely
+      intrinsic inability to go on. The intellectual machine was not shattered;
+      it simply ran down. To this fact the phenomenon owes its peculiar
+      interest. For we behold here in the case of man the same spectacle that we
+      see cosmically in the case of the moon, the spectacle of a world that has
+      died of old age. No weak spot in their social organism destroyed them from
+      within; no epidemic, in the shape of foreign hordes, fell upon them from
+      without. For in spite of the fact that China offers the unique example of
+      a country that has simply lived to be conquered, mentally her masters have
+      invariably become her pupils. Having ousted her from her throne as ruler,
+      they proceeded to sit at her feet as disciples. Thus they have rather
+      helped than hindered her civilization.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whatever portion of the Far East we examine we find its mental history to
+      be the same story with variations. However unlike China, Korea, and Japan
+      are in some respects, through the careers of all three we can trace the
+      same life-spirit. It is the career of the river Jordan rising like any
+      other stream from the springs among the mountains only to fall after a
+      brief existence into the Dead Sea. For their vital force had spent itself
+      more than a millennium ago. Already, then, their civilization had in its
+      deeper developments attained its stature, and has simply been perfecting
+      itself since. We may liken it to some stunted tree, that, finding itself
+      prevented from growth, bastes the more luxuriantly to put forth flowers
+      and fruit. For not the final but the medial processes were skipped. In
+      those superficial amenities with which we more particularly link our idea
+      of civilization, these peoples continued to grow. Their refinement, if
+      failing to reach our standard in certain respects, surpasses ours
+      considering the bare barbaric basis upon which it rests. For it is as true
+      of the Japanese as of the proverbial Russian, though in a more scientific
+      sense, that if you scratch him you will find the ancestral Tartar. But it
+      is no less true that the descendants of this rude forefather have now
+      taken on a polish of which their own exquisite lacquer gives but a faint
+      reflection. The surface was perfected after the substance was formed. Our
+      word finish, with its double meaning, expresses both the process and the
+      result.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There entered, to heighten the bizarre effect, a spirit common in minds
+      that lack originality&mdash;the spirit of imitation. Though consequent
+      enough upon a want of initiative, the results of this trait appear
+      anything but natural to people of a more progressive past. The proverbial
+      collar and pair of spurs look none the less odd to the stranger for being
+      a mental instead of a bodily habit. Something akin to such a case of
+      unnatural selection has there taken place. The orderly procedure of
+      natural evolution was disastrously supplemented by man. For the fact that
+      in the growth of their tree of knowledge the branches developed out of all
+      proportion to the trunk is due to a practice of culture-grafting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From before the time when they began to leave records of their actions the
+      Japanese have been a nation of importers, not of merchandise, but of
+      ideas. They have invariably shown the most advanced free-trade spirit in
+      preferring to take somebody else's ready-made articles rather than to try
+      to produce any brand-new conceptions themselves. They continue to follow
+      the same line of life. A hearty appreciation of the things of others is
+      still one of their most winning traits. What they took they grafted bodily
+      upon their ancestral tree, which in consequence came to present a most
+      unnaturally diversified appearance. For though not unlike other nations in
+      wishing to borrow, if their zeal in the matter was slightly excessive,
+      they were peculiar in that they never assimilated what they took. They
+      simply inserted it upon the already existing growth. There it remained,
+      and throve, and blossomed, nourished by that indigenous Japanese sap,
+      taste. But like grafts generally, the foreign boughs were not much
+      modified by their new life-blood, nor was the tree in its turn at all
+      affected by them. Connected with it only as separable parts of its
+      structure, the cuttings might have been lopped off again without
+      influencing perceptibly the condition of the foster-parent stem. The
+      grafts in time grew to be great branches, but the trunk remained through
+      it all the trunk of a sapling. In other words, the nation grew up to man's
+      estate, keeping the mind of its childhood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What is thus true of the Japanese is true likewise of the Koreans and of
+      the Chinese. The three peoples, indeed, form so many links in one long
+      chain of borrowing. China took from India, then Korea copied China, and
+      lastly Japan imitated Korea. In this simple manner they successively
+      became possessed of a civilization which originally was not the property
+      of any one of them. In the eagerness they all evinced in purloining what
+      was not theirs, and in the perfect content with which they then proceeded
+      to enjoy what they had taken, they remind us forcibly of that
+      happy-go-lucky class in the community which prefers to live on
+      questionable loans rather than work itself for a living. Like those same
+      individuals, whatever interest the Far Eastern people may succeed in
+      raising now, Nature will in the end make them pay dearly for their lack of
+      principal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Far Eastern civilization resembles, in fact, more a mechanical mixture
+      of social elements than a well differentiated chemical compound. For in
+      spite of the great variety of ingredients thrown into its caldron of
+      destiny, as no affinity existed between them, no combination resulted. The
+      power to fuse was wanting. Capability to evolve anything is not one of the
+      marked characteristics of the Far East. Indeed, the tendency to
+      spontaneous variation, Nature's mode of making experiments, would seem
+      there to have been an enterprising faculty that was exhausted early.
+      Sleepy, no doubt, from having got up betimes with the dawn, these dwellers
+      in the far lands of the morning began to look upon their day as already
+      well spent before they had reached its noon. They grew old young, and have
+      remained much the same age ever since. What they were centuries ago, that
+      at bottom they are to-day. Take away the European influence of the last
+      twenty years, and each man might almost be his own great-grandfather. In
+      race characteristics he is yet essentially the same. The traits that
+      distinguished these peoples in the past have been gradually extinguishing
+      them ever since. Of these traits, stagnating influences upon their career,
+      perhaps the most important is the great quality of impersonality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If we take, through the earth's temperate zone, a belt of country whose
+      northern and southern edges are determined by certain limiting isotherms,
+      not more than half the width of the zone apart, we shall find that we have
+      included in a relatively small extent of surface almost all the nations of
+      note in the world, past or present. Now if we examine this belt, and
+      compare the different parts of it with one another, we shall be struck by
+      a remarkable fact. The peoples inhabiting it grow steadily more personal
+      as we go west. So unmistakable is this gradation of spirit, that one is
+      tempted to ascribe it to cosmic rather than to human causes. It is as
+      marked as the change in color of the human complexion observable along any
+      meridian, which ranges from black at the equator to blonde toward the
+      pole. In like manner, the sense of self grows more intense as we follow in
+      the wake of the setting sun, and fades steadily as we advance into the
+      dawn. America, Europe, the Levant, India, Japan, each is less personal
+      than the one before. We stand at the nearer end of the scale, the Far
+      Orientals at the other. If with us the I seems to be of the very essence
+      of the soul, then the soul of the Far East may be said to be
+      Impersonality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Curious as this characteristic is as a fact, it is even more interesting
+      as a factor. For what it betokens of these peoples in particular may
+      suggest much about man generally. It may mark a stride in theory, if a
+      standstill in practice. Possibly it may help us to some understanding of
+      ourselves. Not that it promises much aid to vexed metaphysical questions,
+      but as a study in sociology it may not prove so vain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And for a thing which is always with us, its discussion may be said to be
+      peculiarly opportune just now. For it lies at the bottom of the most
+      pressing questions of the day. Of the two great problems that stare the
+      Western world in the face at the present moment, both turn to it for
+      solution. Agnosticism, the foreboding silence of those who think,
+      socialism, communism, and nihilism, the petulant cry of those who do not,
+      alike depend ultimately for the right to be upon the truth or the falsity
+      of the sense of self.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For if there be no such actual thing as individuality, if the feeling we
+      call by that name be naught but the transient illusion the Buddhists would
+      have us believe it, any faith founded upon it as basis vanishes as does
+      the picture in a revolving kaleidoscope,&mdash;less enduring even than the
+      flitting phantasmagoria of a dream. If the ego be but the passing shadow
+      of the material brain, at the disintegration of the gray matter what will
+      become of us? Shall we simply lapse into an indistinguishable part of the
+      vast universe that compasses us round? At the thought we seem to stand
+      straining our gaze, on the shore of the great sea of knowledge, only to
+      watch the fog roll in, and hide from our view even those headlands of hope
+      that, like beseeching hands, stretch out into the deep.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So more materially. If individuality be a delusion of the mind, what
+      motive potent enough to excite endeavor in the breast of an ordinary
+      mortal remains? Philosophers, indeed, might still work for the advancement
+      of mankind, but mankind itself would not continue long to labor
+      energetically for what should profit only the common weal. Take away the
+      stimulus of individuality, and action is paralyzed at once. For with most
+      men the promptings of personal advantage only afford sufficient incentive
+      to effort. Destroy this force, then any consideration due it lapses, and
+      socialism is not only justified, it is raised instantly into an axiom of
+      life. The community, in that case, becomes itself the unit, the
+      indivisible atom of existence. Socialism, then communism, then nihilism,
+      follow in inevitable sequence. That even the Far Oriental, with all his
+      numbing impersonality, has not touched this goal may at least suggest that
+      individuality is a fact.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But first, what do we know about its existence ourselves?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Very early in the course of every thoughtful childhood an event takes
+      place, by the side of which, to the child himself, all other events sink
+      into insignificance. It is not one that is recognized and chronicled by
+      the world, for it is wholly unconnected with action. No one but the child
+      is aware of its occurrence, and he never speaks of it to others. Yet to
+      that child it marks an epoch. So intensely individual does it seem that
+      the boy is afraid to avow it, while in reality so universal is it that
+      probably no human being has escaped its influence. Though subjective
+      purely, it has more vividness than any external event; and though strictly
+      intrinsic to life, it is more startling than any accident of fate or
+      fortune. This experience of the boy's, at once so singular and yet so
+      general, is nothing less than the sudden revelation to him one day of the
+      fact of his own personality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Somewhere about the time when sensation is giving place to sensitiveness
+      as the great self-educator, and the knowledge gained by the five bodily
+      senses is being fused into the wisdom of that mental one we call common
+      sense, the boy makes a discovery akin to the act of waking up. All at once
+      he becomes conscious of himself; and the consciousness has about it a
+      touch of the uncanny. Hitherto he has been aware only of matter; he now
+      first realizes mind. Unwarned, unprepared, he is suddenly ushered before
+      being, and stands awe-struck in the presence of&mdash;himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If the introduction to his own identity was startling, there is nothing
+      reassuring in the feeling that this strange acquaintanceship must last.
+      For continue it does. It becomes an unsought intimacy he cannot shake off.
+      Like to his own shadow he cannot escape it. To himself a man cannot but be
+      at home. For years this alter ego haunts him, for he imagines it an
+      idiosyncrasy of his own, a morbid peculiarity he dare not confide to any
+      one, for fear of being thought a fool. Not till long afterwards, when he
+      has learned to live as a matter of course with his ever-present ghost,
+      does he discover that others have had like familiars themselves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sometimes this dawn of consciousness is preceded by a long twilight of
+      soul-awakening; but sometimes, upon more sensitive and subtler natures,
+      the light breaks with all the suddenness of a sunrise at the equator,
+      revealing to the mind's eye an unsuspected world of self within. But in
+      whatever way we may awake to it, the sense of personality, when first
+      realized, appears already, like the fabled Goddess of Wisdom, full grown
+      in the brain. From the moment when we first remember ourselves we seem to
+      be as old as we ever seem to others afterwards to become. We grow, indeed,
+      in knowledge, in wisdom, in experience, as our years increase, but deep
+      down in our heart of hearts we are still essentially the same. To be sure,
+      people pay us more deference than they did, which suggests a doubt at
+      times whether we may not have changed; small boys of a succeeding
+      generation treat us with a respect that causes us inwardly to smile, as we
+      think how little we differ from them, if they but knew it. For at bottom
+      we are not conscious of change from that morning, long ago, when first we
+      realized ourselves. We feel just as young now as we felt old then. We are
+      but amused at the world's discrimination where we can detect no
+      difference.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Every human being has been thus "twice born": once as matter, once as
+      mind. Nor is this second birth the birthright only of mankind. All the
+      higher animals probably, possibly even the lower too, have experienced
+      some such realization of individual identity. However that may be,
+      certainly to all races of men has come this revelation; only the degree in
+      which they have felt its force has differed immensely. It is one thing to
+      the apathetic, fatalistic Turk, and quite another matter to an energetic,
+      nervous American. Facts, fancies, faiths, all show how wide is the
+      variance in feelings. With them no introspective [greek]cnzhi seauton
+      overexcites the consciousness of self. But with us; as with those of old
+      possessed of devils, it comes to startle and stays to distress. Too apt is
+      it to prove an ever-present, undesirable double. Too often does it play
+      the part of uninvited spectre at the feast, whose presence no one save its
+      unfortunate victim suspects. The haunting horror of his own identity is to
+      natures far less eccentric than Kenelm Chillingly's only too common a
+      curse. To this companionship, paradoxical though it sound, is principally
+      due the peculiar loneliness of childhood. For nothing is so isolating as a
+      persistent idea which one dares not confide.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And yet,&mdash;stranger paradox still,&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. With
+      us the idea seems the bitter fruit of material philosophy; by them it was
+      looked upon as the fairest flower of their faith. What is dreaded now as
+      the impious suggestion of the godless four thousand years ago was
+      reverenced as a sacred tenet of religion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Shorter even than his short threescore years and ten is that soul's life
+      of which man is directly cognizant. Bounded by two seemingly impersonal
+      states is the personal consciousness of which he is made aware: the one
+      the infantile existence that precedes his boyish discovery, the other the
+      gloom that grows with years,&mdash;two twilights that fringe the two
+      borders of his day. But with the Far Oriental, life is all twilight. For
+      in Japan and China both states are found together. There, side by side
+      with the present unconsciousness of the babe exists the belief in a coming
+      unconsciousness for the man. So inseparably blended are the two that the
+      known truth of the one seems, for that very bond, to carry with it the
+      credentials of the other. Can it be that the personal, progressive West is
+      wrong, and the impersonal, impassive East right? Surely not. Is the other
+      side of the world in advance of us in mind-development, even as it
+      precedes us in the time of day; or just as our noon is its night, may it
+      not be far in our rear? Is not its seeming wisdom rather the
+      precociousness of what is destined never to go far?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Brought suddenly upon such a civilization, after the blankness of a long
+      ocean voyage, one is reminded instinctively of the feelings of that
+      bewildered individual who, after a dinner at which he had eventually
+      ceased to be himself, was by way of pleasantry left out overnight in a
+      graveyard, on their way home, by his humorously inclined companions; and
+      who, on awaking alone, in a still dubious condition, looked around him in
+      surprise, rubbed his eyes two or three times to no purpose, and finally
+      muttered in a tone of awe-struck conviction, "Well, either I'm the first
+      to rise, or I'm a long way behind time!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whether their failure to follow the natural course of evolution results in
+      bringing them in at the death just the same or not, these people are now,
+      at any rate, stationary not very far from the point at which we all set
+      out. They are still in that childish state of development before
+      self-consciousness has spoiled the sweet simplicity of nature. An
+      impersonal race seems never to have fully grown up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Partly for its own sake, partly for ours, this most distinctive feature of
+      the Far East, its marked impersonality, is well worthy particular
+      attention; for while it collaterally suggests pregnant thoughts about
+      ourselves, it directly underlies the deeper oddities of a civilization
+      which is the modern eighth wonder of the world. We shall see this as we
+      look at what these people are, at what they were, and at what they hope to
+      become; not historically, but psychologically, as one might perceive, were
+      he but wise enough, in an acorn, besides the nut itself, two oaks, that
+      one from which it fell, and that other which from it will rise. These
+      three states, which we may call its potential past, present, and future,
+      may be observed and studied in three special outgrowths of a race's
+      character: in its language, in its every-day thoughts, and in its
+      religion. For in the language of a people we find embalmed the spirit of
+      its past; in its every-day thoughts, be they of arts or sciences, is
+      wrapped up its present life; in its religion lie enfolded its dreamings of
+      a future. From out each of these three subjects in the Far East
+      impersonality stares us in the face. Upon this quality as a foundation
+      rests the Far Oriental character. It is individually rather than
+      nationally that I propose to scan it now. It is the action of a particle
+      in the wave of world-development I would watch, rather than the
+      propagation of the wave itself. Inferences about the movement of the whole
+      will follow of themselves a knowledge of the motion of its parts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But before we attack the subject esoterically, let us look a moment at the
+      man as he appears in his relation to the community. Such a glance will
+      suggest the peculiar atmosphere of impersonality that pervades the people.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      However lacking in cleverness, in merit, or in imagination a man may be,
+      there are in our Western world, if his existence there be so much as
+      noticed at all, three occasions on which he appears in print. His birth,
+      his marriage, and his death are all duly chronicled in type, perhaps as
+      sufficiently typical of the general unimportance of his life. Mention of
+      one's birth, it is true, is an aristocratic privilege, confined to the
+      world of English society. In democratic America, no doubt because all men
+      there are supposed to be born free and equal, we ignore the first event,
+      and mention only the last two episodes, about which our national
+      astuteness asserts no such effacing equality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Accepting our newspaper record as a fair enough summary of the biography
+      of an average man, let us look at these three momentous occasions in the
+      career of a Far Oriental.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0002" id="link2HCH0002">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter 2. Family.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      In the first place, then, the poor little Japanese baby is ushered into
+      this world in a sadly impersonal manner, for he is not even accorded the
+      distinction of a birthday. He is permitted instead only the much less
+      special honor of a birth-year. Not that he begins his separate existence
+      otherwise than is the custom of mortals generally, at a definite instant
+      of time, but that very little subsequent notice is ever taken of the fact.
+      On the contrary, from the moment he makes his appearance he is spoken of
+      as a year old, and this same age he continues to be considered in most
+      simple ease of calculation, till the beginning of the next calendar year.
+      When that epoch of general rejoicing arrives, he is credited with another
+      year himself. So is everybody else. New Year's day is a common birthday
+      for the community, a sort of impersonal anniversary for his whole world. A
+      like reckoning is followed in China and Korea. Upon the disadvantages of
+      being considered from one's birth up at least one year and possibly two
+      older than one really is, it lies beyond our present purpose to expatiate.
+      It is quite evident that woman has had no voice in the framing of such a
+      chronology. One would hardly imagine that man had either, so astronomic is
+      the system. A communistic age is however but an unavoidable detail of the
+      general scheme whose most suggestive feature consists in the subordination
+      of the actual birthday of the individual to the fictitious birthday of the
+      community. For it is not so much the want of commemoration shown the
+      subject as the character of the commemoration which is significant. Some
+      slight notice is indeed paid to birthdays during early childhood, but even
+      then their observance is quite secondary in importance to that of the
+      great impersonal anniversaries of the third day of the third moon and the
+      fifth day of the fifth moon. These two occasions celebrated the coming of
+      humanity into the world with an impersonality worthy of the French
+      revolutionary calendar. The first of them is called the festival of girls,
+      and commemorates the birth of girls generally, the advent of the universal
+      feminine, as one may say. The second is a corresponding anniversary for
+      boys. Owing to its sex, the latter is the greater event of the two, and in
+      consequence of its most conspicuous feature is styled the festival of
+      fishes. The fishes are hollow paper images of the "tai" from four to six
+      feet in length, tied to the top of a long pole planted in the ground and
+      tipped with a gilded ball. Holes in the paper at the mouth and the tail
+      enable the wind to inflate the body so that it floats about horizontally,
+      swaying hither and thither, and tugging at the line after the manner of a
+      living thing. The fish are emblems of good luck, and are set up in the
+      courtyard of every house where a son has been born during the year. On
+      this auspicious day Tokio is suddenly transformed into eighty square miles
+      of aquarium.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For any more personal purpose New Year's day eclipses all particular
+      anniversaries. Then everybody congratulates everybody else upon everything
+      in general, and incidentally upon being alive. Such substitution of an
+      abstract for a concrete birthday, although exceedingly convenient for
+      others, must at least conduce to self-forgetfulness on the part of its
+      proper possessor, and tend inevitably to merge the identity of the
+      individual in that of the community.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It fares hardly better with the Far Oriental in the matter of marriage.
+      Although he is, as we might think, the person most interested in the
+      result, he is permitted no say in the affair whatever. In fact, it is not
+      his affair at all, but his father's. His hand is simply made a cat's-paw
+      of. The matter is entirely a business transaction, entered into by the
+      parent and conducted through regular marriage brokers. In it he plays only
+      the part of a marionette. His revenge for being thus bartered out of what
+      might be the better half of his life, he takes eventually on the next
+      succeeding generation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His death may be said to be the most important act of his whole life. For
+      then only can his personal existence be properly considered to begin. By
+      it he joins the great company of ancestors who are to these people of
+      almost more consequence than living folk, and of much more individual
+      distinction. Particularly is this the case in China and Korea, but the
+      same respect, though in a somewhat less rigid form, is paid the dead in
+      Japan. Then at last the individual receives that recognition which was
+      denied him in the flesh. In Japan a mortuary tablet is set up to him in
+      the house and duly worshipped; on the continent the ancestors are given a
+      dwelling of their own, and even more devotedly reverenced. But in both
+      places the cult is anything but funereal. For the ancestral tombs are
+      temples and pleasure pavilions at the same time, consecrated not simply to
+      rites and ceremonies, but to family gatherings and general jollification.
+      And the fortunate defunct must feel, if he is still half as sentient as
+      his dutiful descendants suppose, that his earthly life, like other
+      approved comedies, has ended well.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Important, however, as these critical points in his career may be reckoned
+      by his relatives, they are scarcely calculated to prove equally epochal to
+      the man himself. In a community where next to no note is ever taken of the
+      anniversary of his birth, some doubt as to the special significance of
+      that red-letter day may not unnaturally creep into his own mind. While in
+      regard to his death, although it may be highly flattering for him to know
+      that he will certainly become somebody when he shall have ceased,
+      practically, to be anybody, such tardy recognition is scarcely timely
+      enough to be properly appreciated. Human nature is so earth-tied, after
+      all, that a post-mundane existence is very apt to seem immaterial as well
+      as be so.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With the old familiar landmarks of life obliterated in this wholesale
+      manner, it is to be doubted whether one of us, placed in the midst of such
+      a civilization, would know himself. He certainly would derive but scanty
+      satisfaction from the recognition if he did. Even Nirvana might seem a
+      happy limbo by comparison. With a communal, not to say a cosmic, birthday,
+      and a conventional wife, he might well deem his separate existence the
+      shadow of a shade and embrace Buddhism from mere force of circumstances.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Further investigation would not shake his opinion. For a far-oriental
+      career is thoroughly in keeping with these, its typical turning-points.
+      From one end of its course to the other it is painfully impersonal. In its
+      regular routine as in its more salient junctures, life presents itself to
+      these races a totally different affair from what it seems to us. The cause
+      lies in what is taken to be the basis of socio-biology, if one may so
+      express it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the Far East the social unit, the ultimate molecule of existence, is
+      not the individual, but the family.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We occidentals think we value family. We even parade our pretensions so
+      prominently as sometimes to tread on other people's prejudices of a like
+      nature. Yet we scarcely seem to appreciate the inheritance. For with a
+      logic which does us questionable credit, we are proud of our ancestors in
+      direct proportion to their remoteness from ourselves, thus permitting
+      Democracy to revenge its insignificance by smiling at our self-imposed
+      satire. To esteem a man in inverse ratio to the amount of remarkable blood
+      he has inherited is, to say the least, bathetic. Others, again, make
+      themselves objectionable by preferring their immediate relatives to all
+      less connected companions, and cling to their cousins so closely that
+      affection often culminates in matrimony, nature's remonstrances
+      notwithstanding. But with all the pride or pleasure which we take in the
+      members of our particular clan, our satisfaction really springs from
+      viewing them on an autocentric theory of the social system. In our own
+      eyes we are the star about which, as in Joseph's dream, our relatives
+      revolve and upon which they help to shed an added lustre. Our Ptolemaic
+      theory of society is necessitated by our tenacity to the personal
+      standpoint. This fixed idea of ours causes all else seemingly to rotate
+      about it. Such an egoistic conception is quite foreign to our longitudinal
+      antipodes. However much appearances may agree, the fundamental principles
+      upon which family consideration is based are widely different in the two
+      hemispheres. For the far-eastern social universe turns on a patricentric
+      pivot.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Upon the conception of the family as the social and political unit depends
+      the whole constitution of China. The same theory somewhat modified
+      constitutes the life-principle of Korea, of Japan, and of their less
+      advanced cousins who fill the vast centre of the Asiatic continent. From
+      the emperor on his throne to the common coolie in his hovel it is the idea
+      of kinship that knits the entire body politic together. The Empire is one
+      great family; the family is a little empire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The one developed out of the other. The patriarchal is, as is well known,
+      probably the oldest political system in the world. All nations may be said
+      to have experienced such a paternal government, but most nations outgrew
+      it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now the interesting fact about the yellow branch of the human race is, not
+      that they had so juvenile a constitution, but that they have it; that it
+      has persisted practically unchanged from prehistoric ages. It is certainly
+      surprising in this kaleidoscopic world whose pattern is constantly
+      changing as time merges one combination of its elements into another, that
+      on the other side of the globe this set should have remained the same. Yet
+      in spite of the lapse of years, in spite of the altered conditions of
+      existence, in spite of an immense advance in civilization, such a
+      primitive state of society has continued there to the present day, in all
+      its essentials what it was when as nomads the race forefathers wandered
+      peacefully or otherwise over the plains of Central Asia. The principle
+      helped them to expand; it has simply cramped them ever since. For, instead
+      of dissolving like other antiquated views, it has become, what it was
+      bound to become if it continued to last, crystallized into an institution.
+      It had practically reached this condition when it received a theoretical,
+      not to say a theological recognition which gave it mundane immortality. A
+      couple of millenniums ago Confucius consecrated filial duty by making it
+      the basis of the Chinese moral code. His hand was the finishing touch of
+      fossilification. For since the sage set his seal upon the system no one
+      has so much as dreamt of changing it. The idea of confuting Confucius
+      would be an act of impiety such as no Chinaman could possibly commit. Not
+      that the inadmissibility of argument is due really to the authority of the
+      philosopher, but that it lies ingrained in the character of the people.
+      Indeed the genius of the one may be said to have consisted in divining the
+      genius of the other. Confucius formulated the prevailing practice, and in
+      so doing helped to make it perpetual. He gave expression to the national
+      feeling, and like expressions, generally his, served to stamp the idea all
+      the more indelibly upon the national consciousness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In this manner the family from a natural relation grew into a highly
+      unnatural social anachronism. The loose ties of a roving life became
+      fetters of a fixed conventionality. Bonds originally of mutual advantage
+      hardened into restrictions by which the young were hopelessly tethered to
+      the old. Midway in its course the race undertook to turn round and face
+      backwards, as it journeyed on. Its subsequent advance could be nothing but
+      slow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The head of a family is so now in something of a corporeal sense. From him
+      emanate all its actions; to him are responsible all its parts. Any other
+      member of it is as incapable of individual expression as is the hand, or
+      the foot, or the eye of man. Indeed, Confucian doctors of divinity might
+      appropriately administer psychically to the egoistic the rebuke of the
+      Western physician to the too self-analytic youth who, finding that, after
+      eating, his digestion failed to give him what he considered its proper
+      sensations, had come to consult the doctor as to how it ought to feel.
+      "Feel! young man," he was answered, "you ought not to be aware that you
+      have a digestion." So with them, a normally constituted son knows not what
+      it is to possess a spontaneity of his own. Indeed, this very word "own,"
+      which so long ago in our own tongue took to itself the symbol of
+      possession, well exemplifies his dependent state. China furnishes the most
+      conspicuous instance of the want of individual rights. A Chinese son
+      cannot properly be said to own anything. The title to the land he tills is
+      vested absolutely in the family, of which he is an undivided thirtieth, or
+      what-not. Even the administration of the property is not his, but resides
+      in the family, represented by its head. The outward symbols of ownership
+      testify to the fact. The bourns that mark the boundaries of the fields
+      bear the names of families, not of individuals. The family, as such, is
+      the proprietor, and its lands are cultivated and enjoyed in common by all
+      the constituents of the clan. In the tenure of its real estate, the
+      Chinese family much resembles the Russian Mir. But so far as his personal
+      state is concerned, the Chinese son outslaves the Slav. For he lives at
+      home, under the immediate control of the paternal will&mdash;in the most
+      complete of serfdoms, a filial one. Even existence becomes a communal
+      affair. From the family mansion, or set of mansions, in which all its
+      members dwell, to the family mausoleum, to which they will all eventually
+      be borne, a man makes his life journey in strict company with his kin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A man's life is thus but an undivisible fraction of the family life. How
+      essentially so will appear from the following slight sketch of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To begin at the beginning, his birth is a very important event&mdash;for
+      the household, at which no one fails to rejoice except the new-comer. He
+      cries. The general joy, however, depends somewhat upon his sex. If the
+      baby chances to be a boy, everybody is immensely pleased; if a girl, there
+      is considerably less effusion shown. In the latter case the more impulsive
+      relatives are unmistakably sorry; the more philosophic evidently hope for
+      better luck next time. Both kinds make very pretty speeches, which not
+      even the speakers believe, for in the babe lottery the family is
+      considered to have drawn a blank. A delight so engendered proves how
+      little of the personal, even in prospective, attaches to its object. The
+      reason for the invidious distinction in the matter of sex lies of course
+      in an inordinate desire for the perpetuation of the family line. The
+      unfortunate infant is regarded merely in the light of a possible
+      progenitor. A boy is already potentially a father; whereas a girl, if she
+      marry at all, is bound to marry out of her own family into another, and is
+      relatively lost. The full force of the deprivation is, however, to some
+      degree tempered by the almost infinite possibilities of adoption.
+      Daughters are, therefore, not utterly unmitigable evils.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From the privacy of the domestic circle, the infant's entrance into public
+      life is performed pick-a-back. Strapped securely to the shoulders of a
+      slightly older sister, out he goes, consigned to the tender mercies of a
+      being who is scarcely more than a baby herself. The diminutiveness of the
+      nurse-perambulators is the most surprising part of the performance. The
+      tiniest of tots may be seen thus toddling round with burdens half their
+      own size. Like the dot upon the little i, the baby's head seems a natural
+      part of their childish ego.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An economy of the kind in the matter of nurses is highly suggestive. That
+      it should be practicable thus to entrust one infant to another proves the
+      precociousness of children. But this surprising maturity of the young
+      implies by a law too well known to need explanation, the consequent
+      immaturity of the race. That which has less to grow up to, naturally grows
+      up to its limit sooner. It may even be questioned whether it does not do
+      so with the more haste; on the same principle that a runner who has less
+      distance to travel not only accomplishes his course quicker, but moves
+      with relatively greater speed, or as a small planet grows old not simply
+      sooner, but comparatively faster than a larger one. Jupiter is still in
+      his fiery youth, while the moon is senile in decrepid old age, and yet his
+      separate existence began long before hers. Either hypothesis will explain
+      the abnormally early development of the Chinese race, and its subsequent
+      career of inactivity. Meanwhile the youthful nurse, in blissful ignorance
+      of the evidence which her present precocity affords against her future
+      possibilities, pursues her sports with intermittent attention to her
+      charge, whose poor little head lolls about, now on one side and now on the
+      other, in a most distressingly loose manner, an uninterested spectator of
+      the proceedings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As soon as the babe gets a trifle bigger he ceases to be ministered to and
+      begins his long course of ministering to others. His home life consists of
+      attentive subordination. The relation his obedience bears to that of
+      children elsewhere is paralleled perhaps sufficiently by the comparative
+      importance attached to precepts on the subject in the respective moral
+      codes. The commandment "honor thy father" forms a tithe of the Mosaic law,
+      while the same injunction constitutes at least one half of the Confucian
+      precepts. To the Chinese child all the parental commands are not simply
+      law to the letter, they are to be anticipated in the spirit. To do what he
+      is told is but the merest fraction of his duty; theoretically his only
+      thought is how to serve his sire. The pious Aeneas escaping from Troy
+      exemplifies his conduct when it comes to a question of domestic
+      precedence,&mdash;whose first care, it will be remembered, was for his
+      father, his next for his son, and his last for his wife. He lost his wife,
+      it may be noted in passing. Filial piety is the greatest of Chinese
+      virtues. Indeed, an undutiful son is a monstrosity, a case of moral
+      deformity. It could now hardly be otherwise. For a father sums up in
+      propria persona a whole pedigree of patriarchs whose superimposed weight
+      of authority is practically divine. This condition of servitude is never
+      outgrown by the individual, as it has never been outgrown by the race.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our boy now begins to go to school; to a day school, it need hardly be
+      specified, for a boarding school would be entirely out of keeping with the
+      family life. Here, he is given the "Trimetrical Classic" to start on, that
+      he may learn the characters by heart, picking up incidentally what ideas
+      he may. This book is followed by the "Century of Surnames," a catalogue of
+      all the clan names in China, studied like the last for the sake of the
+      characters, although the suggestion of the importance of the family
+      contained in it is probably not lost upon his youthful mind. Next comes
+      the "Thousand Character Classic," a wonderful epic as a feat of skill, for
+      of the thousand characters which it contains not a single one is repeated,
+      an absence of tautology not properly appreciated by the enforced reader.
+      Reminiscences of our own school days vividly depict the consequent
+      disgust, instead of admiration, of the boy. Three more books succeed these
+      first volumes, differing from one another in form, but in substance
+      singularly alike, treating, as they all do, of history and ethics
+      combined. For tales and morals are inseparably associated by pious
+      antiquity. Indeed, the past would seem to have lived with special
+      reference to the edification of the future. Chinamen were abnormally
+      virtuous in those golden days, barring the few unfortunates whom fate
+      needed as warning examples of depravity for succeeding ages. Except for
+      the fact that instruction as to a future life forms no part of the
+      curriculum, a far-eastern education may be said to consist of
+      Sunday-school every day in the week. For no occasion is lost by the
+      erudite authors, even in the most worldly portions of their work, for
+      preaching a slight homily on the subject in hand. The dictum of Dionysius
+      of Halicarnassus that "history is philosophy teaching by example" would
+      seem there to have become modified into "history is filiosophy teaching by
+      example." For in the instructive anecdotes every other form of merit is
+      depicted as second to that of being a dutiful son. To the practice of that
+      supreme virtue all other considerations are sacrificed. The student's aim
+      is thus kept single. At every turn of the leaves, paragons of filial piety
+      shame the youthful reader to the pitch of emulation by the epitaphic
+      records of their deeds. Portraits of the past, possibly colored, present
+      that estimable trait in so exalted a type that to any less filial a people
+      they would simply deter competition. Yet the boy implicitly believes and
+      no doubt resolves to rival what he reads. A specimen or two will amply
+      suggest the rest. In one tale the hero is held up to the unqualified
+      admiration of posterity for having starved to death his son, in an extreme
+      case of family destitution, for the sake of providing food enough for his
+      aged father. In another he unhesitatingly divorces his wife for having
+      dared to poke fun, in the shape of bodkins, at some wooden effigies of his
+      parents which he had had set up in the house for daily devotional
+      contemplation. Finally another paragon actually sells himself in
+      perpetuity as a slave that he may thus procure the wherewithal to bury
+      with due honor his anything but worthy progenitor, who had first cheated
+      his neighbors and then squandered his ill-gotten gains in riotous living.
+      Of these tales, as of certain questionable novels in a slightly different
+      line, the eventual moral is considered quite competent to redeem the
+      general immorality of the plot.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Along such a curriculum the youthful Chinaman is made to run. A very
+      similar system prevails in Japan, the difference between the two
+      consisting in quantity rather than quality. The books in the two cases are
+      much the same, and the amount read differs surprisingly little when we
+      consider that in the one case it is his own classics the student is
+      reading, in the other the Chinaman's.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If he belong to the middle class, as soon as his schooling is over he is
+      set to learn his father's trade. To undertake to learn any trade but his
+      father's would strike the family as simply preposterous. Why should he
+      adopt another line of business? And, if he did, what other business should
+      he adopt? Is his father's occupation not already there, a part of the
+      existing order of things; and is he not the son of his father and heir
+      therefore of the paternal skill? Not that such inherited aptness is
+      recognized scientifically; it is simply taken for granted instinctively.
+      It is but a halfhearted intuition, however, for the possibility of an
+      inheritance from the mother's side is as out of the question as if her
+      severance from her own family had an ex post facto effect. As for his
+      individual predilection in the matter, nature has considerately conformed
+      to custom by giving him none. He becomes a cabinet-maker, for instance,
+      because his ancestors always have been cabinet-makers. He inherits the
+      family business as a necessary part of the family name. He is born to his
+      trade, not naturally selected because of his fitness for it. But he
+      usually is amply qualified for the position, for generations of practice,
+      if only on one side of the house, accumulate a vast deal of technical
+      skill. The result of this system of clan guilds in all branches of
+      industry is sufficiently noticeable. The almost infinite superiority of
+      Japanese artisans over their European fellow-craftsmen is world-known. On
+      the other hand the tendency of the occupation in the abstract to swallow
+      up the individual in the concrete is as evident to theory as it is patent
+      in practice. Eventually the man is lost in the manner. The very names of
+      trades express the fact. The Japanese word for cabinet-maker, for example,
+      means literally cutting-thing-house, and is now applied as distinctively
+      to the man as to his shop. Nominally as well as practically the youthful
+      Japanese artisan makes his introduction to the world, much after the
+      manner of the hero of Lecocq's comic opera, the son of the house of
+      Marasquin et Cie.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If instead of belonging to the lower middle class our typical youth be
+      born of bluer blood, or if he be filled with the same desires as if he
+      were so descended, he becomes a student. Having failed to discover in the
+      school-room the futility of his country's self-vaunted learning, he
+      proceeds to devote his life to its pursuit. With an application which is
+      eminently praiseworthy, even if its object be not, he sets to work to
+      steep himself in the classics till he can perceive no merit in anything
+      else. As might be suspected, he ends by discovering in the sayings of the
+      past more meaning than the simple past ever dreamed of putting there. He
+      becomes more Confucian than Confucius. Indeed, it is fortunate for the
+      reputation of the sage that he cannot return to earth, for he might
+      disagree to his detriment with his own commentators.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such is the state of things in China and Korea. Learning, however, is not
+      dependent solely on individual interest for its wonderfully flourishing
+      condition in the Middle Kingdom, for the government abets the practice to
+      its utmost. It is itself the supreme sanction, for its posts are the
+      prizes of proficiency. Through the study of the classics lies the only
+      entrance to political power. To become a mandarin one must have passed a
+      series of competitive examinations on these very subjects, and competition
+      in this impersonal field is most keen. For while popular enthusiasm for
+      philosophy for philosophy's sake might, among any people, eventually show
+      symptoms of fatigue, it is not likely to flag where the outcome of it is
+      so substantial. Erudition carries there all earthly emoluments in its
+      train. For the man who can write the most scholastic essay on the classics
+      is forthwith permitted to amass much honor and more wealth by wronging his
+      less accomplished fellow-citizens. China is a student's paradise where the
+      possession of learning is instantly convertible into unlimited pelf.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In Japan the study of the classics was never pursued professionally. It
+      was, however, prosecuted with much zeal en amateur. The Chinese
+      bureaucratic system has been wanting. For in spite of her students, until
+      within thirty years Japan slumbered still in the Knight-time of the Middle
+      Ages, and so long as a man carried about with him continually two
+      beautiful swords he felt it incumbent upon him to use them. The happy days
+      of knight-errantry have passed. These same cavaliers of Samurai are now
+      thankful to police the streets in spectacles necessitated by the too
+      diligent study of German text, and arrest chance disturbers of the public
+      peace for a miserably small salary per month.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our youth has now reached the flowering season of life, that brief May
+      time when the whole world takes on the rose-tint, and when by all dramatic
+      laws he ought to fall in love. He does nothing of the kind. Sad to say, he
+      is a stranger to the feeling. Love, as we understand the word, is a thing
+      unknown to the Far East; fortunately, indeed, for the possession there of
+      the tender passion would be worse than useless. Its indulgence would work
+      no end of disturbance to the community at large, beside entailing much
+      misery upon its individual victim. Its exercise would probably be classed
+      with kleptomania and other like excesses of purely personal consideration.
+      The community could never permit the practice, for it strikes at the very
+      root of their whole social system.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The immense loss in happiness to these people in consequence of the
+      omission by the too parsimonious Fates of that thread, which, with us,
+      spins the whole of woman's web of life, and at least weaves the warp of
+      man's, is but incidental to the present subject; the effect of the loss
+      upon the individuality of the person himself is what concerns us now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If there is one moment in a man's life when his interest for the world at
+      large pales before the engrossing character of his own emotions, it is
+      assuredly when that man first falls in love. Then, if never before, the
+      world within excludes the world without. For of all our human passions
+      none is so isolating as the tenderest. To shut that one other being in, we
+      must of necessity shut all the rest of mankind out; and we do so with a
+      reckless trust in our own self-sufficiency which has about it a touch of
+      the sublime. The other millions are as though they were not, and we two
+      are alone in the earth, which suddenly seems to have grown unprecedentedly
+      beautiful. Indeed, it only needs such judicious depopulation to make of
+      any spot an Eden. Perhaps the early Jewish myth-makers had some such
+      thought in mind when they wrote their idyl of the cosmogony. The human
+      traits are true to-day. Then at last our souls throw aside their
+      conventional wrappings to stand revealed as they really are. Certain of
+      comprehension, the thoughts we have never dared breathe to any one before,
+      find a tongue for her who seems fore-destined to understand. The
+      long-closed floodgates of feeling are thrown wide, and our personality,
+      pent up from the time of its inception for very mistrust, sweeps forth in
+      one uncontrollable rush. For then the most reticent becomes confiding; the
+      most self-contained expands. Then every detail of our past lives assumes
+      an importance which even we had not divined. To her we tell them all,&mdash;our
+      boyish beliefs, our youthful fancies, the foolish with the fine, the witty
+      with the wise, the little with the great. Nothing then seems quite
+      unworthy, as nothing seems quite worthy enough. Flowers and weeds that we
+      plucked upon our pathway, we heap them in her lap, certain that even the
+      poorest will not be tossed aside. Small wonder that we bring as many as we
+      may when she bends her head so lovingly to each.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As our past rises in reminiscence with all its oldtime reality, no less
+      clearly does our future stand out to us in mirage. What we would be seems
+      as realizable as what we were. Seen by another beside ourselves, our
+      castles in the air take on something of the substance of stereoscopic
+      sight. Our airiest fancies seem solid facts for their reality to her, and
+      gilded by lovelight, they glitter and sparkle like a true palace of the
+      East. For once all is possible; nothing lies beyond our reach. And as we
+      talk, and she listens, we two seem to be floating off into an empyrean of
+      our own like the summer clouds above our heads, as they sail dreamily on
+      into the far-away depths of the unfathomable sky.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It would be more than mortal not to believe in ourselves when another
+      believes so absolutely in us. Our most secret thoughts are no longer
+      things to be ashamed of, for she has sanctioned them. Whatever doubt may
+      have shadowed us as to our own imaginings disappears before the smile of
+      her appreciation. That her appreciation may be prejudiced is not a
+      possibility we think of then. She understands us, or seems to do so to our
+      own better understanding of ourselves. Happy the man who is thus
+      understood! Happy even he who imagines that he is, because of her eager
+      wish to comprehend; fortunate, indeed, if in this one respect he never
+      comes to see too clearly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No such blissful infatuation falls to the lot of the Far Oriental. He
+      never is the dupe of his own desire, the willing victim of his
+      self-illusion. He is never tempted to reveal himself, and by thus
+      revealing, realize. No loving appreciation urges him on toward the
+      attainment of his own ideal. That incitement to be what he would seem to
+      be, to become what she deems becoming, he fails to feel. Custom has so far
+      fettered fancy that even the wish to communicate has vanished. He has now
+      nothing to tell; she needs no ear to hear. For she is not his love; she is
+      only his wife,&mdash;what is left of a romance when the romance is left
+      out. Worse still, she never was anything else. He has not so much as a
+      memory of her, for he did not marry her for love; he may not love of his
+      own accord, nor for the matter of that does he wish to do so. If by some
+      mischance he should so far forget to forget himself, it were much better
+      for him had he not done so, for the choice of a bride is not his, nor of a
+      bridegroom hers. Marriage to a Far Oriental is the most important
+      mercantile transaction of his whole life. It is, therefore, far too
+      weighty a matter to be entrusted to his youthful indiscretion; for
+      although the person herself is of lamentably little account in the
+      bargain, the character of her worldly circumstances is most material to
+      it. So she is contracted for with the same care one would exercise in the
+      choice of any staple business commodity. The particular sample is not
+      vital to the trade, but the grade of goods is. She is selected much as the
+      bride of the Vicar of Wakefield chose her wedding-gown, only that the one
+      was at least cut to suit, while the other is not. It is certainly easier,
+      if less fitting, to get a wife as some people do clothes, not to their own
+      order, but ready made; all the more reason when the bargain is for one's
+      son, not one's self. So the Far East, which looks at the thing from a
+      strictly paternal standpoint and ignores such trifles as personal
+      preferences, takes its boy to the broker's and fits him out. That the
+      object of such parental care does not end by murdering his unfortunate
+      spouse or making way with himself suggests how dead already is that
+      individuality which we deem to be of the very essence of the thing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marriage is thus a species of investment contracted by the existing family
+      for the sake of the prospective one, the actual participants being only
+      lay figures in the affair. Sometimes the father decides the matter
+      himself; sometimes he or the relative who stands in loco parentis calls
+      for a plebiscit on the subject; for such an extension of the suffrage has
+      gradually crept even into patriarchal institutions. The family then
+      assemble, sit in solemn conclave on the question, and decide it by vote.
+      Of course the interested parties are not asked their opinion, as it might
+      be prejudiced. The result of the conference must be highly gratifying. To
+      have one's wife chosen for one by vote of one's relatives cannot but be
+      satisfactory&mdash;to the electors. The outcome of this ballot, like that
+      of universal suffrage elsewhere, is at the best unobjectionable
+      mediocrity. Somehow such a result does not seem quite to fulfil one's
+      ideal of a wife. It is true that the upper classes of impersonal France
+      practise this method of marital selection, their conseils de famille
+      furnishing in some sort a parallel. But, as is well known, matrimony among
+      these same upper classes is largely form devoid of substance. It begins
+      impressively with a dual ceremony, the civil contract, which amounts to a
+      contract of civility between the parties, and a religious rite to render
+      the same perpetual, and there it is too apt to end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So much for the immediate influence on the man; the eventual effect on the
+      race remains to be considered. Now, if the first result be anything, the
+      second must in the end be everything. For however trifling it be in the
+      individual instance, it goes on accumulating with each successive
+      generation, like compound interest. The choosing of a wife by family
+      suffrage is not simply an exponent of the impersonal state of things, it
+      is a power toward bringing such a state of things about. A hermit seldom
+      develops to his full possibilities, and the domestic variety is no
+      exception to the rule. A man who is linked to some one that toward him
+      remains a cipher lacks surroundings inciting to psychological growth, nor
+      is he more favorably circumstanced because all his ancestors have been
+      similarly circumscribed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As if to make assurance doubly sure, natural selection here steps in to
+      further the process. To prove this with all the rigidity of demonstration
+      desirable is in the present state of erotics beyond our power. Until our
+      family trees give us something more than mere skeletons of dead branches,
+      we must perforce continue ignorant of the science of grafts. For the nonce
+      we must be content to generalize from our own premises, only rising above
+      them sufficiently to get a bird's-eye view of our neighbor's estates. Such
+      a survey has at least one advantage: the whole field of view appears
+      perfectly plain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Surveying the subject, then, from this ego-altruistic position, we can
+      perceive why matrimony, as we practise it, should result in increasing the
+      personality of our race: for the reason namely that psychical similarity
+      determines the selection. At first sight, indeed, such a natural affinity
+      would seem to have little or nothing to do with marriage. As far as
+      outsiders are capable of judging, unlikes appear to fancy one another
+      quite as gratuitously as do likes. Connubial couples are often anything
+      but twin souls. Yet our own dual use of the word "like" bears historic
+      witness to the contrary. For in this expression we have a record from
+      early Gothic times that men liked others for being like themselves. Since
+      then, our feelings have not changed materially, although our mode of
+      showing them is slightly less intense. In those simple days stranger and
+      enemy were synonymous terms, and their objects were received in a
+      corresponding spirit. In our present refined civilization we hurl epithets
+      instead of spears, and content ourselves with branding as heterodox the
+      opinions of another which do not happen to coincide with our own. The
+      instinct of self-development naturally begets this self-sided view. We
+      insensibly find those persons congenial whose ideas resemble ours, and
+      gravitate to them, as leaves on a pond do to one another, nearer and
+      nearer till they touch. Is it likely, then, that in the most important
+      case of all the rule should suddenly cease to hold? Is it to be presumed
+      that even Socrates chose Xantippe for her remarkable contrariety to
+      himself?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mere physical attraction is another matter. Corporeally considered, men
+      not infrequently fall in love with their opposites, the phenomenally tall
+      with the painfully short, the unnecessarily stout with the distressingly
+      slender. But even such inartistic juxtapositions are much less common than
+      we are apt at times to think. For it must never be forgotten that the
+      exceptional character of the phenomena renders them conspicuous, the
+      customary more consorted combinations failing to excite attention.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Besides, there exists a reason for physical incongruity which does not
+      hold psychically. Nature sanctions the one while she discountenances the
+      other. Instead of the forethought she once bestowed upon the body, it
+      receives at her hands now but the scantiest attention. Its development has
+      ceased to be an object with her. For some time past almost all her care
+      has been devoted to the evolution of the soul. The consequence is that
+      physically man is much less specialized than many other animals. In other
+      words, he is bodily less advanced in the race for competitive
+      extermination. He belongs to an antiquated, inefficient type of mammal.
+      His organism is still of the jack-of-all-trades pattern, such as prevailed
+      generally in the more youthful stages of organic life&mdash;one not
+      specially suited to any particular pursuit. Were it not for his cerebral
+      convolutions he could not compete for an instant in the struggle for
+      existence, and even the monkey would reign in his stead. But brain is more
+      effective than biceps, and a being who can kill his opponent farther off
+      than he can see him evidently needs no great excellence of body to survive
+      his foe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The field of competition has thus been transferred from matter to mind,
+      but the fight has lost none of its keenness in consequence. With the same
+      zeal with which advantageous anatomical variations were seized upon and
+      perpetuated, psychical ones are now grasped and rendered hereditary. Now
+      if opposites were to fancy and wed one another, such fortunate
+      improvements would soon be lost. They would be scattered over the
+      community at large even it they escaped entire neutralization. To prevent
+      so disastrous a result nature implants a desire for resemblance, which
+      desire man instinctively acts upon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Complete compatibility of temperament is of course a thing not to be
+      expected nor indeed to be desired, since it would defeat its own end by
+      allowing no room for variation. A fairly broad basis of agreement,
+      however, exists even when least suspected. This common ground of content
+      consists of those qualities held to be most essential by the individuals
+      concerned, although not necessarily so appearing to other people.
+      Sometimes, indeed, these qualities are still in the larvae state of
+      desires. They are none the less potent upon the man's personality on that
+      account, for the wish is always father to its own fulfilment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The want of conjugal resemblance not only works mediately on the child, it
+      works mutually on the parents; for companionship, as is well recognized,
+      tends to similarity. Now companionship is the last thing to be looked for
+      in a far-eastern couple. Where custom requires a wife to follow dutifully
+      in the wake of her husband, whenever the two go out together, there is
+      small opportunity for intercourse by the way, even were there the
+      slightest inclination to it, which there is not. The appearance of the
+      pair on an excursion is a walking satire on sociability, for the
+      comicality of the connection is quite unperceived by the performers. In
+      the privacy of the domestic circle the separation, if less humorous, is no
+      less complete. Each lives in a world of his own, largely separate in fact
+      in China and Korea, and none the less in fancy in Japan. On the continent
+      a friend of the husband would see little or nothing of the wife, and even
+      in Japan he would meet her much as we meet an upper servant in a friend's
+      house. Such a semi-attached relationship does not conduce to much mutual
+      understanding.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The remainder of our hero's uneventful existence calls for no particular
+      comment. As soon as he has children borne him he is raised ipso facto from
+      the position of a common soldier to that of a subordinate officer in the
+      family ranks. But his opportunities for the expression of individuality
+      are not one whit increased. He has simply advanced a peg in a regular
+      hierarchy of subjection. From being looked after himself he proceeds to
+      look after others. Such is the extent of the change. Even should he chance
+      to be the eldest son of the eldest son, and thus eventually end by
+      becoming the head of the family, he cannot consistently consider himself.
+      There is absolutely no place in his social cosmos for so particular a
+      thing as the ego.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With a certain grim humor suggestive of metaphysics, it may be said of his
+      whole life that it is nothing but a relative affair after all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0003" id="link2HCH0003">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter 3. Adoption.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      But one may go a step farther in this matter of the family, and by so
+      doing fare still worse with respect to individuality. There are certain
+      customs in vogue among these peoples which would seem to indicate that
+      even so generic a thing as the family is too personal to serve them for
+      ultimate social atom, and that in fact it is only the idea of the family
+      that is really important, a case of abstraction of an abstract. These
+      suggestive customs are the far-eastern practices of adoption and
+      abdication.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Adoption, with us, is a kind of domestic luxury, akin to the keeping of
+      any other pets, such as lap-dogs and canaries. It is a species of
+      self-indulgence which those who can afford it give themselves when fortune
+      has proved unpropitious, an artificial method of counteracting the
+      inequalities of fate. That such is the plain unglamoured view of the
+      procedure is shown by the age at which the object is adopted. Usually the
+      future son or daughter enters the adoptive household as an infant,
+      intentionally so on the part of the would-be parents. His ignorance of a
+      previous relationship largely increases his relative value; for the
+      possibility of his making comparisons in his own mind between a former
+      state of existence and the present one unfavorable to the latter is not
+      pleasant for the adopters to contemplate. He is therefore acquired young.
+      The amusement derived from his company is thus seen to be distinctly
+      paramount to all other considerations. No one cares so heartily to own a
+      dog which has been the property of another; a fortiori of a child. It is
+      clearly, then, not as a necessity that the babe is adopted. If such were
+      the case, if like the ancient Romans all a man wanted was the continuance
+      of the family line, he would naturally wait until the last practicable
+      moment; for he would thus save both care and expense. In the Far East
+      adoption is quite a different affair. There it is a genealogical necessity&mdash;like
+      having a father or mother. It is, indeed, of almost more importance. For
+      the great desideratum to these peoples is not ancestors but descendants.
+      Pedigrees in the land of the universal opposite are not matters of bequest
+      but of posthumous reversion. A man is not beholden to the past, he looks
+      forward to the future for inherited honors. No fame attaches to him for
+      having had an illustrious grandfather. On the contrary, it is the
+      illustrious grandson who reflects some of his own greatness back upon his
+      grandfather. If a man therefore fail to attain eminence himself, he always
+      has another chance in his descendants; for he will of necessity be
+      ennobled through the merits of those who succeed him. Such is the
+      immemorial law of the land. Fame is retroactive. This admirable system has
+      only one objection: it is posthumous in its effect. An ambitious man who
+      unfortunately lacks ability himself has to wait too long for vicarious
+      recognition. The objection is like that incident to the making of a
+      country seat out of a treeless plain by planting the same with saplings.
+      About the time the trees begin to be worth having the proprietary
+      landscape-gardener dies of old age. However, as custom permits a Far
+      Oriental no ancestral growth of timber, he is obliged to lay the seeds of
+      his own family trees. Natural offspring are on the whole easier to get,
+      and more satisfactory when got. Hence the haste with which these peoples
+      rush into matrimony. If in despite of his precipitation fate perversely
+      refuse to grant him children, he must endeavor to make good the omission
+      by artificial means. He proceeds to adopt somebody. True to instinct, he
+      chooses from preference a collateral relative. In some far-eastern lands
+      he must so restrict himself by law. In Korea, for instance, he can only
+      adopt an agnate and one of a lower generation than his own. But in Japan
+      his choice is not so limited. In so praiseworthy an act as the
+      perpetuation of his unimportant family line, it is deemed unwise in that
+      progressive land to hinder him from unconsciously bettering it by the way.
+      He is consequently permitted to adopt anybody. As people are by no means
+      averse to being adopted, the power to adopt whom he will gives him more
+      voice in the matter of his unnatural offspring than he ever had in the
+      selection of a more natural one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The adopted changes his name, of course, to take that of the family he
+      enters. As he is very frequently grown up and extensively known at the
+      time the adoption takes place, his change of cognomen occasions at first
+      some slight confusion among his acquaintance. This would be no worse,
+      however, than the change with us from the maid to the matron, and
+      intercourse would soon proceed smoothly again if people would only rest
+      content with one such domestic migration. But they do not. The fatal
+      facility of the process tempts them to repeat it. The result is
+      bewildering: a people as nomadic now in the property of their persons as
+      their forefathers were in their real estate. A man adopts another to-day
+      to unadopt him to-morrow and replace him by somebody else the day after.
+      So profoundly unimportant to them is their social identity, that they
+      bandy it about with almost farcical freedom. Perhaps it is fitting that
+      there should be some slight preparation in this world for a future
+      transmigration of souls. Still one fails to conceive that the practice can
+      be devoid of disadvantages even to its beneficiaries. To foreigners it
+      proves disastrously perplexing. For if you chance upon a man whom you have
+      not met for some time, you can never be quite sure how to accost him. If
+      you begin, "Well met, Green, how goes it?" as likely as not he replies,
+      "Finely. But I am no longer Green; I have become Brown. I was adopted last
+      month by my maternal grandfather." You of course apologize for your
+      unfortunate mistake, carefully note his change of hue for a future
+      occasion, and behold, on meeting him the next time you find he has turned
+      Black. Such a chameleon-like cognomen is very unsettling to your idea of
+      his identity, and can hardly prove reassuring to his own. The only persons
+      who reap any benefit from the doubt are those, with us unhappy,
+      individuals who possess the futile faculty of remembering faces without
+      recalling their accompanying names.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Girls, as a rule, are not adopted, being valueless genealogically. A niece
+      or grandniece to whom one has taken a great fancy might of course be
+      adopted there as elsewhere, but it would be distinctly out of the
+      every-day run, as she could never be included in the household on strict
+      business principles.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The practice of adopting is not confined to childless couples. Others may
+      find themselves in quite as unfortunate a predicament. A man may be the
+      father of a large and thriving family and yet be as destitute
+      patriarchally as if he had not a child to his name. His offspring may be
+      of the wrong sex; they may all be girls. In this untoward event the father
+      has something more on his hands than merely a houseful of daughters to
+      dispose of. In addition to securing sons-in-law, he must, unless he would
+      have his ancestral line become extinct, provide himself with a son. The
+      simplest procedure in such a case is to combine relationships in a single
+      individual, and the most self-evident person to select for the dual
+      capacity is the husband of the eldest daughter. This is the course
+      pursued. Some worthy young man is secured as spouse for the senior sister;
+      he is at the same time formally taken in as a son by the family whose
+      cognomen he assumes, and eventually becomes the head of the house. Strange
+      to say, this vista of gradually unfolding honors does not seem to prove
+      inviting. Perhaps the new-comer objects to marrying the whole family, a
+      prejudice not without parallel elsewhere. Certainly the opportunity is not
+      appreciated. Indeed, to "go out as a son-in-law," as the Japanese idiom
+      hath it, is considered demeaning to the matrimonial domestic. Like other
+      household help he wears too patently the badge of servitude. "If you have
+      three koku of rice to your name, don't do it," is the advice of the local
+      proverb&mdash;a proverb whose warning against marrying for money is the
+      more suggestive for being launched in a land where marrying for love is
+      beyond the pale of respectability. To barter one's name in this mercenary
+      manner is looked upon as derogatory to one's self-respect, although, as we
+      have seen, to part with it for any less direct remuneration is not
+      attended with the slightest loss of personal prestige. As practically the
+      unfortunate had none to lose in either event, it would seem to be a case
+      of taking away from a man that which he hath not. So contumacious a thing
+      is custom. It is indeed lucky that popular prejudice interposes some limit
+      to this fictitious method of acquiring children. A trifling predilection
+      for the real thing in sonships is absolutely vital, even to the
+      continuance of the artificial variety. For if one generation ever went in
+      exclusively for adoption, there would be no subsequent generation to
+      adopt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As it to give the finishing touch to so conventional a system of society,
+      a man can leave it under certain circumstances with even greater ease than
+      he entered it. He can become as good as dead without the necessity of
+      making way with himself. Theoretically, he can cease to live while still
+      practically existing; for it is always open to the head of a family to
+      abdicate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The word abdicate has to our ears a certain regal sound. We instinctively
+      associate the act with a king. Even the more democratic expression resign
+      suggests at once an office of public or quasi public character. To talk of
+      abdicating one's private relationships sounds absurd; one might as well
+      talk of electing his parents, it would seem to us. Such misunderstanding
+      of far-eastern social possibilities comes from our having indulged in
+      digressions from our more simple nomadic habits. If in imagination we will
+      return to our ancestral muttons and the then existing order of things, the
+      idea will not strike us as so strange; for in those early bucolic days
+      every father was a king. Family economics were the only political
+      questions in existence then. The clan was the unit. Domestic disputes were
+      state disturbances, and clan-claims the only kind of international
+      quarrels. The patriarch was both father to his people and king.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As time widened the family circle it eventually reached a point where
+      cohesion ceased to be possible. The centrifugal tendency could no longer
+      be controlled by the centripetal force. It split up into separate bodies,
+      each of them a family by itself. In their turn these again divided, and so
+      the process went on. This principle has worked universally, the only
+      difference in its action among different races being the greater or less
+      degree of the evolving motion. With us the social system has been turning
+      more and more rapidly with time. In the Far East its force, instead of
+      increasing, would seem to have decreased, enabling the nebula of its
+      original condition to keep together as a single mass, so that to-day a
+      whole nation, resembling a nebula indeed in homogeneity, is swayed by a
+      single patriarchal principle. Here, on the contrary, so rapid has the
+      motion become that even brethren find themselves scattered to the four
+      winds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An Occidental father and an Oriental head of a family are no longer really
+      correlative terms. The latter more closely resembles a king in his duties,
+      responsibilities, and functions generally. Now, in the Middle Ages in
+      Europe, when a king grew tired of affairs of state, he abdicated. So in
+      the Far East, when the head of a family has had enough of active life, he
+      abdicates, and his eldest son reigns in his stead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From that moment he ceases to belong to the body politic in any active
+      sense. Not that he is no longer a member of society nor unamenable to its
+      general laws, but that he has become a respectable declasse, as it were.
+      He has entered, so to speak, the social nirvana, a not unfitting first
+      step, as he regards it, toward entering the eventual nirvana beyond. Such
+      abdication now takes place without particular cause. After a certain time
+      of life, and long before a man grows old, it is the fashion thus to make
+      one's bow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0004" id="link2HCH0004">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter 4. Language.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      A man's personal equation, as astronomers call the effect of his
+      individuality, is kin, for all its complexity, to those simple algebraical
+      problems which so puzzled us at school. To solve either we must begin by
+      knowing the values of the constants that enter into its expression. Upon
+      the a b c's of the one, as upon those of the other, depend the
+      possibilities of the individual x.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now the constants in any man's equation are the qualities that he has
+      inherited from the past. What a man does follows from what he is, which in
+      turn is mostly dependent upon what his ancestors have been; and of all the
+      links in the long chain of mind-evolution, few are more important and more
+      suggestive than language. Actions may at the moment speak louder than
+      words, but methods of expression have as tell-tale a tongue for bygone
+      times as ways of doing things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If it should ever fall to my lot to have to settle that exceedingly vexed
+      Eastern question,&mdash;not the emancipation of ancient Greece from the
+      bondage of the modern Turk, but the emancipation of the modern college
+      student from the bond of ancient Greek,&mdash;I should propose, as a
+      solution of the dilemma, the addition of a course in Japanese to the
+      college list of required studies. It might look, I admit, like begging the
+      question for the sake of giving its answer, but the answer, I think, would
+      justify itself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is from no desire to parade a fresh hobby-horse upon the university
+      curriculum that I offer the suggestion, but because I believe that a study
+      of the Japanese language would prove the most valuable of ponies in the
+      academic pursuit of philology. In the matter of literature, indeed, we
+      should not be adding very much to our existing store, but we should gain
+      an insight into the genesis of speech that would put us at least one step
+      nearer to being present at the beginnings of human conversation. As it is
+      now, our linguistic learning is with most of us limited to a knowledge of
+      Aryan tongues, and in consequence we not only fall into the mistake of
+      thinking our way the only way, which is bad enough, but, what is far
+      worse, by not perceiving the other possible paths we quite fail to
+      appreciate the advantages or disadvantages of following our own. We are
+      the blind votaries of a species of ancestral language-worship, which, with
+      all its erudition, tends to narrow our linguistic scope. A study of
+      Japanese would free us from the fetters of any such family infatuation.
+      The inviolable rules and regulations of our mother-tongue would be found
+      to be of relative application only. For we should discover that speech is
+      a much less categorical matter than we had been led to suppose. We should
+      actually come to doubt the fundamental necessity of some of our most
+      sacred grammatical constructions; and even our reverenced Latin grammars
+      would lose that air of awful absoluteness which so impressed us in
+      boyhood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An encouraging estimate of a certain missionary puts the amount of study
+      needed by the Western student for the learning of Japanese as sufficient,
+      if expended nearer home, to equip him with any three modern European
+      languages. It is certainly true that a completely strange vocabulary, an
+      utter inversion of grammar, and an elaborate system of honorifics combine
+      to render its acquisition anything but easy. In its fundamental
+      principles, however, it is alluringly simple.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the first place, the Japanese language is pleasingly destitute of
+      personal pronouns. Not only is the obnoxious "I" conspicuous only by its
+      absence; the objectionable antagonistic "you" is also entirely suppressed,
+      while the intrusive "he" is evidently too much of a third person to be
+      wanted. Such invidious distinctions of identity apparently never thrust
+      their presence upon the simple early Tartar minds. I, you, and he, not
+      being differences due to nature, demanded, to their thinking, no
+      recognition of man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is about this vagueness of expression a freedom not without its
+      charm. It is certainly delightful to be able to speak of yourself as if
+      you were somebody else, choosing mentally for the occasion any one you may
+      happen to fancy, or, it you prefer, the possibility of soaring boldly
+      forth into the realms of the unconditioned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To us, at first sight, however, such a lack of specification appears
+      wofully incompatible with any intelligible transmission of ideas. So
+      communistic a want of discrimination between the meum and the tuum&mdash;to
+      say nothing of the claims of a possible third party&mdash;would seem to be
+      as fatal to the interchange of thoughts as it proves destructive to the
+      trafficking in commodities. Such, nevertheless, is not the result. On the
+      contrary, Japanese is as easy and as certain of comprehension as is
+      English. On ninety occasions out of a hundred, the context at once makes
+      clear the person meant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the very few really ambiguous cases, or those in which, for the sake of
+      emphasis, a pronoun is wanted, certain consecrated expressions are
+      introduced for the purpose. For eventually the more complex social
+      relations of increasing civilization compelled some sort of distant
+      recognition. Accordingly, compromises with objectionable personality were
+      effected by circumlocutions promoted to a pronoun's office, becoming thus
+      pro-pronouns, as it were. Very noncommittal expressions they are, most of
+      them, such as: "the augustness," meaning you; "that honorable side," or
+      "that corner," denoting some third person, the exact term employed in any
+      given instance scrupulously betokening the relative respect in which the
+      individual spoken of is held; while with a candor, an indefiniteness, or a
+      humility worthy so polite a people, the I is known as "selfishness," or "a
+      certain person," or "the clumsy one."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Pronominal adjectives are manufactured in the same way. "The stupid
+      father," "the awkward son," "the broken-down firm," are "mine." Were they
+      "yours," they would instantly become "the august, venerable father," "the
+      honorable son," "the exalted firm." 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Even these lame substitutes for pronouns are paraded as sparingly as
+      possible. To the Western student, who brings to the subject a brain
+      throbbing with personality, hunting in a Japanese sentence for personal
+      references is dishearteningly like "searching in the dark for a black hat
+      which is n't there;" for the brevet pronouns are commonly not on duty. To
+      employ them with the reckless prodigality that characterizes our
+      conversation would strike the Tartar mind like interspersing his talk with
+      unmeaning italics. He would regard such discourse much as we do those
+      effusive epistles of a certain type of young woman to her most intimate
+      girl friends, in which every other word is emphatically underlined.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For the most part, the absolutely necessary personal references are
+      introduced by honorifics; that is, by honorary or humble expressions. Such
+      is a portion of the latter's duty. They do a great deal of unnecessary
+      work besides.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These honorifics are, taken as a whole, one of the most interesting
+      peculiarities of Japanese, as also of Korean, just as, taken in detail,
+      they are one of its most dangerous pitfalls. For silence is indeed golden
+      compared with the chagrin of discovering that a speech which you had meant
+      for a compliment was, in fact, an insult, or the vexation of learning that
+      you have been industriously treating your servant with the deference due a
+      superior,&mdash;two catastrophes sure to follow the attempts of even the
+      most cautious of beginners. The language is so thoroughly imbued with the
+      honorific spirit that the exposure of truth in all its naked simplicity is
+      highly improper. Every idea requires to be more or less clothed in
+      courtesy before it is presentable; and the garb demanded by etiquette is
+      complex beyond conception. To begin with, there are certain preliminary
+      particles which are simply honorific, serving no other purpose whatsoever.
+      In addition to these there are for every action a small infinity of verbs,
+      each sacred to a different degree of respect. For instance, to our verb
+      "to give" corresponds a complete social scale of Japanese verbs, each
+      conveying the idea a shade more politely than its predecessor; only the
+      very lowest meaning anything so plebeian as simply "to give." Sets of
+      laudatory or depreciatory adjectives are employed in the same way. Lastly,
+      the word for "is," which strictly means "exists," expresses this existence
+      under three different forms,&mdash;in a matter-of-fact, a flowing, or an
+      inflated style; the solid, liquid, and gaseous states of conversation, so
+      to speak, to suit the person addressed. But three forms being far too few
+      for the needs of so elaborate a politeness, these are supplemented by many
+      interpolated grades.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Terms of respect are applied not only to those mortals who are held in
+      estimation higher than their fellows, but to all men indiscriminately as
+      well. The grammatical attitude of the individual toward the speaker is of
+      as much importance as his social standing, I being beneath contempt, and
+      you above criticism.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Honorifics are used not only on all possible occasions for courtesy, but
+      at times, it would seem, upon impossible ones; for in some instances the
+      most subtle diagnosis fails to reveal in them a relevancy to anybody. That
+      the commonest objects should bear titles because of their connection with
+      some particular person is comprehensible, but what excuse can be made for
+      a phrase like the following, "It respectfully does that the august seat
+      exists," all of which simply means "is," and may be applied to anything,
+      being the common word&mdash;in Japanese it is all one word now&mdash;for
+      that apparently simple idea. It would seem a sad waste of valuable
+      material. The real reason why so much distinguished consideration is shown
+      the article in question lies in the fact that it is treated as existing
+      with reference to the person addressed, and therefore becomes ipso facto
+      august.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here is a still subtler example. You are, we will suppose, at a tea-house,
+      and you wish for sugar. The following almost stereotyped conversation is
+      pretty sure to take place. I translate it literally, simply prefacing that
+      every tea-house girl, usually in the first blush of youth, is generically
+      addressed as "elder sister,"&mdash;another honorific, at least so
+      considered in Japan.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+ You clap your hands.  (Enter tea-house maiden.)
+
+ You.  Hai, elder sister, augustly exists there sugar?
+
+ The T. H. M.  The honorable sugar, augustly is it?
+
+ You.  So, augustly.
+
+ The T. H. M. He (indescribable expression of assent).
+ (Exit tea-house maiden to fetch the sugar.)
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Now, the "augustlies" go almost without saying, but why is the sugar
+      honorable? Simply because it is eventually going to be offered to you. But
+      she would have spoken of it by precisely the same respectful title, if she
+      had been obliged to inform you that there was none, in which case it never
+      could have become yours. Such is politeness. We may note, in passing, that
+      all her remarks and all yours, barring your initial question, meant
+      absolutely nothing. She understood you perfectly from the first, and you
+      knew she did; but then, if all of us were to say only what were necessary,
+      the delightful art of conversation would soon be nothing but a science.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The average Far Oriental, indeed, talks as much to no purpose as his
+      Western cousin, only in his chit-chat politeness replaces personalities.
+      With him, self is suppressed, and an ever-present regard for others is
+      substituted in its stead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A lack of personality is, as we have seen, the occasion of this courtesy;
+      it is also its cause.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That politeness should be one of the most marked results of impersonality
+      may appear surprising, yet a slight examination will show it to be a fact.
+      Looked at a posteriori, we find that where the one trait exists the other
+      is most developed, while an absence of the second seems to prevent the
+      full growth of the first. This is true both in general and in detail.
+      Courtesy increases, as we travel eastward round the world, coincidently
+      with a decrease in the sense of self. Asia is more courteous than Europe,
+      Europe than America. Particular races show the same concomitance of
+      characteristics. France, the most impersonal nation of Europe, is at the
+      same time the most polite.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Considered a priori, the connection between the two is not far to seek.
+      Impersonality, by lessening the interest in one's self, induces one to
+      take an interest in others. Introspection tends to make of man a solitary
+      animal, the absence of it a social one. The more impersonal the people,
+      the more will the community supplant the individual in the popular
+      estimation. The type becomes the interesting thing to man, as it always is
+      to nature. Then, as the social desires develop, politeness, being the
+      means to their enjoyment, develops also.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A second omission in Japanese etymology is that of gender. That words
+      should be credited with sex is a verbal anthropomorphism that would seem
+      to a Japanese exquisitely grotesque, if so be that it did not strike him
+      as actually immodest. For the absence of gender is simply symptomatic of a
+      much more vital failing, a disregard of sex. Originally, as their language
+      bears witness, the Japanese showed a childish reluctance to recognizing
+      sex at all. Usually a single sexless term was held sufficient for a given
+      species, and did duty collectively for both sexes. Only where a
+      consideration of sex thrust itself upon them, beyond the possibility of
+      evasion, did they employ for the male and the female distinctive
+      expressions. The more intimate the relation of the object to man, the more
+      imperative the discriminating name. Hence human beings possessed a fair
+      number of such special appellatives; for a man is a palpably different
+      sort of person from his grandmother, and a mother-in-law from a wife. But
+      it is noteworthy that the artificial affinities of society were as
+      carefully differentiated as the distinctions due to sex, while ancestral
+      relationships were deemed more important than either.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Animals, though treated individually most humanely, are vouchsafed but
+      scant recognition on the score of sex. With them, both sexes share one
+      common name, and commonly, indeed, this answers quite well enough. In
+      those few instances where sex enters into the question in a manner not to
+      be ignored, particles denoting "male" or "female" are prefixed to the
+      general term. How comparatively rare is the need of such specification can
+      be seen from the way in which, with us, in many species, the name of one
+      sex alone does duty indifferently for both. That of the male is the one
+      usually selected, as in the case of the dog or horse. If, however, it be
+      the female with which man has most to do, she is allowed to bestow her
+      name upon her male partner. Examples of the latter description occur in
+      the use of "cows" for "cattle," and "hens" for "fowls." A Japanese can say
+      only "fowl," defined, if absolutely necessary, as "he-fowl" or "she-fowl."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now such a slighting of one of the most potent springs of human action,
+      sex, with all that the idea involves, is not due to a pronounced
+      misogynism on the part of these people, but to a much more effective
+      neglect, a great underlying impersonality. Indifference to woman is but
+      included in a much more general indifference to mankind. The fact becomes
+      all the more evident when we descend from sex to gender. That Father Ocean
+      does not, in their verbal imagery, embrace Mother Earth, with that subtle
+      suggestion of humanity which in Aryan speech the gender of the nouns hints
+      without expressing, is not due to any lack of poesy in the Far Oriental
+      speaker, but to the essential impersonality of his mind, embodied now in
+      the very character of the words he uses. A Japanese noun is a crystallized
+      concept, handed down unchanged from the childhood of the Japanese race. So
+      primitive a conception does it represent that it is neither a total nor a
+      partial symbol, but rather the outcome of a first vague generality. The
+      word "man," for instance, means to them not one man, still less mankind,
+      but that indefinite idea which struggles for embodiment in the utterance
+      of the infant. It represents not a person, but a thing, a material fact
+      quite innocent of gender. This early state of semi-consciousness the
+      Japanese never outgrew. The world continued to present itself to their
+      minds as a collection of things. Nor did their subsequent Chinese
+      education change their view. Buddhism simply infused all things with the
+      one universal spirit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As to inanimate objects, the idea of supposing sex where there is not even
+      life is altogether too fanciful a notion for the Far Eastern mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Impersonality first fashioned the nouns, and then the nouns, by their very
+      impersonality, helped keep impersonal the thought and fettered fancy. All
+      those temptings to poesy which to the Aryan imagination lie latent in the
+      sex with which his forefathers humanized their words, never stir the
+      Tartar nor the Chinese soul. They feel the poetry of nature as much as,
+      indeed much more than, we; but it is a poetry unassociated with man. And
+      this, too, curiously enough, in spite of the fact that to explain the
+      cosmos the Chinamen invented, or perhaps only adapted, a singularly sexual
+      philosophy. For possibly, like some other portions of their intellectual
+      wealth, they stole it from India. The Chinese conception of the origin of
+      the world is based on the idea of sex. According to their notions the
+      earth was begotten. It is true that with them the cosmos started in an
+      abstract something, which self-produced two great principles; but this
+      pair once obtained, matters proceeded after the analogy of mankind. The
+      two principles at work were themselves abstract enough to have satisfied
+      the most unimpassioned of philosophers. They were simply a positive
+      essence and a negative one, correlated to sunshine and shadow, but also
+      correlated to male and female forces. Through their mutual action were
+      born the earth and the air and the water; from these, in turn, was
+      begotten man. The cosmical modus operandi was not creative nor
+      evolutionary, but sexual. The whole scheme suggests an attempt to wed
+      abstract philosophy with primitive concrete mythology.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The same sexuality distinguishes the Japanese demonology. Here the
+      physical replaces the philosophical; instead of principles we find
+      allegorical personages, but they show just the same pleasing propensity to
+      appear in pairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This attributing of sexes to the cosmos is not in the least incompatible
+      with an uninterested disregard of sex where it really exists. It is one
+      thing to admit the fact as a general law of the universe, and quite
+      another to dwell upon it as an important factor in every-day affairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How slight is the Tartar tendency to personification can be seen from a
+      glance at these same Japanese gods. They are a combination of defunct
+      ancestors and deified natural phenomena. The evolving of the first half
+      required little imagination, for fate furnished the material ready made;
+      while in conjuring up the second moiety, the spirit-evokers showed even
+      less originality. Their results were neither winsome nor sublime. The gods
+      whom they created they invested with very ordinary humanity, the usual
+      endowment of aboriginal deity, together with the customary superhuman
+      strength. If these demigods differed from others of their class, it was
+      only in being more commonplace, and in not meddling much with man. Even
+      such personification of natural forces, simple enough to be
+      self-suggested, quickly disappeared. The various awe-compelling phenomena
+      soon ceased to have any connection with the anthropomorphic noumena they
+      had begotten. For instance, the sun-goddess, we are informed, was one day
+      lured out of a cavern, where she was sulking in consequence of the
+      provoking behavior of her younger brother, by her curiosity at the sight
+      of her own face in a mirror, ingeniously placed before the entrance for
+      the purpose. But no Japanese would dream now of casting any such
+      reflections, however flattering, upon the face of the orb of day. The sun
+      has become not only quite sexless to him, but as devoid of personality as
+      it is to any Western materialist. Lesser deities suffered a like
+      unsubstantial transformation. The thunder-god, with his belt of drums,
+      upon which he beats a devil's tattoo until he is black in the face, is no
+      longer even indirectly associated with the storm. As for dryads and
+      nymphs, the beautiful creatures never inhabited Eastern Asia. Anthropoid
+      foxes and raccoons, wholly lacking in those engaging qualities that beget
+      love, and through love remembrance, take their place. Even Benten, the
+      naturalized Venus, who, like her Hellenic sister, is said to have risen
+      from the sea, is a person quite incapable of inspiring a reckless
+      infatuation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Utterly unlike was this pantheon to the pantheon of the Greeks, the
+      personifying tendency of whose Aryan mind was forever peopling nature with
+      half-human inhabitants. Under its quickening fancy the very clods grew
+      sentient. Dumb earth awoke at the call of its desire, and the beings its
+      own poesy had begotten made merry companionship for man. Then a change
+      crept over the face of things. Faith began to flicker, for want of facts
+      to feed its flame. Little by little the fires of devotion burnt themselves
+      out. At last great Pan died. The body of the old belief was consumed. But
+      though it perished, its ashes preserved its form, an unsubstantial
+      presentment of the past, to crumble in a twinkling at the touch of
+      science, but keeping yet to the poet's eye the lifelike semblance of what
+      once had been. The dead gods still live in our language and our art. Even
+      to-day the earth about us seems semiconscious to the soul, for the
+      memories they have left.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But with the Far Oriental the exorcising feeling was fear. He never fell
+      in love with his own mythological creations, and so he never embalmed
+      their memories. They were to him but explanations of facts, and had no
+      claims upon his fancy. His ideal world remained as utterly impersonal as
+      if it had never been born.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The same impersonality reappears in the matter of number. Grammatically,
+      number with them is unrecognized. There exist no such things as plural
+      forms. This singularity would be only too welcome to the foreign student,
+      were it not that in avoiding the frying-pan the Tartars fell into the
+      fire. For what they invented in place of a plural was quite as difficult
+      to memorize, and even more cumbrous to express. Instead of inflecting the
+      noun and then prefixing a number, they keep the noun unchanged and add two
+      numerals; thus at times actually employing more words to express the
+      objects than there are objects to express. One of these numerals is a
+      simple number; the other is what is known as an auxiliary numeral, a word
+      as singular in form as in function. Thus, for instance, "two men" become
+      amplified verbally into "man two individual," or, as the Chinaman puts it,
+      in pidgin English, "two piecey man." For in this respect Chinese resembles
+      Japanese, though in very little else, and pidgin English is nothing but
+      the literal translation of the Chinese idiom into Anglo-Saxon words. The
+      necessity for such elaborate qualification arises from the excessive
+      simplicity of the Japanese nouns. As we have seen, the noun is so
+      indefinite a generality that simply to multiply it by a number cannot
+      possibly produce any definite result. No exact counterpart of these nouns
+      exists in English, but some idea of the impossibility of the process may
+      be got from our word "cattle," which, prolific though it may prove in
+      fact, remains obstinately incapable of verbal multiplication. All Japanese
+      nouns being of this indefinite description, all require auxiliary
+      numerals. But as each one has its own appropriate numeral, about which a
+      mistake is unpardonable, it takes some little study merely to master the
+      etiquette of these handles to the names of things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nouns are not inflected, their cases being expressed by postpositions,
+      which, as the name implies, follow, in becoming Japanese inversion,
+      instead of preceding the word they affect. To make up, nevertheless, for
+      any lack of perplexity due to an absence of inflections, adjectives, en
+      revanche, are most elaborately conjugated. Their protean shapes are as
+      long as they are numerous, representing not only times, but conditions.
+      There are, for instance, the root form, the adverbial form, the indefinite
+      form, the attributive form, and the conclusive form, the two last being
+      conjugated through all the various voices, moods, and tenses, to say
+      nothing of all the potential forms. As one change is superposed on
+      another, the adjective ends by becoming three or four times its original
+      length. The fact is, the adjective is either adjective, adverb, or verb,
+      according to occasion. In the root form it also helps to make nouns; so
+      that it is even more generally useful than as a journalistic epithet with
+      us. As a verb, it does duty as predicate and copula combined. For such an
+      unnecessary part of speech as a real copula does not exist in Japanese. In
+      spite of the shock to the prejudices of the old school of logicians, it
+      must be confessed that the Tartars get on very well without any such
+      couplings to their trains of thought. But then we should remember that in
+      their sentences the cart is always put before the horse, and so needs only
+      to be pushed, not pulled along.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The want of a copula is another instance of the primitive character of the
+      tongue. It has its counterpart in our own baby-talk, where a quality is
+      predicated of a thing simply by placing the adjective in apposition with
+      the noun.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That the Japanese word which is commonly translated "is" is in no sense a
+      copula, but an ordinary intransitive verb, referring to a natural state,
+      and not to a logical condition, is evident in two ways. In the first
+      place, it is never used to predicate a quality directly. A Japanese does
+      not say, "The scenery is fine," but simply, "Scenery, fine." Secondly,
+      wherever this verb is indirectly employed in such a manner, it is
+      followed, not by an adjective, but by an adverb. Not "She is beautiful,"
+      but "She exists beautifully," would be the Japanese way of expressing his
+      admiration. What looks at first, therefore, like a copula turns out to be
+      merely an impersonal intransitive verb.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A negative noun is, of course, an impossibility in any language, just as a
+      negative substantive, another name for the same thing, is a direct
+      contradiction in terms. No matter how negative the idea to be given, it
+      must be conveyed by a positive expression. Even a void is grammatically
+      quite full of meaning, although unhappily empty in fact. So much is common
+      to all tongues, but Japanese carries its positivism yet further. Not only
+      has it no negative nouns, it has not even any negative pronouns nor
+      pronominal adjectives,&mdash;those convenient keepers of places for the
+      absent. "None" and "nothing" are unknown words in its vocabulary, because
+      the ideas they represent are not founded on observed facts, but upon
+      metaphysical abstractions. Such terms are human-born, not earth-begotten
+      concepts, and so to the Far Oriental, who looks at things from the point
+      of view of nature, not of man, negation takes another form. Usually it is
+      introduced by the verbs, because the verbs, for the most part, relate to
+      human actions, and it is man, not nature, who is responsible for the
+      omission in question. After all, it does seem more fitting to say, "I am
+      ignorant of everything," than "I know nothing." It is indeed you who are
+      wanting, not the thing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The question of verbs leads us to another matter bearing on the subject of
+      impersonality; namely, the arrangement of the words in a Japanese
+      sentence. The Tartar mode of grammatical construction is very nearly the
+      inverse of our own. The fundamental rule of Japanese syntax is, that
+      qualifying words precede the words they qualify; that is, an idea is
+      elaborately modified before it is so much as expressed. This practice
+      places the hearer at some awkward preliminary disadvantage, inasmuch as
+      the story is nearly over before he has any notion what it is all about;
+      but really it puts the speaker to much more trouble, for he is obliged to
+      fashion his whole sentence complete in his brain before he starts to
+      speak. This is largely in consequence of two omissions in Tartar
+      etymology. There are in Japanese no relative pronouns and no temporal
+      conjunctions; conjunctions, that is, for connecting consecutive events.
+      The want of these words precludes the admission of afterthoughts.
+      Postscripts in speech are impossible. The functions of relatives are
+      performed by position, explanatory or continuative clauses being made to
+      precede directly the word they affect. Ludicrous anachronisms, not unlike
+      those experienced by Alice in her looking-glass journey, are occasioned by
+      this practice. For example, "The merry monarch who ended by falling a
+      victim to profound melancholia" becomes "To profound melancholia a victim
+      by falling ended merry monarch," and the sympathetic hearer weeps first
+      and laughs afterward, when chronologically he should be doing precisely
+      the opposite.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A like inversion of the natural order of things results from the absence
+      of temporal conjunctions. In Japanese, though nouns can be added, actions
+      cannot; you can say "hat and coat," but not "dressed and came."
+      Conjunctions are used only for space, never for time. Objects that exist
+      together can be joined in speech, but it is not allowable thus to connect
+      consecutive events. "Having dressed, came" is the Japanese idiom. To speak
+      otherwise would be to violate the unities. For a Japanese sentence is a
+      single rounded whole, not a bunch of facts loosely tied together. It is as
+      much a unit in its composition as a novel or a drama is with us. Such
+      artistic periods, however, are anything but convenient. In their nicely
+      contrived involution they strikingly resemble those curious nests of
+      Chinese boxes, where entire shells lie closely packed one within another,&mdash;a
+      very marvel of ingenious and perfectly unnecessary construction. One must
+      be antipodally comprehensive to entertain the idea; as it is, the idea
+      entertains us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the same general plan, the nouns precede the verbs in the sentence, and
+      are in every way the more important parts of speech. The consequence is
+      that in ordinary conversation the verbs come so late in the day that they
+      not infrequently get left out altogether. For the Japanese are much given
+      to docking their phrases, a custom the Germans might do well to adopt.
+      Now, nouns denote facts, while verbs express action, and action, as
+      considered in human speech, is mostly of human origin. In this precedence
+      accorded the impersonal element in language over the personal, we observe
+      again the comparative importance assigned the two. In Japanese estimation,
+      the first place belongs to nature, the second only to man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As if to mark beyond a doubt the insignificance of the part man plays in
+      their thought, sentences are usually subjectless. Although it is a common
+      practice to begin a phrase with the central word of the idea, isolated
+      from what follows by the emphasizing particle "wa" (which means "as to,"
+      the French "quant a"), the word thus singled out for distinction is far
+      more likely to be the object of the sentence than its subject. The habit
+      is analogous to the use of our phrase "speaking of,"&mdash;that is, simply
+      an emphatic mode of introducing a fresh thought; only that with them, the
+      practice being the rule and not the exception, no correspondingly abrupt
+      effect is produced by it. Ousted thus from the post of honor, the subject
+      is not even permitted the second place. Indeed, it usually fails to put in
+      an appearance anywhere. You may search through sentence after sentence
+      without meeting with the slightest suggestion of such a thing. When so
+      unusual an anomaly as a motive cause is directly adduced, it owes its
+      mention, not to the fact of being the subject, but because for other
+      reasons it happens to be the important word of the thought. The truth is,
+      the Japanese conception of events is only very vaguely subjective. An
+      action is looked upon more as happening than as being performed, as
+      impersonally rather than personally produced. The idea is due, however, to
+      anything but philosophic profundity. It springs from the most superficial
+      of childish conceptions. For the Japanese mind is quite the reverse of
+      abstract. Its consideration of things is concrete to a primitive degree.
+      The language reflects the fact. The few abstract ideas these people now
+      possess are not represented, for the most part, by pure Japanese, but by
+      imported Chinese expressions. The islanders got such general notions from
+      their foreign education, and they imported idea and word at the same time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Summing up, as it were, in propria persona the impersonality of Japanese
+      speech, the word for "man," "hito," is identical with, and probably
+      originally the same word as "hito," the numeral "one;" a noun and a
+      numeral, from which Aryan languages have coined the only impersonal
+      pronoun they possess. On the one hand, we have the German "mann;" on the
+      other, the French "on". While as if to give the official seal to the
+      oneness of man with the universe, the word mono, thing, is applied,
+      without the faintest implication of insult, to men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such, then, is the mould into which, as children, these people learn to
+      cast their thought. What an influence it must exert upon their subsequent
+      views of life we have but to ask of our own memories to know. With each
+      one of us, if we are to advance beyond the steps of the last generation,
+      there comes a time when our growing ideas refuse any longer to fit the
+      childish grooves in which we were taught to let them run. How great the
+      wrench is when this supreme moment arrives we have all felt too keenly
+      ever to forget. We hesitate, we delay, to abandon the beliefs which,
+      dating from the dawn of our being, seem to us even as a part of our very
+      selves. From the religion of our mother to the birth of our boyish first
+      love, all our early associations send down roots so deep that long after
+      our minds have outgrown them our hearts refuse to give them up. Even when
+      reason conquers at last, sentiment still throbs at the voids they
+      necessarily have left.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the Far East, this fondness for the old is further consecrated by
+      religion. The worship of ancestors sets its seal upon the traditions of
+      the past, to break which were impious as well as sad. The golden age, that
+      time when each man himself was young, has lingered on in the lands where
+      it is always morning, and where man has never passed to his prosaic noon.
+      Befitting the place is the mind we find there. As its language so clearly
+      shows, it still is in that early impersonal state to which we all awake
+      first before we become aware of that something we later know so well as
+      self.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Particularly potent with these people is their language, for a reason that
+      also lends it additional interest to us,&mdash;because it is their own.
+      Among the mass of foreign thought the Japanese imitativeness has caused
+      the nation to adopt, here is one thing which is indigenous. Half of the
+      present speech, it is true, is of Chinese importation, but conservatism
+      has kept the other half pure. From what it reveals we can see how each man
+      starts to-day with the same impersonal outlook upon life the race had
+      reached centuries ago, and which it has since kept unchanged. The man's
+      mind has done likewise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      1. Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain: The Japanese Language.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0005" id="link2HCH0005">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter 5. Nature and Art.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      We have seen how impersonal is the form which Far Eastern thought assumes
+      when it crystallizes into words. Let us turn now to a consideration of the
+      thoughts themselves before they are thus stereotyped for transmission to
+      others, and scan them as they find expression unconsciously in the man's
+      doings, or seek it consciously in his deeds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To the Far Oriental there is one subject which so permeates and pervades
+      his whole being as to be to him, not so much a conscious matter of thought
+      as an unconscious mode of thinking. For it is a thing which shapes all his
+      thoughts instead of constituting the substance of one particular set of
+      them. That subject is art. To it he is born as to a birthright. Artistic
+      perception is with him an instinct to which he intuitively conforms, and
+      for which he inherits the skill of countless generations. From the tips of
+      his fingers to the tips of his toes, in whose use he is surprisingly
+      proficient, he is the artist all over. Admirable, however, as is his
+      manual dexterity, his mental altitude is still more to be admired; for it
+      is artistic to perfection. His perception of beauty is as keen as his
+      comprehension of the cosmos is crude; for while with science he has not
+      even a speaking acquaintance, with art he is on terms of the most
+      affectionate intimacy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To the whole Far Eastern world science is a stranger. Such nescience is
+      patent even in matters seemingly scientific. For although the Chinese
+      civilization, even in the so-called modern inventions, was already old
+      while ours lay still in the cradle, it was to no scientific spirit that
+      its discoveries were due. Notwithstanding the fact that Cathay was the
+      happy possessor of gunpowder, movable type, and the compass before such
+      things were dreamt of in Europe, she owed them to no knowledge of physics,
+      chemistry, or mechanics. It was as arts, not as sciences, they were
+      invented. And it speaks volumes for her civilization that she burnt her
+      powder for fireworks, not for firearms. To the West alone belongs the
+      credit of manufacturing that article for the sake of killing people
+      instead of merely killing time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The scientific is not the Far Oriental point of view. To wish to know the
+      reasons of things, that irrepressible yearning of the Western spirit, is
+      no characteristic of the Chinaman's mind, nor is it a Tartar trait.
+      Metaphysics, a species of speculation that has usually proved peculiarly
+      attractive to mankind, probably from its not requiring any scientific
+      capital whatever, would seem the most likely place to seek it. But upon
+      such matters he has expended no imagination of his own, having quietly
+      taken on trust from India what he now professes. As for science proper, it
+      has reached at his hands only the quasimorphologic stage; that is, it
+      consists of catalogues concocted according to the ingenuity of the
+      individual and resembles the real thing about as much as a haphazard
+      arrangement of human bones might be expected to resemble a man. Not only
+      is the spirit of the subject left out altogether, but the mere outward
+      semblance is misleading. For pseudo-scientific collections of facts which
+      never rise to be classifications of phenomena forms to his idea the acme
+      of erudition. His mathematics, for example, consists of a set of empiric
+      rules, of which no explanation is ever vouchsafed the taught for the
+      simple reason that it is quite unknown to the teacher. It is not even easy
+      to decide how much of what there is is Jesuitical. Of more recent sciences
+      he has still less notion, particularly of the natural ones. Physics,
+      chemistry, geology, and the like are matters that have never entered his
+      head. Even in studies more immediately connected with obvious everyday
+      life, such as language, history, customs, it is truly remarkable how
+      little he possesses the power of generalization and inference. His
+      elaborate lists of facts are imposing typographically, but are not even
+      formally important, while his reasoning about them is as exquisite a bit
+      of scientific satire as could well be imagined.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But with the arts it is quite another matter. While you will search in
+      vain, in his civilization, for explanations of even the most simple of
+      nature's laws, you will meet at every turn with devices for the
+      beautifying of life, which may stand not unworthily beside the products of
+      nature's own skill. Whatever these people fashion, from the toy of an hour
+      to the triumphs of all time, is touched by a taste unknown elsewhere. To
+      stroll down the Broadway of Tokio of an evening is a liberal education in
+      everyday art. As you enter it there opens out in front of you a fairy-like
+      vista of illumination. Two long lines of gayly lighted shops, stretching
+      off into the distance, look out across two equally endless rows of
+      torch-lit booths, the decorous yellow gleam of the one contrasting
+      strangely with the demoniacal red flare of the other. This perspective of
+      pleasure fulfils its promise. As your feet follow your eyes you find
+      yourself in a veritable shoppers' paradise, the galaxy of twinkle
+      resolving into worlds of delight. Nor do you long remain a mere spectator;
+      for the shops open their arms to you. No cold glass reveals their charms
+      only to shut you off. Their wares lie invitingly exposed to the public,
+      seeming to you already half your own. At the very first you come to you
+      stop involuntarily, lost in admiration over what you take to be
+      bric-a-brac. It is only afterwards you learn that the object of your
+      ecstasy was the commonest of kitchen crockery. Next door you halt again,
+      this time in front of some leathern pocket-books, stamped with designs in
+      color to tempt you instantly to empty your wallet for more new ones than
+      you will ever have the means to fill. If you do succeed in tearing
+      yourself away purse-whole, it is only to fall a victim to some painted
+      fans of so exquisite a make and decoration that escape short of possession
+      is impossible. Opposed as stubbornly as you may be to idle purchase at
+      home, here you will find yourself the prey of an acute case of shopping
+      fever before you know it. Nor will it be much consolation subsequently to
+      discover that you have squandered your patrimony upon the most ordinary
+      articles of every-day use. If in despair you turn for refuge to the
+      booths, you will but have delivered yourself into the embrace of still
+      more irresistible fascinations. For the nocturnal squatters are there for
+      the express purpose of catching the susceptible. The shops were modestly
+      attractive from their nature, but the booths deliberately make eyes at
+      you, and with telling effect. The very atmosphere is bewitching. The lurid
+      smurkiness of the torches lends an appropriate weirdness to the figure of
+      the uncouthly clad pedlar who, with the politeness of the arch-fiend
+      himself, displays to an eager group the fatal fascinations of some new
+      conceit. Here the latest thing in inventions, a gutta-percha rat, which,
+      for reasons best known to the vender, scampers about squeaking with a
+      mimicry to shame the original, holds an admiring crowd spellbound with
+      mingled trepidation and delight. There a native zoetrope, indefatigable
+      round of pleasure, whose top fashioned after the type of a turbine wheel
+      enables a candle at the centre ingeniously to supply both illumination and
+      motive power at the same time, affords to as many as can find room on its
+      circumference a peep at the composite antics of a consecutively pictured
+      monkey in the act of jumping a box. Beyond this "wheel of life" lies
+      spread out on a mat a most happy family of curios, the whole of which you
+      are quite prepared to purchase en bloc. While a little farther on stands a
+      flower show which seems to be coyly beckoning to you as the blossoms nod
+      their heads to an imperceptible breeze. So one attraction fairly jostles
+      its neighbor for recognition from the gay thousands that like yourself
+      stroll past in holiday delight. Chattering children in brilliant colors,
+      voluble women and talkative men in quieter but no less picturesque
+      costumes, stream on in kaleidoscopic continuity. And you, carried along by
+      the current, wander thus for miles with the tide of pleasure-seekers,
+      till, late at night, when at last you turn reluctantly homeward, you feel
+      as one does when wakened from some too delightful dream.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Or instead of night, suppose it day and the place a temple. With those who
+      are entering you enter too through the outer gateway into the courtyard.
+      At the farther end rises a building the like of which for richness of
+      effect you have probably never beheld or even imagined. In front of you a
+      flight of white stone steps leads up to a terrace whose parapet, also of
+      stone, is diapered for half its height and open latticework the rest. This
+      piazza gives entrance to a building or set of buildings whose every detail
+      challenges the eye. Twelve pillars of snow-white wood sheathed in part
+      with bronze, arranged in four rows, make, as it were, the bones of the
+      structure. The space between the centre columns lies open. The other
+      triplets are webbed in the middle and connected, on the sides and front,
+      by grilles of wood and bronze forming on the outside a couple of
+      embrasures on either hand the entrance in which stand the guardian Nio,
+      two colossal demons, Gog and Magog. Instead of capitals, a frieze
+      bristling with Chinese lions protects the top of the pillars. Above this
+      in place of entablature rises tier upon tier of decoration, each tier
+      projecting beyond the one beneath, and the topmost of all terminating in a
+      balcony which encircles the whole second story. The parapet of this
+      balcony is one mass of ornament, and its cornice another row of lions,
+      brown instead of white. The second story is no less crowded with carving.
+      Twelve pillars make its ribs, the spaces between being filled with
+      elaborate woodwork, while on top rest more friezes, more cornices,
+      clustered with excrescences of all colors and kinds, and guarded by lions
+      innumerable. To begin to tell the details of so multi-faceted a gem were
+      artistically impossible. It is a jewel of a thousand rays, yet whose
+      beauties blend into one as the prismatic tints combine to white. And then,
+      after the first dazzle of admiration, when the spirit of curiosity urges
+      you to penetrate the centre aisle, lo and behold it is but a gate! The
+      dupe of unexpected splendor, you have been paying court to the means of
+      approach. It is only a portal after all. For as you pass through, you
+      catch a glimpse of a building beyond more gorgeous still. Like in general
+      to the first, unlike it in detail, resembling it only as the mistress may
+      the maid. But who shall convince of charm by enumerating the features of a
+      face! From the tiles of its terrace to the encrusted gables that drape it
+      as with some rich bejewelled mantle falling about it in the most graceful
+      of folds, it is the very eastern princess of a building standing in the
+      majesty of her court to give you audience.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A pebbly path, a low flight of stone steps, a pause to leave your shoes
+      without the sill, and you tread in the twilight of reverence upon the
+      moss-like mats within. The richness of its outer ornament, so impressive
+      at first, is, you discover, but prelude to the lavish luxury of its
+      interior. Lacquer, bronze, pigments, deck its ceiling and its sides in
+      such profusion that it seems to you as if art had expanded, in the
+      congenial atmosphere, into a tropical luxuriance of decoration, and grew
+      here as naturally on temples as in the jungle creepers do on trees. Yet
+      all is but setting to what the place contains; objects of bigotry and
+      virtue that appeal to the artistic as much as to the religious instincts
+      of the devout. More sacred still are the things treasured in the sanctum
+      of the priests. There you will find gems of art for whose sake only the
+      most abnormal impersonality can prevent you from breaking the tenth
+      commandment. Of the value set upon them you can form a distant
+      approximation from the exceeding richness and the amazing number of the
+      silk cloths and lacquered boxes in which they are so religiously kept. As
+      you gaze thus, amid the soul-satisfying repose of the spot, at some
+      masterpiece from the brush of Motonobu, you find yourself wondering, in a
+      fanciful sort of way, whether Buddhist contemplation is not after all only
+      another name for the contemplation of the beautiful, since devotees to the
+      one are ex officio such votaries of the other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dissimilar as are these two glimpses of Japanese existence, in one point
+      the bustling street and the hushed temple are alike,&mdash;in the nameless
+      grace that beautifies both.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This spirit is even more remarkable for its all-pervasiveness than for its
+      inherent excellence. Both objectively and subjectively its catholicity is
+      remarkable. It imbues everything, and affects everybody. So universally is
+      it applied to the daily affairs of life that there may be said to be no
+      mechanical arts in Japan simply because all such have been raised to the
+      position of fine arts. The lowest artisan is essentially an artist. Modern
+      French nomenclature on the subject, in spite of the satire to which the
+      more prosaic Anglo-Saxon has subjected it, is peculiarly applicable there.
+      To call a Japanese cook, for instance, an artist would be but the barest
+      acknowledgment of fact, for Japanese food is far more beautiful to look at
+      than agreeable to eat; while Tokio tailors are certainly masters of
+      drapery, if they are sublimely oblivious to the natural modelings of the
+      male or female form.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the other hand, art is sown, like the use of tobacco, broadcast among
+      the people. It is the birthright of the Far East, the talent it never
+      hides. Throughout the length and breadth of the land, and from the highest
+      prince to the humblest peasant, art reigns supreme.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now such a prevalence of artistic feeling implies of itself impersonality
+      in the people. At first sight it might seem as if science did the same,
+      and that in this respect the one hemisphere offset the other, and that
+      consequently both should be equally impersonal. But in the first place,
+      our masses are not imbued with the scientific spirit, as theirs are with
+      artistic sensibility. Who would expect of a mason an impersonal interest
+      in the principles of the arch, or of a plumber a non-financial devotion to
+      hydraulics? Certainly one would be wrong in crediting the masses in
+      general or European waiters in particular with much abstract love of
+      mathematics, for example. In the second place, there is an essential
+      difference in the attitude of the two subjects upon personality.
+      Emotionally, science appeals to nobody, art to everybody. Now the emotions
+      constitute the larger part of that complex bundle of ideas which we know
+      as self. A thought which is not tinged to some extent with feeling is not
+      only not personal; properly speaking, it is not even distinctively human,
+      but cosmical. In its lofty superiority to man, science is unpersonal
+      rather than impersonal. Art, on the other hand, is a familiar spirit.
+      Through the windows of the senses she finds her way into the very soul of
+      man, and makes for herself a home there. But it is to his humanity, not to
+      his individuality, that she whispers, for she speaks in that universal
+      tongue which all can understand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Examples are not wanting to substantiate theory. It is no mere coincidence
+      that the two most impersonal nations of Europe and Asia respectively, the
+      French and the Japanese, are at the same time the most artistic. Even
+      politeness, which, as we have seen, distinguishes both, is itself but a
+      form of art,&mdash;the social art of living agreeably with one's fellows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This impersonality comes out with all the more prominence when we pass
+      from the consideration of art in itself to the spirit which actuates that
+      art, and especially when we compare their spirit with our own. The
+      mainsprings of Far Eastern art may be said to be three: Nature, Religion,
+      and Humor. Incongruous collection that they are, all three witness to the
+      same trait. For the first typifies concrete impersonality, the second
+      abstract impersonality, while the province of the last is to ridicule
+      personality generally. Of the trio the first is altogether the most
+      important. Indeed, to a Far Oriental, so fundamental a part of himself is
+      his love of Nature that before we view its mirrored image it will be well
+      to look the emotion itself in the face. The Far Oriental lives in a long
+      day-dream of beauty. He muses rather than reasons, and all musing, so the
+      word itself confesses, springs from the inspiration of a Muse. But this
+      Muse appears not to him, as to the Greeks, after the fashion of a woman,
+      nor even more prosaically after the likeness of a man. Unnatural though it
+      seem to us, his inspiration seeks no human symbol. His Muse is not kin to
+      mankind. She is too impersonal for any personification, for she is Nature.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That poet whose name carries with it a certain presumption of
+      infallibility has told us that "the proper study of mankind is man;" and
+      if material advancement in consequence be any criterion of the fitness of
+      a particular mental pursuit, events have assuredly justified the saying.
+      Indeed, the Levant has helped antithetically to preach the same lesson, in
+      showing us by its own fatal example that the improper study of mankind is
+      woman, and that they who but follow the fair will inevitably degenerate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Far Oriental knows nothing of either study, and cares less. The
+      delight of self-exploration, or the possibly even greater delight of
+      losing one's self in trying to fathom femininity, is a sensation equally
+      foreign to his temperament. Neither the remarkable persistence of one's
+      own characteristics, not infrequently matter of deep regret to their
+      possessor, nor the charmingly unaccountable variability of the fairer sex,
+      at times quite as annoying, is a phenomenon sufficient to stir his
+      curiosity. Accepting, as he does, the existing state of things more as a
+      material fact than as a phase in a gradual process of development, he
+      regards humanity as but a small part of the great natural world, instead
+      of considering it the crowning glory of the whole. He recognizes man
+      merely as a fraction of the universe,&mdash;one might almost say as a
+      vulgar fraction of it, considering the low regard in which he is held,&mdash;and
+      accords him his proportionate share of attention, and no more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In his thought, nature is not accessory to man. Worthy M. Perichon, of
+      prosaic, not to say philistinic fame, had, as we remember, his travels
+      immortalized in a painting where a colossal Perichon in front almost
+      completely eclipsed a tiny Mont Blanc behind. A Far Oriental thinks
+      poetry, which may possibly account for the fact that in his mind-pictures
+      the relative importance of man and mountain stands reversed. "The
+      matchless Fuji," first of motifs in his art, admits no pilgrim as its
+      peer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nor is it to woman that turn his thoughts. Mother Earth is fairer, in his
+      eyes, than are any of her daughters. To her is given the heart that should
+      be theirs. The Far Eastern love of Nature amounts almost to a passion. To
+      the study of her ever varying moods her Japanese admirer brings an
+      impersonal adoration that combines oddly the aestheticism of a poet with
+      the asceticism of a recluse. Not that he worships in secret, however. His
+      passion is too genuine either to find disguise or seek display. With us,
+      unfortunately, the love of Nature is apt to be considered a mental
+      extravagance peculiar to poets, excusable in exact ratio to the ability to
+      give it expression. For an ordinary mortal to feel a fondness for Mother
+      Earth is a kind of folly, to be carefully concealed from his fellows. A
+      sort of shamefacedness prevents him from avowing it, as a boy at
+      boarding-school hides his homesickness, or a lad his love. He shrinks from
+      appearing less pachydermatous than the rest. Or else he flies to the other
+      extreme, and affects the odd; pretends, poses, parades, and at last
+      succeeds half in duping himself, half in deceiving other people. But with
+      Far Orientals the case is different. Their love has all the unostentatious
+      assurance of what has received the sanction of public opinion. Nor is it
+      still at that doubtful, hesitating stage when, by the instrumentality of a
+      third, its soul-harmony can suddenly be changed from the jubilant major
+      key into the despairing minor. No trace of sadness tinges his delight. He
+      has long since passed this melancholy phase of erotic misery, if so be
+      that the course of his true love did not always run smooth, and is now
+      well on in matrimonial bliss. The very look of the land is enough to
+      betray the fact. In Japan the landscape has an air of domesticity about
+      it, patent even to the most casual observer. Wherever the Japanese has
+      come in contact with the country he has made her unmistakably his own. He
+      has touched her to caress, not injure, and it seems as if Nature accepted
+      his fondness as a matter of course, and yielded him a wifely submission in
+      return. His garden is more human, even, than his house. Not only is
+      everything exquisitely in keeping with man, but natural features are
+      actually changed, plastic to the imprint of their lord and master's mind.
+      Bushes, shrubs, trees, forget to follow their original intent, and grow as
+      he wills them to; now expanding in wanton luxuriance, now contracting into
+      dwarf designs of their former selves, all to obey his caprice and please
+      his eye. Even stubborn rocks lose their wildness, and come to seem a part
+      of the almost sentient life around them. If the description of such
+      dutifulness seems fanciful, the thing itself surpasses all supposition.
+      Hedges and shrubbery, clipped into the most fantastic shapes, accept the
+      suggestion of the pruning-knife as if man's wishes were their own whims.
+      Manikin maples, Tom Thumb trees, a foot high and thirty years old, with
+      all the gnarls and knots and knuckles of their fellows of the forest, grow
+      in his parterres, their native vitality not a whit diminished. And they
+      are not regarded as monstrosities but only as the most natural of
+      artificialities; for they are a part of a horticultural whole. To walk
+      into a Japanese garden is like wandering of a sudden into one of those
+      strange worlds we see reflected in the polished surface of a concave
+      mirror, where all but the observer himself is transformed into a fantastic
+      miniature of the reality. In that quaint fairyland diminutive rivers flow
+      gracefully under tiny trees, past mole-hill mountains, till they fall at
+      last into lilliputian lakes, almost smothered for the flowers that grow
+      upon their banks; while in the extreme distance of a couple of rods the
+      cone of a Fuji ten feet high looks approvingly down upon a scene which
+      would be nationally incomplete without it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But besides the delights of domesticity which the Japanese enjoys daily in
+      Nature's company, he has his acces de tendresse, too. When he feels thus
+      specially stirred, he invites a chosen few of his friends, equally
+      infatuated, and together they repair to some spot noted for its scenery.
+      It may be a waterfall, or some dreamy pond overhung by trees, or the
+      distant glimpse of a mountain peak framed in picture-wise between the
+      nearer hills; or, at their appropriate seasons, the blossoming of the many
+      tree flowers, which in eastern Asia are beautiful beyond description. For
+      he appreciates not only places, but times. One spot is to be seen at
+      sunrise, another by moonlight; one to be visited in the spring-time,
+      another in the fall. But wherever or whenever it be, a tea-house, placed
+      to command the best view of the sight, stands ready to receive him. For
+      nature's beauties are too well recognized to remain the exclusive property
+      of the first chance lover. People flock to view nature as we do to see a
+      play, and privacy is as impossible as it is unsought. Indeed, the aversion
+      to publicity is simply a result of the sense of self, and therefore
+      necessarily not a feature of so impersonal a civilization. Aesthetic
+      guidebooks are written for the nature-enamoured, descriptive of these
+      views which the Japanese translator quaintly calls "Sceneries," and which
+      visitors come not only from near but from far to gaze upon. In front of
+      the tea-house proper are rows of summer pavilions, in one of which the
+      party make themselves at home, while gentle little tea-house girls toddle
+      forth to serve them the invariable preliminary tea and confections. Each
+      man then produces from up his sleeve, or from out his girdle, paper, ink,
+      and brush, and proceeds to compose a poem on the beauty of the spot and
+      the feelings it calls up, which he subsequently reads to his admiring
+      companions. Hot sake is next served, which is to them what beer is to a
+      German or absinthe to a blouse; and there they sit, sip, and poetize,
+      passing their couplets, as they do their cups, in honor to one another. At
+      last, after drinking in an hour or two of scenery and sake combined, the
+      symposium of poets breaks up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sometimes, instead of a company of friends, a man will take his family,
+      wife, babies, and all, on such an outing, but the details of his holiday
+      are much the same as before. For the scenery is still the centre of
+      attraction, and in the attendant creature comforts Far Eastern etiquette
+      permits an equal enjoyment to man, woman, and child.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This love of nature is quite irrespective of social condition. All classes
+      feel its force, and freely indulge the feeling. Poor as well as rich, low
+      as well as high, contrive to gratify their poetic instincts for natural
+      scenery. As for flowers, especially tree flowers, or those of the larger
+      plants, like the lotus or the iris, the Japanese appreciation of their
+      beauty is as phenomenal as is that beauty itself. Those who can afford the
+      luxury possess the shrubs in private; those who cannot, feast their eyes
+      on the public specimens. From a sprig in a vase to a park planted on
+      purpose, there is no part of them too small or too great to be excluded
+      from Far Oriental affection. And of the two "drawing-rooms" of the Mikado
+      held every year, in April and November, both are garden-parties: the one
+      given at the time and with the title of "the cherry blossoms," and the
+      other of "the chrysanthemum."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These same tree flowers deserve more than a passing notice, not simply
+      because of their amazing beauty, which would arrest attention anywhere,
+      but for the national attitude toward them. For no better example of the
+      Japanese passion for nature could well be cited. If the anniversaries of
+      people are slightingly treated in the land of the sunrise, the same cannot
+      be said of plants. The yearly birthdays of the vegetable world are
+      observed with more than botanic enthusiasm. The regard in which they are
+      held is truly emotional, and it not actually individual in its object, at
+      least personal to the species. Each kind of tree as its season brings it
+      into flower is made the occasion of a festival. For the beauty of the
+      blossoming receives the tribute of a national admiration. From peers to
+      populace mankind turns out to witness it. Nor are these occasions few.
+      Spring in the Far East is one long chain of flower fetes, and as spring
+      begins by the end of January and lasts till the middle of June,
+      opportunities for appreciating each in turn are not half spoiled by a
+      common contemporaneousness. People have not only occasion but time to
+      admire. Indeed, spring itself is suitably respected by being dated
+      conformably to fact. Far Orientals begin their year when Nature begins
+      hers, instead of starting anachronously as we do in the very middle of the
+      dead season, much as our colleges hold their commencements, on the last in
+      place at on the first day of the academic term. So previous has the haste
+      of Western civilization become. The result is that our rejoicing partakes
+      of the incongruity of humor. The new year exists only in name. In the Far
+      East, on the other band, the calendar is made to fit the time. Men begin
+      to reckon their year some three weeks later than the Western world, just
+      as the plum-tree opens its pink white petals, as it were, in rosy
+      reflection of the snow that lies yet upon the ground. But the coldness of
+      the weather does not in the least deter people from thronging the spot in
+      which the trees grow, where they spend hours in admiration, and end by
+      pinning appropriate poems on the twigs for later comers to peruse.
+      Fleeting as the flowers are in fact, they live forever in fancy. For they
+      constitute one of the commonest motifs of both painting and poetry. A
+      branch just breaking into bloom seen against the sunrise sky, or a bough
+      bending its blossoms to the bosom of a stream, is subject enough for their
+      greatest masters, who thus wed, as it were, two arts in one,&mdash;the
+      spirit of poesy with pictorial form. This plum-tree is but a blossom.
+      Precocious harbinger of a host of flowers, its gay heralding over, it
+      vanishes not to be recalled, for it bears no edible fruit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The next event in the series might fairly be called phenomenal. Early in
+      April takes place what is perhaps as superb a sight as anything in this
+      world, the blossoming of the cherry-trees. Indeed, it is not easy to do
+      the thing justice in description. If the plum invited admiration, the
+      cherry commands it; for to see the sakura in flower for the first time is
+      to experience a new sensation. Familiar as a man may be with cherry
+      blossoms at home, the sight there bursts upon him with the dazzling effect
+      of a revelation. Such is the profusion of flowers that the tree seems to
+      have turned into a living mass of rosy light. No leaves break the
+      brilliance. The snowy-pink petals drape the branches entirely, yet so
+      delicately, one deems it all a veil donned for the tree's nuptials with
+      the spring. For nothing could more completely personify the spirit of the
+      spring-time. You can almost fancy it some dryad decked for her bridal, in
+      maidenly day-dreaming too lovely to last. For like the plum the cherry
+      fails in its fruit to fulfil the promise of its flower.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It would be strange indeed if so much beauty received no recognition, but
+      it is even more strange that recognition should be so complete and so
+      universal as it is. Appreciation is not confined to the cultivated few; it
+      is shown quite as enthusiastically by the masses. The popularity of the
+      plants is all-embracing. The common people are as sensitive to their
+      beauty as are the upper classes. Private gratification, roseate as it is,
+      pales beside the public delight. Indeed, not content with what revelation
+      Nature makes of herself of her own accord, man has multiplied her
+      manifestations. Spots suitable to their growth have been peopled by him
+      with trees. Sometimes they stand in groups like star-clusters, as in Oji,
+      crowning a hill; sometimes, as at Mukojima, they line an avenue for miles,
+      dividing the blue river on the one hand from the blue-green rice-fields on
+      the other,&mdash;a floral milky way of light. But wherever the trees may
+      be, there at their flowering season are to be found throngs of admirers.
+      For in crowds people go out to see the sight, multitudes streaming
+      incessantly to and fro beneath their blossoms as the time of day
+      determines the turn of the human tide. To the Occidental stranger such a
+      gathering suggests some social loadstone; but none exists. In the
+      cherry-trees alone lies the attraction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For one week out of the fifty-two the cherry-tree stands thus glorified, a
+      vision of beauty prolonged somewhat by the want of synchronousness of the
+      different kinds. Then the petals fall. What was a nuptial veil becomes a
+      winding-sheet, covering the sod as with winter's winding-sheet of snow,
+      destined itself to disappear, and the tree is nothing but a common
+      cherry-tree once more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But flowers are by no means over because the cherry blossoms are past. A
+      brief space, and the same crowds that flocked to the cherry turn to the
+      wistaria. Gardens are devoted to the plants, and the populace greatly
+      given to the gardens. There they go to sit and gaze at the grape-like
+      clusters of pale purple flowers that hang more than a cubit long over the
+      wooden trellis, and grow daily down toward their own reflections in the
+      pond beneath, vying with one another in Narcissus-like endeavor. And the
+      people, as they sip their tea on the veranda opposite, behold a doubled
+      delight, the flower itself and its mirrored image stretching to kiss.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After the wistaria comes the tree-peony, and then the iris, with its
+      trefoil flowers broader than a man may span, and at all colors under the
+      sky. To one who has seen the great Japanese fleur-de-lis, France looks
+      ludicrously infelicitous in her choice of emblem.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the list grows too long, limited as it is only by its own annual
+      repetition. We have as yet reached but the first week in June; the summer
+      and autumn are still to come, the first bringing the lotus for its crown,
+      and the second the chrysanthemum. And lazily grand the lotus is, itself
+      the embodiment of the spirit of the drowsy August air, the very essence of
+      Buddha-like repose. The castle moats are its special domain, which in this
+      its flowering season it wrests wholly from their more proper occupant&mdash;the
+      water. A dense growth of leather-like leaves, above which rise in majestic
+      isolation the solitary flowers, encircles the outer rampart, shutting the
+      castle in as it might be the palace of the Sleeping Beauty. In the
+      delightful dreaminess that creeps over one as he stands thus before some
+      old daimyo's former abode in the heart of Japan, he forgets all his
+      metaphysical difficulties about Nirvana, for he fancies he has found it,
+      one long Lotus afternoon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then last, but in some sort first, since it has been taken for the
+      imperial insignia, comes the chrysanthemum. The symmetry of its shape well
+      fits it to symbolize the completeness of perfection which the Mikado, the
+      son of heaven, mundanely represents. It typifies, too, the fullness of the
+      year; for it marks, as it were, the golden wedding of the spring, the
+      reminiscence in November of the nuptials of the May. Its own color,
+      however, is not confined to gold. It may be of almost any hue and within
+      the general limits of a circle of any form. Now it is a chariot wheel with
+      petals for spokes; now a ball of fire with lambent tongues of flame; while
+      another kind seems the button of some natural legion of honor, and still
+      another a pin-wheel in Nature's own day-fireworks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Admired as a thing of beauty for its own sake, it is also used merely as a
+      material for artistic effects; for among the quaintest of such conceits
+      are the Japanese Jarley chrysanthemum works. Every November in the
+      florists' gardens that share the temple grounds at Asakusa may be seen
+      groups of historical and mythological figures composed entirely of
+      chrysanthemum flowers. These effigies are quite worthy of comparison with
+      their London cousins, being sufficiently life-like to terrify children and
+      startle anybody. To come suddenly, on turning a corner, upon a colossal
+      warrior, deterrently uncouth and frightfully battle-clad, in the act of
+      dispatching a fallen foe, is a sensation not instantly dispelled by the
+      fact that he is made of flowers. The practice, at least, bears witness to
+      an artistic ingenuity of no mean merit, and to a horticulture ably carried
+      on, if somewhat eccentrically applied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From the passing of the chrysanthemum dates the dead season. But it is
+      suitably short-lived. Sometimes as early as November, the plum-tree is
+      already blossoming again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Even from so imperfectly gathered a garland it will be seen that the
+      Japanese do not lack for opportunities to admire, nor do they turn coldly
+      away from what they are given. Indeed, they may be said to live in a
+      chronic state of flower-fever; but in spite of the vast amount of
+      admiration which they bestow on plants, it is not so much the quantity of
+      that admiration as the quality of it which is remarkable. The intense
+      appreciation shown the subject by the Far Oriental is something whose very
+      character seems strange to us, and when in addition we consider that it
+      permeates the entire people from the commonest coolie to the most
+      aesthetic courtier, it becomes to our comprehension a state of things
+      little short of inexplicable. To call it artistic sensibility is to use
+      too limited a term, for it pervades the entire people; rather is it a
+      sixth sense of a natural, because national description; for the trait
+      differs from our corresponding feeling in degree, and especially in
+      universality enough to merit the distinction. Their care for tree flowers
+      is not confined to a cultivation, it is a cult. It approaches to a sort of
+      natural nature-worship, an adoration in which nothing is personified. For
+      the emotion aroused in the Far Oriental is just as truly an emotion as it
+      was to the Greek; but whereas the Greek personified its object, the
+      Japanese admires that object for what it is. To think of the cherry-tree,
+      for instance, as a woman, would be to his mind a conception transcending
+      even the limits of the ludicrous.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0006" id="link2HCH0006">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter 6. Art.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      That nature, not man, is their beau ideal, the source of inspiration to
+      them, is evident again on looking at their art. The same spirit that makes
+      of them such wonderful landscape gardeners and such wonder-full landscape
+      gazers shows itself unmistakably in their paintings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The current impression that Japanese pictorial ambition, and consequent
+      skill, is confined to the representation of birds and flowers, though
+      entirely erroneous as it stands, has a grain of truth behind it. This idea
+      is due to the attitude of the foreign observers, and was in fact a tribute
+      to Japanese technique rather than an appreciation of Far Eastern artistic
+      feeling. The truth is, the foreigners brought to the subject their own
+      Western criteria of merit, and judged everything by these standards. Such
+      works naturally commended themselves most as had least occasion to deviate
+      from their canons. The simplest pictures, therefore, were pronounced the
+      best. Paintings of birds and flowers were thus admitted to be fine,
+      because their realism spoke for itself. Of the exquisite poetic feeling of
+      their landscape paintings the foreign critics were not at first conscious,
+      because it was not expressed in terms with which they were familiar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But first impressions, here as elsewhere, are valuable. One is very apt to
+      turn to them again from the reasoning of his second thoughts. Flora and
+      fauna are a conspicuous feature of Far Asiatic art, because they enter as
+      details of the subject-matter of the artist's thoughts and day-dreams.
+      These birds and flowers are his sujets de genre. Where we should select a
+      phase of human life for effective isolation, they choose instead a bit of
+      nature. A spray of grass or a twig of cherry-blossoms is motif enough for
+      them. To their thought its beauty is amply suggestive. For to the Far
+      Oriental all nature is sympathetically sentient. His admiration, instead
+      of being centred on man, embraces the universe. His art reflects it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Leaving out of consideration, for the moment, minor though still important
+      distinctions in tone, treatment, and technique, the great fundamental
+      difference between Western and Far Eastern art lies in its attitude toward
+      humanity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With us, from the time of the Greeks to the present day, man has been the
+      cynosure of artistic eyes; with them he has never been vouchsafed more
+      than a casual, not to say a cursory glance, even woman failing to rivet
+      his attention. One of our own writers has said that, without passing the
+      bounds of due respect, a man is permitted two looks at any woman he may
+      meet, one to recognize, one to admire. A Japanese ordinarily never dreams
+      of taking but one,&mdash;if indeed he goes so far as that,&mdash;the
+      first. It is the omitting to take that second look that has left him what
+      he is. Not that Fortune has been unpropitious; only blind. Fate has
+      offered him opportunity enough; too much, perhaps. For in Japan the
+      exposure of the female form is without a parallel in latitude. Never nude,
+      it is frequently naked. The result artistically is much the same, though
+      the cause be different. For it is a fatal mistake to suppose the Japanese
+      an immodest people. According to their own standards, they are exceedingly
+      modest. No respectable Japanese woman would, for instance, ever for a
+      moment turn out her toes in walking. It is considered immodest to do so.
+      Their code is, however, not so whimsical as this bit of etiquette might
+      suggest. The intent is with them the touchstone of propriety. In their
+      eyes a state of nature is not a state of indecency. Whatever exposure is
+      required for convenience is right; whatever unnecessary, wrong. Such an
+      Eden-like condition of society would seem to be the very spot for a
+      something like the modern French school of art to have developed in. And
+      yet it is just that study of the nude which has from immemorial antiquity
+      been entirely neglected in the Far East. An ancient Greek, to say nothing
+      of a modern Parisian, would have shocked a Japanese. Yet we are shocked by
+      them. We are astounded at the sights we see in their country villages,
+      while they in their turn marvel at the exhibitions they witness in our
+      city theatres. At their watering-places the two sexes bathe promiscuously
+      together in all the simplicity of nature; but for a Japanese woman to
+      appear on the stage in any character, however proper, would be deemed
+      indecent. The difference between the two hemispheres may be said to
+      consist in an artless liberty on the one hand, and artistic license on the
+      other. Their unwritten code of propriety on the subject seems to be, "You
+      must see, but you may not observe."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These people live more in accordance with their code of propriety than we
+      do with ours. All classes alike conform to it. The adjective
+      "respectable," used above as a distinction in speaking of woman, was in
+      reality superfluous, for all women there, as far as appearance goes, are
+      respectable. Even the most abandoned creature does not betray her status
+      by her behavior. The reason of this uniformity and its psychological
+      importance I shall discuss later.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This form of modesty, a sort of want of modesty of form, has no connection
+      whatever with sex. It applies with equal force to the male figure, which
+      is even more exposed than the female, and offers anatomical suggestions
+      invaluable alike to the artistic and medical professions,&mdash;suggestions
+      that are equally ignored by both. The coolies are frequently possessed of
+      physiques which would have delighted Michael Angelo; and as for the
+      phenomenal corpulency of the wrestlers, it would have made of the place a
+      very paradise for Rubens. In regard to the doctors,&mdash;for to call them
+      surgeons would be to give a name to what does not exist,&mdash;a lack of
+      scientific zeal has been the cause of their not investigating what tempts
+      too seductively, we should imagine, to be ignored. Acupuncture, or the
+      practice of sticking long pins into any part of the patient's body that
+      may happen to be paining him, pretty much irrespective of anatomical
+      position, is the nearest approach to surgery of which they are guilty, and
+      proclaims of itself the in corpore vili character of the thing operated
+      upon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nor does the painter owe anything to science. He represents humanity
+      simply as he sees it in its every-day costume; and it betokens the highest
+      powers of generalized observation that he produces the results he does. In
+      his drawings, man is shown, not as he might look in the primitive, or
+      privitive, simplicity of his ancestral Garden of Eden, but as he does look
+      in the ordinary wear and tear of his present garments. Civilization has
+      furnished him with clothes, and he prefers, when he has his picture taken,
+      to keep them on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In dealing with man, the Far Oriental artist is emphatically a realist; it
+      is when he turns to nature that he becomes ideal. But by ideal is not
+      meant here conventional. That term of reproach is a misnomer, founded upon
+      a mistake. His idealism is simply the outcome of his love, which, like all
+      human love, transfigures its object. The Far Oriental has plenty of this,
+      which, if sometimes a delusion, seems also second sight, but it is
+      peculiarly impersonal. His color-blindness to the warm, blood-red end of
+      the spectrum of life in no wise affects his perception of the colder
+      beauty of the great blues and greens of nature. To their poetry he is ever
+      sensitive. His appreciation of them is something phenomenal, and his power
+      of presentation worthy his appreciation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A Japanese painting is a poem rather than a picture. It portrays an
+      emotion called up by a scene, and not the scene itself in all its
+      elaborate complexity. It undertakes to give only so much of it as is vital
+      to that particular feeling, and intentionally omits all irrelevant
+      details. It is the expression caught from a glimpse of the soul of nature
+      by the soul of man; the mirror of a mood, passing, perhaps, in fact, but
+      perpetuated thus to fancy. Being an emotion, its intensity is directly
+      proportional to the singleness with which it possesses the thoughts. The
+      Far Oriental fully realizes the power of simplicity. This principle is his
+      fundamental canon of pictorial art. To understand his paintings, it is
+      from this standpoint they must be regarded; not as soulless photographs of
+      scenery, but as poetic presentations of the spirit of the scenes. The very
+      charter of painting depends upon its not giving us charts. And if with us
+      a long poem be a contradiction in terms, a full picture is with them as
+      self-condemnatory a production. From the contemplation of such works of
+      art as we call finished, one is apt, after he has once appreciated Far
+      Eastern taste, to rise with an unpleasant feeling of satiety, as if he has
+      eaten too much at the feast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Their paintings, by comparison, we call sketches. Is not our would-be
+      slight unwittingly the reverse? Is not a sketch, after all, fuller of
+      meaning, to one who knows how to read it, than a finished affair, which is
+      very apt to end with itself, barren of fruit? Does not one's own
+      imagination elude one's power to portray it? Is it not forever flitting
+      will-o'-the-wisp-like ahead of us just beyond exact definition? For the
+      soul of art lies in what art can suggest, and nothing is half so
+      suggestive as the half expressed, not even a double entente. To hint a
+      great deal by displaying a little is more vital to effect than the
+      cleverest representation of the whole. The art of partially revealing is
+      more telling, even, than the ars celare artem. Who has not suspected
+      through a veil a fairer face than veil ever hid? Who has not been
+      delightedly duped by the semi-disclosures of a dress? The principle is
+      just as true in any one branch of art as it is of the attempted
+      developments by one of the suggestions of another. Yet who but has thus
+      felt its force? Who has not had a shock of day-dream desecration on
+      chancing upon an illustrated edition of some book whose story he had lain
+      to heart? Portraits of people, pictures of places, he does not know, and
+      yet which purport to be his! And I venture to believe that to more than
+      one of us the exquisite pathos of the Bride of Lammermoor is gone when
+      Lucia warbles her woes, be it never so entrancingly, to an admiring house.
+      It almost seems as if the garish publicity of using her name for operatic
+      title were a special intervention of the Muse, that we might the less
+      connect song with story,&mdash;two sensations that, like two lights,
+      destroy one another by mutual interference.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Against this preference shown the sketch it may be urged that to
+      appreciate such suggestions presupposes as much art in the public as in
+      the painter. But the ability to appreciate a thing when expressed is but
+      half that necessary to express it. Some understanding must exist in the
+      observer for any work to be intelligible. It is only a question of degree.
+      The greater the art-sense in the person addressed, the more had better be
+      left to it. Now in Japan the public is singularly artistic. In fact, the
+      artistic appreciation of the masses there is something astonishing to us,
+      accustomed to our immense intellectual differences between man and man.
+      Sketches are thus peculiarly fitting to such a land.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Besides, there is a quiet modesty about the sketch which is itself taking.
+      To attempt the complete even in a fractional bit of the cosmos, like a
+      picture, has in it a difficulty akin to the logical one of proving a
+      universal negative. The possibilities of failure are enormously increased,
+      and failure is less forgiven for the assumption. Art might perhaps not
+      unwisely follow the example of science in such matters where an exhaustive
+      work, which takes the better part of a lifetime to produce, is invariably
+      entitled by its erudite author an Elementary Treatise on the subject in
+      hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To aid the effect due to simplicity of conception steps in the Far
+      Oriental's wonderful technique. His brush-strokes are very few in number,
+      but each one tells. They are laid on with a touch which is little short of
+      marvelous, and requires heredity to explain its skill. For in his method
+      there is no emending, no super-position, no change possible. What he does
+      is done once and for all. The force of it grows on you as you gaze. Each
+      stroke expresses surprisingly much, and suggests more. Even omissions are
+      made significant. In his painting it is visibly true that objects can be
+      rendered conspicuous by their very absence. You are quite sure you see
+      what on scrutiny you discover to be only the illusion of inevitable
+      inference. The Far Oriental artist understands the power of suggestion
+      well; for imagination always fills in the picture better than the brush,
+      however perfect be its skill.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Even the neglect of certain general principles which we consider vital to
+      effect, such as the absence of shadows and the lack of perspective, proves
+      not to be of the importance we imagine. We discover in these paintings how
+      immaterial, artistically, was Peter Schlimmel's sad loss, and how
+      perfectly possible it is to make bits of discontinuous distance take the
+      place effectively of continuous space.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Far Eastern pictures are epigrams rather than descriptions. They present a
+      bit of nature with the terseness of a maxim of La Rochefoucault, and they
+      delight as aphorisms do by their insight and the happy conciseness of its
+      expression. Few aphorisms are absolutely true, but then boldness more than
+      makes up for what they lack in verity. So complex a subject is life that
+      to state a truth with all its accompanying limitations is to weaken it at
+      once. Exceptions, while demonstrating the rule, do not tend to emphasize
+      it. And though the whole truth is essential to science, such
+      exhaustiveness is by no means a canon of art.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Parallels are not wanting at home. What they do with space in their
+      paintings do we not with time in the case of our comedies, those acted
+      pictures of life? Should we not refuse to tolerate a play that insisted on
+      furnishing us with a full perspective of its characters' past? And yet of
+      the two, it is far perferable, artistically, to be given too much in
+      sequence than too much at once. The Chinese, who put much less into a
+      painting than what we deem indispensable, delight in dramas that last six
+      weeks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To give a concluding touch of life to my necessarily skeleton-like
+      generalities, memory pictures me a certain painting of Okio's which I fell
+      in love with at first sight. It is of a sunrise on the coast of Japan. A
+      long line of surf is seen tumbling in to you from out a bank of mist, just
+      piercing which shows the blood-red disk of the rising sun, while over the
+      narrow strip of breaking rollers three cranes are slowly sailing north.
+      And that is all you see. You do not see the shore; you do not see the
+      main; you are looking but at the border-land of that great unknown, the
+      heaving ocean still slumbering beneath its chilly coverlid of mist, out of
+      which come the breakers, and the sun, and the cranes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So much for the more serious side of Japanese fancy; a look at the lighter
+      leads to the same conclusion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Hand in hand with his keen poetic sensibility goes a vivid sense of humor,&mdash;two
+      traits that commonly, indeed, are found Maying together over the meadows
+      of imagination. For, as it might be put,
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  "The heart that is soonest awake to the flowers
+   Is also the first to be touched by the fun."
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The Far Oriental well exemplifies this fact. His art, wherever fun is
+      possible, fairly bubbles over with laughter. From the oldest masters down
+      to Hokusai, it is constantly welling up in the drollest conceits. It is of
+      all descriptions, too. Now it lurks in merry ambush, like the faint
+      suggestion of a smile on an otherwise serious face, so subtile that the
+      observer is left wondering whether the artist could have meant what seems
+      more like one's own ingenious discovery; now it breaks out into the
+      broadest of grins, absurd juxtapositions of singularly happy
+      incongruities. For Hokusai's caricatures and Hendschel's sketches might be
+      twins. If there is a difference, it lies not so much in the artist's work
+      as in the greater generality of its appreciation. Humor flits easily there
+      at the sea-level of the multitude. For the Japanese temperament is ever on
+      the verge of a smile which breaks out with catching naivete at the first
+      provocation. The language abounds in puns which are not suffered to lie
+      idle, and even poetry often hinges on certain consecrated plays on words.
+      From the very constitution of the people there is of course nothing
+      selfish in the national enjoyment. A man is quite as ready to laugh at his
+      own expense as at his neighbor's, a courtesy which his neighbor cordially
+      returns.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now the ludicrous is essentially human in its application. The principle
+      of the synthesis of contradictories, popularly known by the name of humor,
+      is necessarily limited in its field to man. For whether it have to do
+      wholly with actions, or partly with the words that express them, whether
+      it be presented in the shape of a pun or a pleasantry, it is in
+      incongruous contrasts that its virtue lies. It is the unexpected that
+      provokes the smile. Now no such incongruity exists in nature; man enjoys a
+      monopoly of the power of making himself ridiculous. So pleasant is
+      pleasantry that we do indeed cultivate it beyond its proper pale. But it
+      is only by personifying Nature, and gratuitously attributing to her errors
+      of which she is incapable, that we can make fun of her; as, for instance,
+      when we hold the weather up to ridicule by way of impotent revenge. But
+      satires upon the clown-like character of our climate, which, after the
+      lamest sort of a spring, somehow manages a capital fall, would in the Far
+      East be as out of keeping with fancy as with fact. To a Japanese, who
+      never personifies anything, such innocent irony is unmeaning. Besides, it
+      would be also untrue. For his May carries no suggestion of unfulfilment in
+      its name.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Those Far Eastern paintings which have to do with man fall for the most
+      part under one of two heads, the facetious and the historical. The latter
+      implies no particularly intimate concern for man in himself, for the past
+      has very little personality for the present. As for the former, its
+      attention is, if anything, derogatory to him, for we are always shy of
+      making fun of what we feel to be too closely a part of ourselves. But
+      impersonality has prevented the Far Oriental from having much amour
+      propre. He has no particular aversion to caricaturing himself. Few
+      Europeans, perhaps, would have cared to perpetrate a self-portrait like
+      one painted by the potter Kinsei, which was sold me one day as an amusing
+      tour de force by a facetious picture-dealer. It is a composite picture of
+      a new kind, a Japanese variety of type face. The great potter, who was
+      also apparently no mean painter, has combined three aspects of himself in
+      a single representation. At first sight the portrait appears to be simply
+      a full front view of a somewhat moon-faced citizen; but as you continue to
+      gaze, it suddenly dawns on you that there are two other individuals, one
+      on either side, hob-nobbing in profile with the first, the lines of the
+      features being ingeniously made to do double duty; and when this aspect of
+      the thing has once struck you, you cannot look at the picture without
+      seeing all three citizens simultaneously. The result is doubtless more
+      effective as a composition than flattering as a likeness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Far Eastern sculpture, by its secondary importance among Far Eastern arts,
+      witnesses again to the secondary importance assigned to man at our mental
+      antipodes. In this art, owing to its necessary limitations, the
+      representation of nature in its broader sense is impossible. For in the
+      first place, whatever the subject, it must be such as it is possible to
+      present in one continuous piece; disconnected adjuncts, as, for instance,
+      a flock of birds flying, which might be introduced with great effect in
+      painting, being here practically beyond the artist's reach. Secondly, the
+      material being of uniform appearance, as a rule, color, or even shading,
+      vital points in landscape portrayal, is out of the question, unless the
+      piece were subsequently painted, as in Grecian sculptures, a custom which
+      is not practised in China or Japan. Lastly, another fact fatal to the
+      representation of landscape is the size. The reduced scale of the
+      reproduction suggests falsity at once, a falsity whose belittlement the
+      mind can neither forget nor forgive. Plain sculpture is therefore
+      practically limited to statuary, either of men or animals. The result is
+      that in their art, where landscape counts for so much, sculpture plays a
+      very minor part. In what little there is, Nature's place is taken by
+      Buddha. For there are two classes of statues, divided the one from the
+      other by that step which separates the sublime from the ridiculous,
+      namely, the colossal and the diminutive. There is no happy human mean. Of
+      the first kind are the beautiful bronze figures of the Buddha, like the
+      Kamakura Buddha, fifty feet high and ninety-seven feet round, in whose
+      face all that is grand and noble lies sleeping, the living representation
+      of Nirvana; and of the second, those odd little ornaments known as
+      netsuke, comical carvings for the most part, grotesque figures of men and
+      monkeys, saints and sinners, gods and devils. Appealing bits of ivory,
+      bone, or wood they are, in which the dumb animals are as speaking
+      likenesses as their human fellows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The other arts show the same motif in their decorations. Pottery and
+      lacquer alike witness the respective positions assigned to the serious and
+      the comic in Far Eastern feeling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Far Oriental makes fun of man and makes love to Nature; and it almost
+      seems as if Nature heard his silent prayer, and smiled upon him in
+      acceptance; as if the love-light lent her face the added beauty that it
+      lends the maid's. For nowhere in this world, probably, is she lovelier
+      than in Japan: a climate of long, happy means and short extremes, months
+      of spring and months of autumn, with but a few weeks of winter in between;
+      a land of flowers, where the lotus and the cherry, the plum and wistaria,
+      grow wantonly side by side; a land where the bamboo embosoms the maple,
+      where the pine at last has found its palm-tree, and the tropic and the
+      temperate zones forget their separate identity in one long
+      self-obliterating kiss.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0007" id="link2HCH0007">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter 7. Religion.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      In regard to their religion, nations, like individuals, seem singularly
+      averse to practising what they have preached. Whether it be that his
+      self-constructed idols prove to the maker too suggestive of his own
+      intellectual chisel to deceive him for long, or whether sacred soil, like
+      less hallowed ground, becomes after a time incapable of responding to
+      repeated sowings of the same seed, certain it is that in spiritual matters
+      most peoples have grown out of conceit with their own conceptions. An
+      individual may cling with a certain sentiment to the religion of his
+      mother, but nations have shown anything but a foolish fondness for the
+      sacred superstitions of their great-grandfathers. To the charm of creation
+      succeeds invariably the bitter-sweet after-taste of criticism, and man
+      would not be the progressive animal he is if he long remained in love with
+      his own productions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What his future will be is too engrossing a subject, and one too deeply
+      shrouded in mystery, not to be constantly pictured anew. No wonder that
+      the consideration at that country toward which mankind is ever being
+      hastened should prove as absorbing to fancy as contemplated earthly
+      journeys proverbially are. Few people but have laid out skeleton tours
+      through its ideal regions, and perhaps, as in the mapping beforehand of
+      merely mundane travels, one element of attraction has always consisted in
+      the possible revision of one's routes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Besides, there is a fascination about the foreign merely because it is
+      such. Distance lends enchantment to the views of others, and never more so
+      than when those views are religious visions. An enthusiast has certainly a
+      greater chance of being taken for a god among a people who do not know him
+      intimately as a man. So with his doctrines. The imported is apt to seem
+      more important than the home-made; as the far-off bewitches more easily
+      than the near. But just as castles in the air do not commonly become the
+      property of their builders, so mansions in the skies almost as frequently
+      have failed of direct inheritance. Rather strikingly has this proved the
+      case with what are to-day the two most powerful religions of the world,&mdash;Buddhism
+      and Christianity. Neither is now the belief of its founder's people. What
+      was Aryan-born has become Turanian-bred, and what was Semitic by
+      conception is at present Aryan by adoption. The possibilities of another's
+      hereafter look so much rosier than the limitations of one's own present!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Few pastimes are more delightful than tossing pebbles into some still,
+      dark pool, and watching the ripples that rise responsive, as they run in
+      ever widening circles to the shore. Most of us have felt its fascination
+      second only to that of the dotted spiral of the skipping-stone, a
+      fascination not outgrown with years. There is something singularly
+      attractive in the subtle force that for a moment sways each particle only
+      to pass on to the next, a motion mysterious in its immateriality. Some
+      such pleasure must be theirs who have thrown their thoughts into the
+      hearts of men, and seen them spread in waves of feeling, whose sphere time
+      widens through the world. For like the mobile water is the mind of man,&mdash;quick
+      to catch emotions, quick to transmit them. Of all waves of feeling, this
+      is not the least true of religious ones, that, starting from their
+      birthplace, pass out to stir others, who have but humanity in common with
+      those who professed them first. Like the ripples in the pool, they leave
+      their initial converts to sink back again into comparative quiescence, as
+      they advance to throw into sudden tremors hordes of outer barbarians. In
+      both of the great religions in question this wave propagation has been
+      most marked, only the direction it took differed. Christianity went
+      westward; Buddhism travelled east. Proselytes in Asia Minor, Greece, and
+      Italy find counterparts in Eastern India, Burmah, and Thibet. Eventually
+      the taught surpassed their teachers both in zeal and numbers. Jerusalem
+      and Benares at last gave place to Rome and Lassa as sacerdotal centres.
+      Still the movement journeyed on. Popes and Lhamas remained where their
+      predecessors had founded sees, but the tide of belief surged past them in
+      its irresistible advance. Farther yet from where each faith began are to
+      be found to-day the greater part of its adherents. The home that the
+      Western hemisphere seems to promise to the one, the extreme Orient affords
+      the other. As Roman Catholicism now looks to America for its strength, so
+      Buddhism to-day finds its worshippers chiefly in China and Japan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But though the Japanese may be said to be all Buddhists, Buddhist is by no
+      means all that they are. At the time of their adoption of the great Indian
+      faith, the Japanese were already in possession of a system of superstition
+      which has held its own to this day. In fact, as the state religion of the
+      land, it has just experienced a revival, a regalvanizing of its old-time
+      energy, at the hands of some of the native archaeologists. Its sacred
+      mirror, held up to Nature, has been burnished anew. Formerly this body of
+      belief was the national faith, the Mikado, the direct descendant of the
+      early gods, being its head on earth. His reinstatement to temporal power
+      formed a very fitting first step toward reinvesting the cult with its
+      former prestige; a curious instance, indeed, of a religious revival due to
+      archaeological, not to religious zeal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This cult is the mythological inheritance of the whole eastern seaboard of
+      Asia, from Siam to Kamtchatka. In Japan it is called Shintoism. The word
+      "Shinto" means literally "the way of the gods," and the letter of its name
+      is a true exponent of the spirit of the belief. For its scriptures are
+      rather an itinerary of the gods' lives than a guide to that road by which
+      man himself may attain to immortality. Thus with a certain fitness
+      pilgrimages are its most noticeable rites. One cannot journey anywhere in
+      the heart of Japan without meeting multitudes of these pilgrims, with
+      their neat white leggings and their mushroom-like hats, nor rest at night
+      at any inn that is not hung with countless little banners of the pilgrim
+      associations, of which they all are members. Being a pilgrim there is
+      equivalent to being a tourist here, only that to the excitement of doing
+      the country is added a sustaining sense of the meritoriousness of the
+      deed. Oftener than not the objective point of the devout is the summit of
+      some noted mountain. For peaks are peculiarly sacred spots in the Shinto
+      faith. The fact is perhaps an expression of man's instinctive desire to
+      rise, as if the bodily act in some wise betokened the mental action. The
+      shrine in so exalted a position is of the simplest: a rude hut, with or
+      without the only distinctive emblems of the cult, a mirror typical of the
+      god and the pendent gohei, or zigzag strips of paper, permanent votive
+      offerings of man. As for the belief itself, it is but the deification of
+      those natural elements which aboriginal man instinctively wonders at or
+      fears, the sun, the moon, the thunder, the lightning, and the wind; all,
+      in short, that he sees, hears, and feels, yet cannot comprehend. He
+      clothes his terrors with forms which resemble the human, because he can
+      conceive of nothing else that could cause the unexpected. But the awful
+      shapes he conjures up have naught in common with himself. They are far too
+      fearful to be followed. Their way is the "highway of the gods," but no
+      Jacob's ladder for wayward man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In this externality to the human lies the reason that Shintoism and
+      Buddhism can agree so well, and can both join with Confucianism in helping
+      to form that happy family of faith which is so singular a feature of Far
+      Eastern religious capability. It is not simply that the two contrive to
+      live peaceably together; they are actually both of them implicitly
+      believed by the same individual. Millions of Japanese are good Buddhists
+      and good Shintoists at the same time. That such a combination should be
+      possible is due to the essential difference in the character of the two
+      beliefs. The one is extrinsic, the other intrinsic, in its relations to
+      the human soul. Shintoism tells man but little about himself and his
+      hereafter; Buddhism, little but about himself and what he may become. In
+      examining Far Eastern religion, therefore, for personality, or the
+      reverse, we may dismiss Shintoism as having no particular bearing upon the
+      subject. The only effect it has is indirect in furthering the natural
+      propensity of these people to an adoration of nature.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In Korea and in China, again, Confucianism is the great moral law, as by
+      reflection it is to a certain extent in Japan. But that in its turn may be
+      omitted in the present argument; inasmuch as Confucius taught confessedly
+      and designedly only a system of morals, and religiously abstained from
+      pronouncing any opinion whatever upon the character or the career of the
+      human soul.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Taouism, the third great religion of China, resembles Shintoism to this
+      extent, that it is a body of superstition, and not a form of philosophy.
+      It undertakes to provide nostrums for spiritual ills, but is dumb as to
+      the constitution of the soul for which it professes to prescribe. Its
+      pills are to be swallowed unquestioningly by the patient, and are
+      warranted to cure; and owing to the two great human frailties, fear and
+      credulity, its practice is very large. Possessing, however, no philosophic
+      diploma, it is without the pale of the present discussion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The demon-worship of Korea is a mild form of the same thing with the
+      hierarchy left out, every man there being his own spiritual adviser. An
+      ordinary Korean is born with an innate belief in malevolent spirits, whom
+      he accordingly propitiates from time to time. One of nobler birth
+      propitiates only the spirits of his own ancestors.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We come, then, by a process of elimination to a consideration of Buddhism,
+      the great philosophic faith of the whole Far East.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not uncommonly in the courtyard of a Japanese temple, in the solemn
+      half-light of the sombre firs, there stands a large stone basin, cut from
+      a single block, and filled to the brim with water. The trees, the basin,
+      and a few stone lanterns&mdash;so called from their form, and not their
+      function, for they have votive pebbles where we should look for wicks&mdash;are
+      the sole occupants of the place. Sheltered from the wind, withdrawn from
+      sound, and only piously approached by man, this antechamber of the god
+      seems the very abode of silence and rest. It might be Nirvana itself,
+      human entrance to an immortality like the god's within, so peaceful, so
+      pervasive is its calm; and in its midst is the moss-covered monolith,
+      holding in its embrace the little imprisoned pool of water. So still is
+      the spot and so clear the liquid that you know the one only as the
+      reflection of the other. Mirrored in its glassy surface appears everything
+      around it. As you peer in, far down you see a tiny bit of sky, as deep as
+      the blue is high above, across which slowly sail the passing clouds; then
+      nearer stand the trees, arching overhead, as if bending to catch glimpses
+      of themselves in that other world below; and then, nearer yet&mdash;yourself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Emblem of the spirit of man is this little pool to Far Oriental eyes.
+      Subtile as the soul is the incomprehensible water; so responsive to light
+      that it remains itself invisible; so clear that it seems illusion! Though
+      portrayer so perfect of forms about it, all we know of the thing itself is
+      that it is. Through none of the five senses do we perceive it. Neither
+      sight, nor hearing, nor taste, nor smell, nor touch can tell us it exists;
+      we feel it to be by the muscular sense alone, that blind and dumb analogue
+      for the body of what consciousness is for the soul. Only when disturbed,
+      troubled, does the water itself become visible, and then it is but the
+      surface that we see. So to the Far Oriental this still little lake
+      typifies the soul, the eventual purification of his own; a something lost
+      in reflection, self-effaced, only the alter ego of the outer world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For contemplation, not action, is the Far Oriental's ideal of life. The
+      repose of self-adjustment like that to which our whole solar system is
+      slowly tending as its death,&mdash;this to him appears, though from no
+      scientific deduction, the end of all existence. So he sits and ponders,
+      abstractly, vaguely, upon everything in general,&mdash;synonym, alas, to
+      man's finite mind, for nothing in particular,&mdash;till even the sense of
+      self seems to vanish, and through the mist-like portal of unconsciousness
+      he floats out into the vast indistinguishable sameness of Nirvana's sea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At first sight Buddhism is much more like Christianity than those of us
+      who stay at home and speculate upon it commonly appreciate. As a system of
+      philosophy it sounds exceedingly foreign, but it looks unexpectedly
+      familiar as a faith. Indeed, the one religion might well pass for the
+      counterfeit presentment of the other. The resemblance so struck the early
+      Catholic missionaries that they felt obliged to explain the remarkable
+      similarity between the two. With them ingenuous surprise instantly begot
+      ingenious sophistry. Externally, the likeness was so exact that at first
+      they could not bring themselves to believe that the Buddhist ceremonials
+      had not been filched bodily from the practices of the true faith. Finding,
+      however, that no known human agency had acted in the matter, they
+      bethought them of introducing, to account for things, a deus ex machina in
+      the shape of the devil. They were so pleased with this solution of the
+      difficulty that they imparted it at once with much pride to the natives.
+      You have indeed got, they graciously if somewhat gratuitously informed
+      them, the outward semblance of the true faith, but you are in fact the
+      miserable victims of an impious fraud. Satan has stolen the insignia of
+      divinity, and is now masquerading before you as the deity; your god is
+      really our devil,&mdash;a recognition of antipodal inversion truly worthy
+      the Jesuitical mind!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps it is not matter for great surprise that they converted but few of
+      their hearers. The suggestion was hardly so diplomatic as might have been
+      expected from so generally astute a body; for it could not make much
+      difference what the all-presiding deity was called, if his actions were
+      the same, since his motives were beyond human observation. Besides, the
+      bare idea of a foreign bogus was not very terrifying. The Chinese
+      possessed too many familiar devils of their own. But there was another and
+      a much deeper reason, which we shall come to later, why Christianity made
+      but little headway in the Far East.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it is by no means in externals only that the two religions are alike.
+      If the first glance at them awakens that peculiar sensation which most of
+      us have felt at some time or other, a sense of having seen all this
+      before, further scrutiny reveals a deeper agreement than merely in
+      appearances.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In passing from the surface into the substance, it may be mentioned
+      incidentally that the codes of morality of the two are about on a level. I
+      say incidentally, for so far as its practice, certainly, is concerned, it
+      not its preaching, morality has no more intimate connection with religion
+      than it has with art or politics. If we doubt this, we have but to examine
+      the facts. Are the most religious peoples the most moral? It needs no
+      prolonged investigation to convince us that they are not. If proof of the
+      want of a bond were required, the matter of truth-telling might be adduced
+      in point. As this is a subject upon which a slight misconception exists in
+      the minds of some evangelically persuaded persons, and because, what is
+      more generally relevant, the presence of this quality, honesty in word and
+      deed, has more than almost any other one characteristic helped to put us
+      in the van of the world's advance to-day, it may not unfittingly be cited
+      here.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The argument in the case may be put thus. Have specially religious races
+      been proportionally truth-telling ones? If not, has there been any other
+      cause at work in the development of mankind tending to increase veracity?
+      The answer to the first question has all the simplicity of a plain
+      negative. No such pleasing concomitance of characteristics is observable
+      to-day, or has been presented in the past. Permitting, however, the dead
+      past to bury its shortcomings in oblivion, let us look at the world as we
+      find it. We observe, then, that the religious spirit is quite as strong in
+      Asia as it is in Europe; if anything, that at the present time it is
+      rather stronger. The average Brahman, Mahometan, or Buddhist is quite as
+      devout as the ordinary Roman Catholic or Presbyterian. If he is somewhat
+      less given to propagandism, he is not a whit less regardful of his own
+      salvation. Yet throughout the Orient truth is a thing unknown, lies of
+      courtesy being de rigueur and lies of convenience de raison; while with
+      us, fortunately, mendacity is generally discredited. But we need not
+      travel so far for proof. The same is evident in less antipodal relations.
+      Have the least religious nations of Europe been any less truthful than the
+      most bigoted? Was fanatic Spain remarkable for veracity? Was Loyola a
+      gentleman whose assertions carried conviction other than to the stake?
+      Were the eminently mundane burghers whom he persecuted noted for a pious
+      superiority to fact? Or, to narrow the field still further, and scan the
+      circle of one's own acquaintance, are the most believing individuals among
+      them worthy of the most belief? Assuredly not.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We come, then, to the second point. Has there been any influence at work
+      to differentiate us in this respect from Far Orientals? There has. Two
+      separate causes, in fact, have conduced to the same result. The one is the
+      development of physical science; the other, the extension of trade. The
+      sole object of science being to discover truth, truth-telling is a
+      necessity of its existence. Professionally, scientists are obliged to be
+      truthful. Aliter of a Jesuit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So long as science was of the closet, its influence upon mankind generally
+      was indirect and slight; but so soon as it proceeded to stalk into the
+      street and earn its own living, its veracious character began to tell.
+      When out of its theories sprang inventions and discoveries that
+      revolutionized every-day affairs and changed the very face of things,
+      society insensibly caught its spirit. Man awoke to the inestimable value
+      of exactness. From scientists proper, the spirit filtered down through
+      every stratum of education, till to-day the average man is born exact to a
+      degree which his forefathers never dreamed of becoming. To-day, as a rule,
+      the more intelligent the individual, the more truthful he is, because the
+      more innately exact in thought, and thence in word and action. With us, to
+      lie is a sign of a want of cleverness, not of an excess of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The second cause, the extension of trade, has inculcated the same regard
+      for veracity through the pocket. For with the increase of business
+      transactions in both time and space, the telling of the truth has become a
+      financial necessity. Without it, trade would come to a standstill at once.
+      Our whole mercantile system, a modern piece of mechanism unknown to the
+      East till we imported it thither, turns on an implicit belief in the word
+      of one's neighbor. Our legal safeguards would snap like red tape were the
+      great bond of mutual trust once broken. Western civilization has to be
+      truthful, or perish.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And now for the spirits of the two beliefs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The soul of any religion realizes in one respect the Brahman idea of the
+      individual soul of man, namely, that it exists much after the manner of an
+      onion, in many concentric envelopes. Man, they tell us, is composed not of
+      a single body simply, but of several layers of body, each shell as it were
+      respectively inclosing another. The outermost is the merely material body,
+      of which we are so directly cognizant. This encases a second, more
+      spiritual, but yet not wholly free from earthly affinities. This contains
+      another, still more refined; till finally, inside of all is that
+      immaterial something which they conceive to constitute the soul. This
+      eventual residuum exemplifies the Franciscan notion of pure substance, for
+      it is a thing delightfully devoid of any attributes whatever.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We may, perhaps, not be aware of the existence of such an elaborate set of
+      encasings to our own heart of hearts, nor of a something so very
+      indefinite within, but the most casual glance at any religion will reveal
+      its truth as regards the soul of a belief. We recognize the fact outwardly
+      in the buildings erected to celebrate its worship. Not among the Jews
+      alone was the holy of holies kept veiled, to temper the divine radiance to
+      man's benighted understanding. Nor is the chancel-rail of Christianity the
+      sole survivor of the more exclusive barriers of olden times, even in the
+      Western world. In the Far East, where difficulty of access is deemed
+      indispensable to dignity, the material approaches are still manifold and
+      imposing. Court within court, building after building, isolate the shrine
+      itself from the profane familiarity of the passers-by. But though the
+      material encasings vary in number and in exclusiveness, according to the
+      temperament of the particular race concerned, the mental envelopes exist,
+      and must exist, in both hemispheres alike, so long as society resembles
+      the crust of the earth on which it dwells,&mdash;a crust composed of
+      strata that grow denser as one descends. What is clear to those on top
+      seems obscure to those below; what are weighty arguments to the second
+      have no force at all upon the first. There must necessarily be grades of
+      elevation in individual beliefs, suited to the needs and cravings of each
+      individual soul. A creed that fills the shallow with satisfaction leaves
+      but an aching void in the deep. It is not of the slightest consequence how
+      the belief starts; differentiated it is bound to become. The higher minds
+      alone can rest content with abstract imaginings; the lower must have
+      concrete realities on which to pin their faith. With them, inevitably,
+      ideals degenerate into idols. In all religions this unavoidable debasement
+      has taken place. The Roman Catholic who prays to a wooden image of Christ
+      is not one whit less idolatrous than the Buddhist who worships a bronze
+      statue of Amida Butzu. All that the common people are capable of seeing is
+      the soul-envelope, for the soul itself they are unable to appreciate.
+      Spiritually they are undiscerning, because imaginatively they are blind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now the grosser soul-envelopes of the two great European and Asiatic
+      faiths, though differing in detail, are in general parallel in structure.
+      Each boasts its full complement of saints, whose congruent catalogues are
+      equally wearisome in length. Each tells its circle of beads to help it
+      keep count of similarly endless prayers. For in both, in the popular
+      estimation, quantity is more effective to salvation than quality. In both
+      the believer practically pictures his heaven for himself, while in each
+      his hell, with a vividness that does like credit to its religious
+      imagination, is painted for him by those of the cult who are themselves
+      confident of escaping it. Into the lap of each mother church the pious
+      believer drops his little votive offering with the same affectionate zeal,
+      and in Asia, as in Europe, the mites of the many make the might of the
+      mass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But behind all this is the religion of the few,&mdash;of those to whom
+      sensuous forms cannot suffice to represent super-sensuous cravings; whose
+      god is something more than an anthropomorphic creation; to whom worship
+      means not the cramping of the body, but the expansion of the soul.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The rays of the truth, like the rays of the sun, which universally seems
+      to have been man's first adoration, have two properties equally inherent
+      in their essence, warmth and light. And as for the life of all things on
+      this globe both attributes of sunshine are necessary, so to the
+      development of that something which constitutes the ego both qualities of
+      the truth are vital. We sometimes speak of character as if it were a thing
+      wholly apart from mind; but, in fact, the two things are so interwoven
+      that to perceive the right course is the strongest possible of incentives
+      to pursue it. In the end the two are one. Now, while clearness of head is
+      all-important, kindness of heart is none the less so. The first, perhaps,
+      is more needed in our communings with ourselves, the second in our
+      commerce with others. For, dark and dense bodies that we are, we can
+      radiate affection much more effectively than we can reflect views.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That Christianity is a religion of love needs no mention; that Buddhism is
+      equally such is perhaps not so generally appreciated. But just as the
+      gospel of the disciple who loved and was loved the most begins its story
+      by telling us of the Light that came into the world, so none the less
+      surely could the Light of Asia but be also its warmth. Half of the
+      teachings of Buddhism are spent in inculcating charity. Not only to men is
+      man enjoined to show kindliness, but to all other animals as well. The
+      people practise what their scriptures preach. The effect indirectly on the
+      condition of the brutes is almost as marked as its more direct effect on
+      the character of mankind. In heart, at least, Buddhism and Christianity
+      are very close.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But here the two paths to a something beyond an earthly life diverge. Up
+      to this point the two religions are alike, but from this point on they are
+      so utterly unlike that the very similarity of all that went before only
+      suffices to make of the second the weird, life-counterfeiting shadow of
+      the first. As in a silhouette, externally the contours are all there, but
+      within is one vast blank. In relation to one's neighbor the two beliefs
+      are kin, but as regards one's self, as far apart as the West is from the
+      East. For here, at this idea of self, we are suddenly aware of standing on
+      the brink of a fathomless abyss, gazing giddily down into that great gulf
+      which divides Buddhism from Christianity. We cannot see the bottom. It is
+      a separation more profound than death; it seems to necessitate
+      annihilation. To cross it we must bury in its depths all we know as
+      ourselves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Christianity is a personal religion; Buddhism, an impersonal one. In this
+      fundamental difference lies the world-wide opposition of the two beliefs.
+      Christianity tells us to purify ourselves that we may enjoy countless
+      aeons of that bettered self hereafter; Buddhism would have us purify
+      ourselves that we may lose all sense of self for evermore.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For all that it preaches the essential vileness of the natural man,
+      Christianity is a gospel of optimism. While it affirms that at present you
+      are bad, it also affirms that this depravity is no intrinsic part of
+      yourself. It unquestioningly asserts that it is something foreign to your
+      true being. It even believes that in a more or less spiritual manner your
+      very body will survive. It essentially clings to the ego. What it
+      inculcates is really present endeavor sanctioned by the prospect of future
+      bliss. It tacitly takes for granted the desirability of personal
+      existence, and promises the certainty of personal immortality,&mdash;a
+      terror to evildoers, and a sustaining sense of coming unalloyed happiness
+      to the good. Through and through its teachings runs the feeling of the
+      fullness of life, that desire which will not die, that wish of the soul
+      which beats its wings against its earthly casement in its longing for
+      expansion beyond the narrow confines of threescore years and ten.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Buddhism, on the contrary, is the cri du coeur of pessimism. This life, it
+      says, is but a chain of sorrows. To multiply days is only to multiply
+      evil. These desires that urge us on are really cause of all our woe. We
+      think they are ourselves. We are mistaken. They are all illusion, and we
+      are victims of a mirage. This personality, this sense of self, is a cruel
+      deception and a snare. Realize once the true soul behind it, devoid of
+      attributes, therefore without this capacity for suffering, an indivisible
+      part of the great impersonal soul of nature: then, and then only, will you
+      have found happiness in the blissful quiescence of Nirvana.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With a certain poetic fitness, misery and impersonality were both present
+      in the occasion that gave the belief birth. Many have turned to the
+      consolations of religion by reason of their own wretchedness; Gautama
+      sought its help touched by the woes of others whom, in his own happy life
+      journey, he chanced one day to come across. Shocked by the sight of human
+      disease, old age, and death, sad facts to which hitherto he had been
+      sedulously kept a stranger, he renounced the world that he might find for
+      it an escape from its ills. But bliss, as he conceived it, lay not in
+      wanting to be something he was not, but in actual want of being. His quest
+      for mankind was immunity from suffering, not the active enjoyment of life.
+      In this negative way of looking at happiness, he acted in strict
+      conformity with the spirit of his world. For the doctrine of pessimism had
+      already been preached. It underlay the whole Brahman philosophy, and
+      everybody believed it implicitly. Already the East looked at this life as
+      an evil, and had affirmed for the individual spirit extinction to be
+      happier than existence. The wish for an end to the ego, the hope to be
+      eventually nothing, Gautama accepted for a truism as undeniably as the
+      Brahmans did. What he pronounced false was the Brahman prospectus of the
+      way to reach this desirable impersonal state. Their road, be said, could
+      not possibly land the traveller where it professed, since it began wrong,
+      and ended nowhere. The way, he asserted, is within a man. He has but to
+      realize the truth, and from that moment he will see his goal and the road
+      that leads there. There is no panacea for human ills, of external
+      application. The Brahman homoeopathic treatment of sin is folly. The
+      slaughtering of men and bulls cannot possibly bring life to the soul. To
+      mortify the body for the sins of the flesh is palpably futile, for in
+      desire alone lies all the ill. Quench the desire, and the deeds will die
+      of inanition. Man himself is sole cause of his own misery. Get rid, then,
+      said the Buddha, of these passions, these strivings for the sake of self,
+      that hold the true soul a prisoner. They have to do with things which we
+      know are transitory: how can they be immortal themselves? We recognize
+      them as subject to our will; they are, then, not the I.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As a man, he taught, becomes conscious that he himself is something
+      distinct from his body, so, if he reflect and ponder, he will come to see
+      that in like manner his appetites, ambitions, hopes, are really extrinsic
+      to the spirit proper. Neither heart nor head is truly the man, for he is
+      conscious of something that stands behind both. Behind desire, behind even
+      the will, lies the soul, the same for all men, one with the soul of the
+      universe. When he has once realized this eternal truth, the man has
+      entered Nirvana. For Nirvana is not an absorption of the individual soul
+      into the soul of all things, since the one has always been a part of the
+      other. Still less is it utter annihilation. It is simply the recognition
+      of the eternal oneness of the two, back through an everlasting past on
+      through an everlasting future.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such is the belief which the Japanese adopted, and which they profess
+      to-day. Such to them is to be the dawn of death's to-morrow; a blessed
+      impersonal immortality, in which all sense of self, illusion that it is,
+      shall itself have ceased to be; a long dreamless sleep, a beatified rest,
+      which no awakening shall ever disturb.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Among such a people personal Christianity converts but few. They accept
+      our material civilization, but they reject our creeds. To preach a
+      prolongation of life appears to them like preaching an extension of
+      sorrow. At most, Christianity succeeds only in making them doubters of
+      what lies beyond this life. But though professing agnosticism while they
+      live, they turn, when the shadows of death's night come on, to the bosom
+      of that faith which teaches that, whatever may have been one's earthly
+      share of happiness, "'tis something better not to be."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Strange it seems at first that those who have looked so long to the rising
+      sun for inspiration should be they who live only in a sort of lethargy of
+      life, while those who for so many centuries have turned their faces
+      steadily to the fading glory of the sunset should be the ones who have
+      embodied the spirit of progress of the world. Perhaps the light, by its
+      very rising, checks the desire to pursue; in its setting it lures one on
+      to follow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Though this religion of impersonality is not their child, it is their
+      choice. They embraced it with the rest that India taught them, centuries
+      ago. But though just as eager to learn of us now as of India then,
+      Christianity fails to commend itself. This is not due to the fact that the
+      Buddhist missionaries came by invitation, and ours do not. Nor is it due
+      to any want of personal character in these latter, but simply to an excess
+      of it in their doctrines.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For to-day the Far East is even more impersonal in its religion than are
+      those from whom that religion originally came. India has returned again to
+      its worship of Brahma, which, though impersonal enough, is less so than is
+      the gospel of Gautama. For it is passively instead of actively impersonal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Buddhism bears to Brahmanism something like the relation that
+      Protestantism does to Roman Catholicism. Both bishops and Brahmans
+      undertake to save all who shall blindly commit themselves to professional
+      guidance, while Buddhists and Protestants alike believe that a man's
+      salvation must be brought about by the action of the man himself. The
+      result is, that in the matter of individuality the two reformed beliefs
+      are further apart than those against which they severally protested. For
+      by the change the personal became more personal, and the impersonal more
+      impersonal than before. The Protestant, from having tamely allowed himself
+      to be led, began to take a lively interest in his own self-improvement;
+      while the Buddhist, from a former apathetic acquiescence in the doctrine
+      of the universally illusive, set to work energetically towards
+      self-extinction. Curious labor for a mind, that of devoting all its
+      strength to the thinking itself out of existence! Not content with being
+      born impersonal, a Far Oriental is constantly striving to make himself
+      more so.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We have seen, then, how in trying to understand these peoples we are
+      brought face to face with impersonality in each of those three expressions
+      of the human soul, speech, thought, yearning. We have looked at them first
+      from a social standpoint. We have seen how singularly little regard is
+      paid the individual from his birth to his death. How he lives his life
+      long the slave of patriarchal customs of so puerile a tendency as to be
+      practically impossible to a people really grown up. How he practises a
+      wholesale system of adoption sufficient of itself to destroy any surviving
+      regard for the ego his other relations might have left. How in his daily
+      life he gives the minimum of thought to the bettering himself in any
+      worldly sense, and the maximum of polite consideration to his neighbor.
+      How, in short, he acts toward himself as much as possible as if he were
+      another, and to that other as if he were himself. Then, not content with
+      standing stranger like upon the threshold, we have sought to see the soul
+      of their civilization in its intrinsic manifestations. We have pushed our
+      inquiry, as it were, one step nearer its home. And the same trait that was
+      apparent sociologically has been exposed in this our antipodal phase of
+      psychical research. We have seen how impersonal is his language, the
+      principal medium of communication between one soul and another; how
+      impersonal are the communings of his soul with itself. How the man turns
+      to nature instead of to his fellowman in silent sympathy. And how, when he
+      speculates upon his coming castles in the air, his most roseate desire is
+      to be but an indistinguishable particle of the sunset clouds and vanish
+      invisible as they into the starry stillness of all-embracing space.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now what does this strange impersonality betoken? Why are these peoples so
+      different from us in this most fundamental of considerations to any
+      people, the consideration of themselves? The answer leads to some
+      interesting conclusions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0008" id="link2HCH0008">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter 8. Imagination.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      If, as is the case with the moon, the earth, as she travelled round her
+      orbit turned always the same face inward, we might expect to find, between
+      the thoughts of that hemisphere which looked continually to the sun, and
+      those of the other peering eternally out at the stars, some such
+      difference as actually exists between ourselves and our longitudinal
+      antipodes. For our conception of the cosmos is of a sunlit world throbbing
+      with life, while their Nirvana finds not unfit expression in the still,
+      cold, fathomless awe of the midnight sky. That we cannot thus directly
+      account for the difference in local coloring serves but to make that
+      difference of more human interest. The dissimilarity between the Western
+      and the Far Eastern attitude of mind has in it something beyond the effect
+      of environment. For it points to the importance of the part which the
+      principle of individuality plays in the great drama daily enacting before
+      our eyes, and which we know as evolution. It shows, as I shall hope to
+      prove, that individuality bears the same relation to the development of
+      mind that the differentiation of species does to the evolution of organic
+      life: that the degree of individualization of a people is the
+      self-recorded measure of its place in the great march of mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All life, whether organic or inorganic, consists, as we know, in a change
+      from a state of simple homogeneity to one of complex heterogeneity. The
+      process is apparently the same in a nebula or a brachiopod, although much
+      more intricate in the latter. The immediate force which works this change,
+      the life principle of things, is, in the case of organic beings, a subtle
+      something which we call spontaneous variation. What this mysterious
+      impulse may be is beyond our present powers of recognition. As yet, the
+      ultimates of all things lie hidden in the womb of the vast unknown. But
+      just as in the case of a man we can tell what organs are vital, though we
+      are ignorant what the vital spark may be, so in our great cosmical laws we
+      can say in what their power resides, though we know not really what they
+      are. Whether mind be but a sublimated form of matter, or, what amounts to
+      the same thing, matter a menial kind of mind, or whether, which seems less
+      likely, it be a something incomparable with substance, of one thing we are
+      sure, the same laws of heredity govern both. In each a like chain of
+      continuity leads from the present to the dim past, a connecting clue which
+      we can follow backward in imagination. Now what spontaneous variation is
+      to the material organism, imagination, apparently, is to the mental one.
+      Just as spontaneous variation is constantly pushing the animal or the
+      plant to push out, as a vine its tendrils, in all directions, while
+      natural conditions are as constantly exercising over it a sort of
+      unconscious pruning power, so imagination is ever at work urging man's
+      mind out and on, while the sentiment of the community, commonly called
+      common sense, which simply means the point already reached by the average,
+      is as steadily tending to keep it at its own level. The environment helps,
+      in the one case as in the other, to the shaping of the development. Purely
+      physical in the first, it is both physical and psychical in the second,
+      the two reacting on each other. But in either case it is only a
+      constraining condition, not the divine impulse itself. Precisely, then, as
+      in the organism, this subtle spirit checked in one direction finds a way
+      to advance in another, and produces in consequence among an originally
+      similar set of bodies a gradual separation into species which grow wider
+      with time, so in brain evolution a like force for like reasons tends
+      inevitably to an ever-increasing individualization.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now what evidence have we that this analogy holds? Let us look at the
+      facts, first as they present themselves subjectively.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The instinct of self-preservation, that guardian angel so persistent to
+      appear when needed, owes its summons to another instinct no less strong,
+      which we may call the instinct of individuality; for with the same innate
+      tenacity with which we severally cling to life do we hold to the idea of
+      our own identity. It is not for the philosophic desire of preserving a
+      very small fraction of humanity at large that we take such pains to avoid
+      destruction; it is that we insensibly regard death as threatening to the
+      continuance of the ego, in spite of the theories of a future life which we
+      have so elaborately developed. Indeed, the psychical shrinking is really
+      the quintessence of the physical fear. We cleave to the abstract idea
+      closer even than to its concrete embodiment. Sooner would we forego this
+      earthly existence than surrender that something we know as self. For
+      sufficient cause we can imagine courting death; we cannot conceive of so
+      much as exchanging our individuality for another's, still less of
+      abandoning it altogether; for gradually a man, as he grows older, comes to
+      regard his body as, after all, separable from himself. It is the soul's
+      covering, rendered indispensable by the climatic conditions of our present
+      existence, one without which we could no longer continue to live here. To
+      forego it does not necessarily negative, so far as we yet know, the
+      possibility of living elsewhere. Some more congenial tropic may be the
+      wandering spirit's fate. But to part with the sense of self seems to be
+      like taking an eternal farewell of the soul. The Western mind shrinks
+      before the bare idea of such a thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The clinging to one's own identity, then, is now an instinct, whatever it
+      may originally have been. It is a something we inherited from our
+      ancestors and which we shall transmit more or less modified to our
+      descendants. How far back this consciousness has been felt passes the
+      possibilities of history to determine, since the recording of it
+      necessarily followed the fact. All we know is that its mention is coeval
+      with chronicle, and its origin lost in allegory. The Bible, one of the
+      oldest written records in the world, begins with a bit of mythology of a
+      very significant kind. When the Jews undertook to trace back their family
+      tree to an idyllic garden of Eden, they mentioned as growing there beside
+      the tree of life, another tree called the tree of knowledge. Of what
+      character this knowledge was is inferable from the sudden
+      self-consciousness that followed the partaking of it. So that if we please
+      we may attribute directly to Eve's indiscretion the many evils of our
+      morbid self-consciousness of the present day. But without indulging in
+      unchivalrous reflections we may draw certain morals from it of both
+      immediate and ultimate applicability.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To begin with, it is a most salutary warning to the introspective, and in
+      the second place it is a striking instance of a myth which is not a sun
+      myth; for it is essentially of human regard, an attempt on man's part to
+      explain that most peculiar attribute of his constitution, the
+      all-possessing sense of self. It looks certainly as if he was not
+      over-proud of his person that he should have deemed its recognition
+      occasion for the primal curse, and among early races the person is for a
+      good deal of the personality. What he lamented was not life but the
+      unavoidable exertion necessary to getting his daily bread, for the
+      question whether life were worth while was as futile then as now, and as
+      inconceivable really as 4-dimensional space.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We are then conscious of individuality as a force within ourselves. But
+      our knowledge by no means ends there; for we are aware of it in the case
+      of others as well.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      About certain people there exists a subtle something which leaves its
+      impress indelibly upon the consciousness of all who come in contact with
+      them. This something is a power, but a power of so indefinable a
+      description that we beg definition by calling it simply the personality of
+      the man. It is not a matter of subsequent reasoning, but of direct
+      perception. We feel it. Sometimes it charms us; sometimes it repels. But
+      we can no more be oblivious to it than we can to the temperature of the
+      air. Its possessor has but to enter the room, and insensibly we are
+      conscious of a presence. It is as if we had suddenly been placed in the
+      field of a magnetic force.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the other hand there are people who produce no effect upon us whatever.
+      They come and go with a like indifference. They are as unimportant
+      psychically as if they were any other portion of the furniture. They never
+      stir us. We might live with them for fifty years and be hardly able to
+      tell, for any influence upon ourselves, whether they existed or not. They
+      remind us of that neutral drab which certain religious sects assume to
+      show their own irrelevancy to the world. They are often most estimable
+      folk, but they are no more capable of inspiring a strong emotion than the
+      other kind are incapable of doing so. And we say the difference is due to
+      the personality or want of personality of the man. Now, in what does this
+      so-called personality consist? Not in bodily presence simply, for men
+      quite destitute of it possess the force in question; not in character
+      only, for we often disapprove of a character whose attraction we are
+      powerless to resist; not in intellect alone, for men more rational fail of
+      stirring us as these unconsciously do. In what, then? In life itself; not
+      that modicum of it, indeed, which suffices simply to keep the machine
+      moving, but in the life principle, the power which causes psychical
+      change; which makes the individual something distinct from all other
+      individuals, a being capable of proving sufficient, if need be, unto
+      himself; which shows itself, in short, as individuality. This is not a
+      mere restatement of the case, for individuality is an objective fact
+      capable of being treated by physical science. And as we know much more at
+      present about physical facts than we do of psychological problems, we may
+      be able to arrive the sooner at solution.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Individuality, personality, and the sense of self are only three different
+      aspects of one and the same thing. They are so many various views of the
+      soul according as we regard it from an intrinsic, an altruistic, or an
+      egoistic standpoint. For by individuality is not meant simply the
+      isolation in a corporeal casing of a small portion of the universal soul
+      of mankind. So far as mind goes, this would not be individuality at all,
+      but the reverse. By individuality we mean that bundle of ideas, thoughts,
+      and daydreams which constitute our separate identity, and by virtue of
+      which we feel each one of us at home within himself. Now man in his
+      mind-development is bound to become more and more distinct from his
+      neighbor. We can hardly conceive a progress so uniform as not to
+      necessitate this. It would be contrary to all we know of natural law,
+      besides contradicting daily experience. For each successive generation
+      bears unmistakable testimony to the fact. Children of the same parents are
+      never exactly like either their parents or one another, and they often
+      differ amazingly from both. In such instances they revert to type, as we
+      say; but inasmuch as the race is steadily advancing in development, such
+      reversion must resemble that of an estate which has been greatly improved
+      since its previous possession. The appearance of the quality is really the
+      sprouting of a seed whose original germ was in some sense coeval with the
+      beginning of things. This mind-seed takes root in some cases and not in
+      others, according to the soil it finds. And as certain traits develop and
+      others do not, one man turns out very differently from his neighbor. Such
+      inevitable distinction implies furthermore that the man shall be sensible
+      of it. Consciousness is the necessary attribute of mental action. Not only
+      is it the sole way we have of knowing mind; without it there would be no
+      mind to know. Not to be conscious of one's self is, mentally speaking, not
+      to be. This complex entity, this little cosmos of a world, the "I," has
+      for its very law of existence self-consciousness, while personality is the
+      effect it produces upon the consciousness of others.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But we may push our inquiry a step further, and find in imagination the
+      cause of this strange force. For imagination, or the image-making faculty,
+      may in a certain sense be said to be the creator of the world within. The
+      separate senses furnish it with material, but to it alone is due the
+      building of our castles, on premises of fact or in the air. For there is
+      no impassable gulf between the two. Coleridge's distinction that
+      imagination drew possible pictures and fancy impossible ones, is itself,
+      except as a classification, an impossible distinction to draw; for it is
+      only the inconceivable that can never be. All else is purely a matter of
+      relation. We may instance dreams which are usually considered to rank
+      among the most fanciful creations of the mind. Who has not in his dreams
+      fallen repeatedly from giddy heights and invariably escaped unhurt? If he
+      had attempted the feat in his waking moments he would assuredly have been
+      dashed to pieces at the bottom. And so we say the thing is impossible. But
+      is it? Only under the relative conditions of his mass and the earth's. If
+      the world he happens to inhabit were not its present size, but the size of
+      one of the tinier asteroids, no such disastrous results would follow a
+      chance misstep. He could there walk off precipices when too closely
+      pursued by bears&mdash;if I remember rightly the usual childish cause of
+      the same&mdash;with perfect impunity. The bear could do likewise,
+      unfortunately. We should have arrived at our conclusion even quicker had
+      we decreased the size both of the man and his world. He would not then
+      have had to tumble actually so far, and would therefore have arrived yet
+      more gently at the foot. This turns out, then, to be a mere question of
+      size. Decrease the scale of the picture, and the impossible becomes
+      possible at once. All fancies are not so easily reducible to actual facts
+      as the one we have taken, but all, perhaps, eventually may be explicable
+      in the same general way. At present we certainly cannot affirm that
+      anything may not be thus explained. For the actual is widening its field
+      every day. Even in this little world of our own we are daily discovering
+      to be fact what we should have thought fiction, like the sailor's mother
+      the tale of the flying fish. Beyond it our ken is widening still more.
+      Gulliver's travels may turn out truer than we think. Could we traverse the
+      inter-planetary ocean of ether, we might eventually find in Jupiter the
+      land of Lilliput or in Ceres some old-time country of the Brobdignagians.
+      For men constituted muscularly like ourselves would have to be
+      proportionately small in the big planet and big in the small one. Still
+      stranger things may exist around other suns. In those bright particular
+      stars&mdash;which the little girl thought pinholes in the dark canopy of
+      the sky to let the glory beyond shine through&mdash;we are finding
+      conditions of existence like yet unlike those we already know. To our
+      groping speculations of the night they almost seem, as we gaze on them in
+      their twinkling, to be winking us a sort of comprehension. Conditions may
+      exist there under which our wildest fancies may be commonplace facts.
+      There may be
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+   "Some Xanadu where Kublai can
+    a stately pleasure dome decree,"
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      and carry out his conceptions to his own disillusionment, perhaps. For if
+      the embodiment of a fancy, however complete, left nothing further to be
+      wished, imagination would have no incentive to work. Coleridge's
+      distinction does very well to separate, empirically, certain kinds of
+      imaginative concepts from certain others; but it has no real foundation in
+      fact. Nor presumably did he mean it to have. But it serves, not inaptly,
+      as a text to point out an important scientific truth, namely, that there
+      are not two such qualities of the mind, but only one. For otherwise we
+      might have supposed the fact too evident to need mention. Imagination is
+      the single source of the new, the one mainspring of psychical advance;
+      reason, like a balance-wheel, only keeping the action regular. For reason
+      is but the touchstone of experience, our own, inherited, or acquired from
+      others. It compares what we imagine with what we know, and gives us answer
+      in terms of the here and the now, which we call the actual. But the actual
+      is really nothing but the local. It does not mark the limits of the
+      possible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That imagination has been the moving spirit of the psychical world is
+      evident, whatever branch of human thought we are pleased to examine. We
+      are in the habit, in common parlance, of making a distinction between the
+      search after truth and the search after beauty, calling the one science
+      and the other art. Now while we are not slow to impute imagination to art,
+      we are by no means so ready to appreciate its connection with science. Yet
+      contrary, perhaps, to exogeric ideas on the subject, it is science rather
+      than art that demands imagination of her votaries. Not that art may not
+      involve the quality to a high degree, but that a high degree of art is
+      quite compatible with a very small amount of imagination. On the one side
+      we may instance painting. Now painting begins its career in the humble
+      capacity of copyist, a pretty poor copyist at that. At first so slight was
+      its skill that the rudest symbols sufficed. "This is a man" was
+      conventionally implied by a few scratches bearing a very distant
+      relationship to the real thing. Gradually, owing to human vanity and a
+      growing taste, pictures improved. Combinations were tried, a bit from one
+      place with a piece from another; a sort of mosaic requiring but a slight
+      amount of imagination. Not that imagination of a higher order has not been
+      called into play, although even now pictures are often happy adaptations
+      rather than creations proper. Some masters have been imaginative; others,
+      unfortunately for themselves and still more for the public, have not. For
+      that the art may attain a high degree of excellence for itself and much
+      distinction for its professors, without calling in the aid of imagination,
+      is evident enough on this side of the globe, without travelling to the
+      other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Take, on the other hand, a branch of science which, to the average layman,
+      seems peculiarly unimaginative, the science of mathematics. Yet at the
+      risk of appearing to cast doubts upon the validity of its conclusions, it
+      might be called the most imaginative product of human thought; for it is
+      simply one vast imagination based upon a few so-called axioms, which are
+      nothing more nor less than the results of experience. It is none the less
+      imaginative because its discoveries always accord subsequently with fact,
+      since man was not aware of them beforehand. Nor are its inevitable
+      conclusions inevitable to any save those possessed of the mathematician's
+      prophetic sight. Once discovered, it requires much less imagination to
+      understand them. With the light coming from in front, it is an easy matter
+      to see what lies behind one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So with other fabrics of human thought, imagination has been spinning and
+      weaving them all. From the most concrete of inventions to the most
+      abstract of conceptions the same force reveals itself upon examination;
+      for there is no gulf between what we call practical and what we consider
+      theoretical. Everything abstract is ultimately of practical use, and even
+      the most immediately utilitarian has an abstract principle at its core. We
+      are too prone to regard the present age of the world as preeminently
+      practical, much as a middle-aged man laments the witching fancies of his
+      boyhood. But, and there is more in the parallel than analogy, if the man
+      be truly imaginative he is none the less so at forty-five than he was at
+      twenty, if his imagination have taken on a more critical form; for this
+      latter half of the nineteenth century is perhaps the most imaginative
+      period the world's history has ever known. While with one hand we are
+      contriving means of transit for our ideas, and even our very voices,
+      compared to which Puck's girdle is anything but talismanic, with the other
+      we are stretching out to grasp the action of mind on mind, pushing our way
+      into the very realm of mind itself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      History tells the same story in detail; for the history of mankind,
+      imperfectly as we know it, discloses the fact that imagination, and not
+      the power of observation nor the kindred capability of perception, has
+      been the cause of soul-evolution.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The savage is but little of an imaginative being. We are tempted, at
+      times, to imagine him more so than he is, for his fanciful folk-lore. The
+      proof of which overestimation is that we find no difficulty in imagining
+      what he does, and even of imagining what he probably imagined, and finding
+      our suppositions verified by discovery. Yet his powers of observation may
+      be marvellously developed. The North American Indian tracks his foe
+      through the forest by signs unrecognizable to a white man, and he reasons
+      most astutely upon them, and still that very man turns out to be a mere
+      child when put before problems a trifle out of his beaten path. And all
+      because his forefathers had not the power to imagine something beyond what
+      they actually saw. The very essence of the force of imagination lies in
+      its ability to change a man's habitat for him. Without it, man would
+      forever have remained, not a mollusk, to be sure, but an animal simply. A
+      plant cannot change its place, an animal cannot alter its conditions of
+      existence except within very narrow bounds; man is free in the sense
+      nothing else in the world is.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What is true of individuals has been true of races. The most imaginative
+      races have proved the greatest factors in the world's advance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now after this look at our own side of the world, let us turn to the
+      other; for it is this very psychological fact that mental progression
+      implies an ever-increasing individualization, and that imagination is the
+      force at work in the process which Far Eastern civilization, taken in
+      connection with our own, reveals. In doing this, it explains incidentally
+      its own seeming anomalies, the most unaccountable of which, apparently, is
+      its existence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We have seen how impressively impersonal the Far East is. Now if
+      individuality be the natural measure of the height of civilization which a
+      nation has reached, impersonality should betoken a relatively laggard
+      position in the race. We ought, therefore, to find among these people
+      certain other characteristics corroborative of a less advanced state of
+      development. In the first place, if imagination be the impulse of which
+      increase in individuality is the resulting motion, that quality should be
+      at a minimum there. The Far Orientals ought to be a particularly
+      unimaginative set of people. Such is precisely what they are. Their lack
+      of imagination is a well-recognized fact. All who have been brought in
+      contact with them have observed it, merchants as strikingly as students.
+      Indeed, the slightest intercourse with them could not fail to make it
+      evident. Their matter-of-fact way of looking at things is truly
+      distressing, coming as it does from so artistic a people. One notices it
+      all the more for the shock. To get a prosaic answer from a man whose
+      appearance and surroundings betoken better things is not calculated to
+      dull that answer's effect. Aston, in a pamphlet on the Altaic tongues,
+      cites an instance which is so much to the point that I venture to repeat
+      it here. He was a true Chinaman, he says, who, when his English master
+      asked him what he thought of
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+   "That orbed maiden
+    With white fires laden
+    Whom mortals call the moon,"
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      replied, "My thinkee all same lamp pidgin" (pidgin meaning thing in the
+      mongrel speech, Chinese in form and English in diction, which goes by the
+      name of pidgin English).
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Their own tongues show the same prosaic character, picturesque as they
+      appear to us at first sight. That effect is due simply to the novelty to
+      us of their expressions. To talk of a pass as an "up-down" has a
+      refreshing turn to our unused ear, but it is a much more descriptive than
+      imaginative figure of speech. Nor is the phrase "the being (so) is
+      difficult," in place of "thank you," a surprisingly beautiful bit of
+      imagery, delightful as it sounds for a change. Our own tongue has, in its
+      daily vocabulary, far more suggestive expressions, only familiarity has
+      rendered us callous to their use. We employ at every instant words which,
+      could we but stop to think of them, would strike us as poetic in the ideas
+      they call up. As has been well said, they were once happy thoughts of some
+      bright particular genius bequeathed to posterity without so much as an
+      accompanying name, and which proved so popular that they soon became but
+      symbols themselves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Their languages are paralleled by their whole life. A lack of any fanciful
+      ideas is one of the most salient traits of all Far Eastern races, if
+      indeed a sad dearth of anything can properly be spoken of as salient.
+      Indirectly their want of imagination betrays itself in their every-day
+      sayings and doings, and more directly in every branch of thought.
+      Originality is not their strong point. Their utter ignorance of science
+      shows this, and paradoxical as it may seem, their art, in spite of its
+      merit and its universality, does the same. That art and imagination are
+      necessarily bound together receives no very forcible confirmation from a
+      land where, nationally speaking, at any rate, the first is easily first
+      and the last easily last, as nations go. It is to quite another quality
+      that their artistic excellence must be ascribed. That the Chinese and
+      later the Japanese have accomplished results at which the rest of the
+      world will yet live to marvel, is due to their&mdash;taste. But taste or
+      delicacy of perception has absolutely nothing to do with imagination. That
+      certain of the senses of Far Orientals are wonderfully keen, as also those
+      parts of the brain that directly respond to them, is beyond question; but
+      such sensitiveness does not in the least involve the less earth-tied
+      portions of the intellect. A peculiar responsiveness to natural beauty, a
+      sort of mental agreement with its earthly environment, is a marked feature
+      of the Japanese mind. But appreciation, however intimate, is a very
+      different thing from originality. The one is commonly the handmaid of the
+      other, but the other by no means always accompanies the one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So much for the cause; now for the effect which we might expect to find if
+      our diagnosis be correct.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If the evolving force be less active in one race than in another, three
+      relative results should follow. In the first place, the race in question
+      will at any given moment be less advanced than its fellow; secondly, its
+      rate of progress will be less rapid; and lastly, its individual members
+      will all be nearer together, just as a stream, in falling from a cliff,
+      starts one compact mass, then gradually increasing in speed, divides into
+      drops, which, growing finer and finer and farther and farther apart,
+      descend at last as spray. All three of these consequences are visible in
+      the career of the Far Eastern peoples. The first result scarcely needs to
+      be proved to us, who are only too ready to believe it without proof. It
+      is, nevertheless, a fact. Viewed unprejudicedly, their civilization is not
+      so advanced a one as our own. Although they are certainly our superiors in
+      some very desirable particulars, their whole scheme is distinctly more
+      aboriginal fundamentally. It is more finished, as far as it goes, but it
+      does not go so far. Less rude, it is more rudimentary. Indeed, as we have
+      seen, its surface-perfection really shows that nature has given less
+      thought to its substance. One may say of it that it is the adult form of a
+      lower type of mind-specification.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The second effect is scarcely less patent. How slow their progress has
+      been, if for centuries now it can be called progress at all, is
+      world-known. Chinese conservatism has passed into a proverb. The pendulum
+      of pulsation in the Middle Kingdom long since came to a stop at the medial
+      point of rest. Centre of civilization, as they call themselves, one would
+      imagine that their mind-machinery had got caught on their own dead centre,
+      and now could not be made to move. Life, which elsewhere is a condition of
+      unstable equilibrium, there is of a fatally stable kind. For the
+      Chinaman's disinclination to progress is something more than vis inertiae;
+      it has become an ardent devotion to the status quo. Jostled, he at once
+      settles back to his previous condition again; much as more materially,
+      after a lifetime spent in California, at his death his body is
+      punctiliously embalmed and sent home across five thousand miles of sea for
+      burial. With the Japanese the condition of affairs is somewhat different.
+      Their tendency to stand still is of a purely passive kind. It is a state
+      of neutral equilibrium, stationary of itself but perfectly responsive to
+      an impulse from without. Left to their own devices, they are conservative
+      enough, but they instantly copy a more advanced civilization the moment
+      they get a chance. This proclivity on their part is not out of keeping
+      with our theory. On the contrary, it is precisely what was to have been
+      expected; for we see the very same apparent contradiction in characters we
+      are thrown with every day. Imitation is the natural substitute for
+      originality. The less strong a man's personality the more prone is he to
+      adopt the ideas of others, on the same principle that a void more easily
+      admits a foreign body than does space that is already occupied; or as a
+      blank piece of paper takes a dye more brilliantly for not being already
+      tinted itself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The third result, the remarkable homogeneity of the people, is not,
+      perhaps, so universally appreciated, but it is equally evident on
+      inspection, and no less weighty in proof. Indeed, the Far Eastern state of
+      things is a kind of charade on the word; for humanity there is singularly
+      uniform. The distance between the extremes of mind-development in Japan is
+      much less than with us. This lack of divergence exists not simply in
+      certain lines of thought, but in all those characteristics by which man is
+      parted from the brutes. In reasoning power, in artistic sensibility, in
+      delicacy of perception, it is the same story. If this were simply the
+      impression at first sight, no deductions could be drawn from it, for an
+      impression of racial similarity invariably marks the first stage of
+      acquaintance of one people by another. Even in outward appearance it is
+      so. We find it at first impossible to tell the Japanese apart; they find
+      it equally impossible to differentiate us. But the present resemblance is
+      not a matter of first impressions. The fact is patent historically. The
+      men whom Japan reveres are much less removed from the common herd than is
+      the case in any Western land. And this has been so from the earliest
+      times. Shakspeares and Newtons have never existed there. Japanese humanity
+      is not the soil to grow them. The comparative absence of genius is fully
+      paralleled by the want of its opposite. Not only are the paths of
+      preeminence untrodden; the purlieus of brutish ignorance are likewise
+      unfrequented. On neither side of the great medial line is the departure of
+      individuals far or frequent. All men there are more alike;&mdash;so much
+      alike, indeed, that the place would seem to offer a sort of forlorn hope
+      for disappointed socialists. Although religious missionaries have not met
+      with any marked success among the natives, this less deserving class of
+      enthusiastic disseminators of an all-possessing belief might do well to
+      attempt it. They would find there a very virgin field of a most
+      promisingly dead level. It is true, human opposition would undoubtedly
+      prevent their tilling it, but Nature, at least, would not present quite
+      such constitutional obstacles as she wisely does with us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The individual's mind is, as it were, an isolated bit of the race mind.
+      The same set of traits will be found in each. Mental characteristics there
+      are a sort of common property, of which a certain undifferentiated portion
+      is indiscriminately allotted to every man at birth. One soul resembles
+      another so much, that in view of the patriarchal system under which they
+      all exist, there seems to the stranger a peculiar appropriateness in so
+      strong a family likeness of mind. An idea of how little one man's brain
+      differs from his neighbor's may be gathered from the fact, that while a
+      common coolie in Japan spends his spare time in playing a chess twice as
+      complicated as ours, the most advanced philosopher is still on the
+      blissfully ignorant side of the pons asinorum.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We find, then, that in all three points the Far East fulfils what our
+      theory demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is one more consideration worthy of notice. We said that the
+      environment had not been the deus ex materia in the matter; but that the
+      soul itself possessed the germ of its own evolution. This fact does not,
+      however, preclude another, that the environment has helped in the process.
+      Change of scene is beneficial to others besides invalids. How stimulating
+      to growth a different habitat can prove, when at all favorable, is perhaps
+      sufficiently shown in the case of the marguerite, which, as an emigrant
+      called white-weed, has usurped our fields. The same has been no less true
+      of peoples. Now these Far Eastern peoples, in comparison with our own
+      forefathers, have travelled very little. A race in its travels gains two
+      things: first it acquires directly a great deal from both places and
+      peoples that it meets, and secondly it is constantly put to its own
+      resources in its struggle for existence, and becomes more personal as the
+      outcome of such strife. The changed conditions, the hostile forces it
+      finds, necessitate mental ingenuity to adapt them and influence it
+      unconsciously. To see how potent these influences prove we have but to
+      look at the two great branches of the Aryan family, the one that for so
+      long now has stayed at home, and the one that went abroad. Destitute of
+      stimulus from without, the Indo-Aryan mind turned upon itself and consumed
+      in dreamy metaphysics the imagination which has made its cousins the
+      leaders in the world's progress to-day. The inevitable numbness of
+      monotony crept over the stay-at-homes. The deadly sameness of their
+      surroundings produced its unavoidable effect. The torpor of the East, like
+      some paralyzing poison, stole into their souls, and they fell into a
+      drowsy slumber only to dream in the land they had formerly wrested from
+      its possessors. Their birthright passed with their cousins into the West.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the case of the Altaic races which we are considering, cause and effect
+      mutually strengthened each other. That they did not travel more is due
+      primarily to a lack of enterprise consequent upon a lack of imagination,
+      and then their want of travel told upon their imagination. They were also
+      unfortunate in their journeying. Their travels were prematurely brought to
+      an end by that vast geographical Nirvana the Pacific Ocean, the great
+      peaceful sea as they call it themselves. That they would have journeyed
+      further is shown by the way their dreams went eastward still. They
+      themselves could not for the preventing ocean, and the lapping of its
+      waters proved a nation's lullaby.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One thing, I think, then, our glance at Far Eastern civilization has more
+      than suggested. The soul, in its progress through the world, tends
+      inevitably to individualization. Yet the more we perceive of the cosmos
+      the more do we recognize an all-pervading unity in it. Its soul must be
+      one, not many. The divine power that made all things is not itself
+      multifold. How to reconcile the ever-increasing divergence with an
+      eventual similarity is a problem at present transcending our
+      generalizations. What we know would seem to be opposed to what we must
+      infer. But perception of how we shall merge the personal in the universal,
+      though at present hidden from sight, may sometime come to us, and the
+      seemingly irreconcilable will then turn out to involve no contradiction at
+      all. For this much is certain: grand as is the great conception of
+      Buddhism, majestic as is the idea of the stately rest it would lead us to,
+      the road here below is not one the life of the world can follow. If
+      earthly existence be an evil, then Buddhism will help us ignore it; but if
+      by an impulse we cannot explain we instinctively crave activity of mind,
+      then the great gospel of Gautama touches us not; for to abandon self&mdash;egoism,
+      that is, not selfishness is the true vacuum which nature abhors. As for
+      Far Orientals, they themselves furnish proof against themselves. That
+      impersonality is not man's earthly goal they unwittingly bear witness; for
+      they are not of those who will survive. Artistic attractive people that
+      they are, their civilization is like their own tree flowers, beautiful
+      blossoms destined never to bear fruit; for whatever we may conceive the
+      far future of another life to be, the immediate effect of impersonality
+      cannot but be annihilating. If these people continue in their old course,
+      their earthly career is closed. Just as surely as morning passes into
+      afternoon, so surely are these races of the Far East, if unchanged,
+      destined to disappear before the advancing nations of the West. Vanish
+      they will off the face of the earth and leave our planet the eventual
+      possession of the dwellers where the day declines. Unless their newly
+      imported ideas really take root, it is from this whole world that Japanese
+      and Koreans, as well as Chinese, will inevitably be excluded. Their
+      Nirvana is already being realized; already it has wrapped Far Eastern Asia
+      in its winding-sheet, the shroud of those whose day was but a dawn, as if
+      in prophetic keeping with the names they gave their homes,&mdash;the Land
+      of the Day's Beginning, and the Land of the Morning Calm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+  <div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1409 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
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+  <head>
+    <title>
+      The Soul of the Far East, by Percival Lowell
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
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+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
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+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
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+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Soul of the Far East, by Percival Lowell
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Soul of the Far East
+
+Author: Percival Lowell
+
+Release Date: September 14, 2008 [EBook #1409]
+Last Updated: February 4, 2013
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SOUL OF THE FAR EAST ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Eric Hutton, and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      THE SOUL OF THE FAR EAST
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      By Percival Lowell
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      Contents
+    </h2>
+    <table summary="" style="margin-right: auto; margin-left: auto">
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0001"> Chapter 1. Individuality. </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0002"> Chapter 2. Family. </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0003"> Chapter 3. Adoption. </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0004"> Chapter 4. Language. </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0005"> Chapter 5. Nature and Art. </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0006"> Chapter 6. Art. </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0007"> Chapter 7. Religion. </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0008"> Chapter 8. Imagination. </a>
+          </p>
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+    </table>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <a name="link2HCH0001" id="link2HCH0001">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter 1. Individuality.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The boyish belief that on the other side of our globe all things are of
+      necessity upside down is startlingly brought back to the man when he first
+      sets foot at Yokohama. If his initial glance does not, to be sure,
+      disclose the natives in the every-day feat of standing calmly on their
+      heads, an attitude which his youthful imagination conceived to be a
+      necessary consequence of their geographical position, it does at least
+      reveal them looking at the world as if from the standpoint of that
+      eccentric posture. For they seem to him to see everything topsy-turvy.
+      Whether it be that their antipodal situation has affected their brains, or
+      whether it is the mind of the observer himself that has hitherto been
+      wrong in undertaking to rectify the inverted pictures presented by his
+      retina, the result, at all events, is undeniable. The world stands
+      reversed, and, taking for granted his own uprightness, the stranger
+      unhesitatingly imputes to them an obliquity of vision, a state of mind
+      outwardly typified by the cat-like obliqueness of their eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If the inversion be not precisely of the kind he expected, it is none the
+      less striking, and impressibly more real. If personal experience has
+      definitely convinced him that the inhabitants of that under side of our
+      planet do not adhere to it head downwards, like flies on a ceiling,&mdash;his
+      early a priori deduction,&mdash;they still appear quite as antipodal,
+      mentally considered. Intellectually, at least, their attitude sets gravity
+      at defiance. For to the mind's eye their world is one huge, comical
+      antithesis of our own. What we regard intuitively in one way from our
+      standpoint, they as intuitively observe in a diametrically opposite manner
+      from theirs. To speak backwards, write backwards, read backwards, is but
+      the a b c of their contrariety. The inversion extends deeper than mere
+      modes of expression, down into the very matter of thought. Ideas of ours
+      which we deemed innate find in them no home, while methods which strike us
+      as preposterously unnatural appear to be their birthright. From the
+      standing of a wet umbrella on its handle instead of its head to dry to the
+      striking of a match away in place of toward one, there seems to be no
+      action of our daily lives, however trivial, but finds with them its
+      appropriate reaction&mdash;equal but opposite. Indeed, to one anxious of
+      conforming to the manners and customs of the country, the only road to
+      right lies in following unswervingly that course which his inherited
+      instincts assure him to be wrong.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet these people are human beings; with all their eccentricities they are
+      men. Physically we cannot but be cognizant of the fact, nor mentally but
+      be conscious of it. Like us, indeed, and yet so unlike are they that we
+      seem, as we gaze at them, to be viewing our own humanity in some
+      mirth-provoking mirror of the mind,&mdash;a mirror that shows us our own
+      familiar thoughts, but all turned wrong side out. Humor holds the glass,
+      and we become the sport of our own reflections. But is it otherwise at
+      home? Do not our personal presentments mock each of us individually our
+      lives long? Who but is the daily dupe of his dressing-glass, and
+      complacently conceives himself to be a very different appearing person
+      from what he is, forgetting that his right side has become his left, and
+      vice versa? Yet who, when by chance he catches sight in like manner of the
+      face of a friend, can keep from smiling at the caricatures which the
+      mirror's left-for-right reversal makes of the asymmetry of that friend's
+      features,&mdash;caricatures all the more grotesque for being utterly
+      unsuspected by their innocent original? Perhaps, could we once see
+      ourselves as others see us, our surprise in the case of foreign peoples
+      might be less pronounced.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Regarding, then, the Far Oriental as a man, and not simply as a
+      phenomenon, we discover in his peculiar point of view a new importance,&mdash;the
+      possibility of using it stereoptically. For his mind-photograph of the
+      world can be placed side by side with ours, and the two pictures combined
+      will yield results beyond what either alone could possibly have afforded.
+      Thus harmonized, they will help us to realize humanity. Indeed it is only
+      by such a combination of two different aspects that we ever perceive
+      substance and distinguish reality from illusion. What our two eyes make
+      possible for material objects, the earth's two hemispheres may enable us
+      to do for mental traits. Only the superficial never changes its
+      expression; the appearance of the solid varies with the standpoint of the
+      observer. In dreamland alone does everything seem plain, and there all is
+      unsubstantial.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To say that the Japanese are not a savage tribe is of course unnecessary;
+      to repeat the remark, anything but superfluous, on the principle that what
+      is a matter of common notoriety is very apt to prove a matter about which
+      uncommonly little is known. At present we go halfway in recognition of
+      these people by bestowing upon them a demi-diploma of mental development
+      called semi-civilization, neglecting, however, to specify in what the
+      fractional qualification consists. If the suggestion of a second moiety,
+      as of something directly complementary to them, were not indirectly
+      complimentary to ourselves, the expression might pass; but, as it is, the
+      self-praise is rather too obvious to carry conviction. For Japan's claim
+      to culture is not based solely upon the exports with which she supplements
+      our art, nor upon the paper, china, and bric-a-brac with which she adorns
+      our rooms; any more than Western science is adequately represented in
+      Japan by our popular imports there of kerosene oil, matches, and beer.
+      Only half civilized the Far East presumably is, but it is so rather in an
+      absolute than a relative sense; in the sense of what might have been, not
+      of what is. It is so as compared, not with us, but with the eventual
+      possibilities of humanity. As yet, neither system, Western nor Eastern, is
+      perfect enough to serve in all things as standard for the other. The light
+      of truth has reached each hemisphere through the medium of its own mental
+      crystallization, and this has polarized it in opposite ways, so that now
+      the rays that are normal to the eyes of the one only produce darkness to
+      those of the other. For the Japanese civilization in the sense of not
+      being savagery is the equal of our own. It is not in the polish that the
+      real difference lies; it is in the substance polished. In politeness, in
+      delicacy, they have as a people no peers. Art has been their mistress,
+      though science has never been their master. Perhaps for this very reason
+      that art, not science, has been the Muse they courted, the result has been
+      all the more widespread. For culture there is not the attainment of the
+      few, but the common property of the people. If the peaks of intellect rise
+      less eminent, the plateau of general elevation stands higher. But little
+      need be said to prove the civilization of a land where ordinary tea-house
+      girls are models of refinement, and common coolies, when not at work, play
+      chess for pastime.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If Japanese ways look odd at first sight, they but look more odd on closer
+      acquaintance. In a land where, to allow one's understanding the freer play
+      of indoor life, one begins, not by taking off his hat, but by removing his
+      boots, he gets at the very threshold a hint that humanity is to be
+      approached the wrong end to. When, after thus entering a house, he tries
+      next to gain admittance to the mind of its occupant, the suspicion becomes
+      a certainty. He discovers that this people talk, so to speak, backwards;
+      that before he can hope to comprehend them, or make himself understood in
+      return, he must learn to present his thoughts arranged in inverse order
+      from the one in which they naturally suggest themselves to his mind. His
+      sentences must all be turned inside out. He finds himself lost in a
+      labyrinth of language. The same seems to be true of the thoughts it
+      embodies. The further he goes the more obscure the whole process becomes,
+      until, after long groping about for some means of orienting himself, he
+      lights at last upon the clue. This clue consists in "the survival of the
+      unfittest."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the civilization of Japan we have presented to us a most interesting
+      case of partially arrested development; or, to speak esoterically, we find
+      ourselves placed face to face with a singular example of a completed
+      race-life. For though from our standpoint the evolution of these people
+      seems suddenly to have come to an end in mid-career, looked at more
+      intimately it shows all the signs of having fully run its course.
+      Development ceased, not because of outward obstruction, but from purely
+      intrinsic inability to go on. The intellectual machine was not shattered;
+      it simply ran down. To this fact the phenomenon owes its peculiar
+      interest. For we behold here in the case of man the same spectacle that we
+      see cosmically in the case of the moon, the spectacle of a world that has
+      died of old age. No weak spot in their social organism destroyed them from
+      within; no epidemic, in the shape of foreign hordes, fell upon them from
+      without. For in spite of the fact that China offers the unique example of
+      a country that has simply lived to be conquered, mentally her masters have
+      invariably become her pupils. Having ousted her from her throne as ruler,
+      they proceeded to sit at her feet as disciples. Thus they have rather
+      helped than hindered her civilization.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whatever portion of the Far East we examine we find its mental history to
+      be the same story with variations. However unlike China, Korea, and Japan
+      are in some respects, through the careers of all three we can trace the
+      same life-spirit. It is the career of the river Jordan rising like any
+      other stream from the springs among the mountains only to fall after a
+      brief existence into the Dead Sea. For their vital force had spent itself
+      more than a millennium ago. Already, then, their civilization had in its
+      deeper developments attained its stature, and has simply been perfecting
+      itself since. We may liken it to some stunted tree, that, finding itself
+      prevented from growth, bastes the more luxuriantly to put forth flowers
+      and fruit. For not the final but the medial processes were skipped. In
+      those superficial amenities with which we more particularly link our idea
+      of civilization, these peoples continued to grow. Their refinement, if
+      failing to reach our standard in certain respects, surpasses ours
+      considering the bare barbaric basis upon which it rests. For it is as true
+      of the Japanese as of the proverbial Russian, though in a more scientific
+      sense, that if you scratch him you will find the ancestral Tartar. But it
+      is no less true that the descendants of this rude forefather have now
+      taken on a polish of which their own exquisite lacquer gives but a faint
+      reflection. The surface was perfected after the substance was formed. Our
+      word finish, with its double meaning, expresses both the process and the
+      result.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There entered, to heighten the bizarre effect, a spirit common in minds
+      that lack originality&mdash;the spirit of imitation. Though consequent
+      enough upon a want of initiative, the results of this trait appear
+      anything but natural to people of a more progressive past. The proverbial
+      collar and pair of spurs look none the less odd to the stranger for being
+      a mental instead of a bodily habit. Something akin to such a case of
+      unnatural selection has there taken place. The orderly procedure of
+      natural evolution was disastrously supplemented by man. For the fact that
+      in the growth of their tree of knowledge the branches developed out of all
+      proportion to the trunk is due to a practice of culture-grafting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From before the time when they began to leave records of their actions the
+      Japanese have been a nation of importers, not of merchandise, but of
+      ideas. They have invariably shown the most advanced free-trade spirit in
+      preferring to take somebody else's ready-made articles rather than to try
+      to produce any brand-new conceptions themselves. They continue to follow
+      the same line of life. A hearty appreciation of the things of others is
+      still one of their most winning traits. What they took they grafted bodily
+      upon their ancestral tree, which in consequence came to present a most
+      unnaturally diversified appearance. For though not unlike other nations in
+      wishing to borrow, if their zeal in the matter was slightly excessive,
+      they were peculiar in that they never assimilated what they took. They
+      simply inserted it upon the already existing growth. There it remained,
+      and throve, and blossomed, nourished by that indigenous Japanese sap,
+      taste. But like grafts generally, the foreign boughs were not much
+      modified by their new life-blood, nor was the tree in its turn at all
+      affected by them. Connected with it only as separable parts of its
+      structure, the cuttings might have been lopped off again without
+      influencing perceptibly the condition of the foster-parent stem. The
+      grafts in time grew to be great branches, but the trunk remained through
+      it all the trunk of a sapling. In other words, the nation grew up to man's
+      estate, keeping the mind of its childhood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What is thus true of the Japanese is true likewise of the Koreans and of
+      the Chinese. The three peoples, indeed, form so many links in one long
+      chain of borrowing. China took from India, then Korea copied China, and
+      lastly Japan imitated Korea. In this simple manner they successively
+      became possessed of a civilization which originally was not the property
+      of any one of them. In the eagerness they all evinced in purloining what
+      was not theirs, and in the perfect content with which they then proceeded
+      to enjoy what they had taken, they remind us forcibly of that
+      happy-go-lucky class in the community which prefers to live on
+      questionable loans rather than work itself for a living. Like those same
+      individuals, whatever interest the Far Eastern people may succeed in
+      raising now, Nature will in the end make them pay dearly for their lack of
+      principal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Far Eastern civilization resembles, in fact, more a mechanical mixture
+      of social elements than a well differentiated chemical compound. For in
+      spite of the great variety of ingredients thrown into its caldron of
+      destiny, as no affinity existed between them, no combination resulted. The
+      power to fuse was wanting. Capability to evolve anything is not one of the
+      marked characteristics of the Far East. Indeed, the tendency to
+      spontaneous variation, Nature's mode of making experiments, would seem
+      there to have been an enterprising faculty that was exhausted early.
+      Sleepy, no doubt, from having got up betimes with the dawn, these dwellers
+      in the far lands of the morning began to look upon their day as already
+      well spent before they had reached its noon. They grew old young, and have
+      remained much the same age ever since. What they were centuries ago, that
+      at bottom they are to-day. Take away the European influence of the last
+      twenty years, and each man might almost be his own great-grandfather. In
+      race characteristics he is yet essentially the same. The traits that
+      distinguished these peoples in the past have been gradually extinguishing
+      them ever since. Of these traits, stagnating influences upon their career,
+      perhaps the most important is the great quality of impersonality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If we take, through the earth's temperate zone, a belt of country whose
+      northern and southern edges are determined by certain limiting isotherms,
+      not more than half the width of the zone apart, we shall find that we have
+      included in a relatively small extent of surface almost all the nations of
+      note in the world, past or present. Now if we examine this belt, and
+      compare the different parts of it with one another, we shall be struck by
+      a remarkable fact. The peoples inhabiting it grow steadily more personal
+      as we go west. So unmistakable is this gradation of spirit, that one is
+      tempted to ascribe it to cosmic rather than to human causes. It is as
+      marked as the change in color of the human complexion observable along any
+      meridian, which ranges from black at the equator to blonde toward the
+      pole. In like manner, the sense of self grows more intense as we follow in
+      the wake of the setting sun, and fades steadily as we advance into the
+      dawn. America, Europe, the Levant, India, Japan, each is less personal
+      than the one before. We stand at the nearer end of the scale, the Far
+      Orientals at the other. If with us the I seems to be of the very essence
+      of the soul, then the soul of the Far East may be said to be
+      Impersonality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Curious as this characteristic is as a fact, it is even more interesting
+      as a factor. For what it betokens of these peoples in particular may
+      suggest much about man generally. It may mark a stride in theory, if a
+      standstill in practice. Possibly it may help us to some understanding of
+      ourselves. Not that it promises much aid to vexed metaphysical questions,
+      but as a study in sociology it may not prove so vain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And for a thing which is always with us, its discussion may be said to be
+      peculiarly opportune just now. For it lies at the bottom of the most
+      pressing questions of the day. Of the two great problems that stare the
+      Western world in the face at the present moment, both turn to it for
+      solution. Agnosticism, the foreboding silence of those who think,
+      socialism, communism, and nihilism, the petulant cry of those who do not,
+      alike depend ultimately for the right to be upon the truth or the falsity
+      of the sense of self.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For if there be no such actual thing as individuality, if the feeling we
+      call by that name be naught but the transient illusion the Buddhists would
+      have us believe it, any faith founded upon it as basis vanishes as does
+      the picture in a revolving kaleidoscope,&mdash;less enduring even than the
+      flitting phantasmagoria of a dream. If the ego be but the passing shadow
+      of the material brain, at the disintegration of the gray matter what will
+      become of us? Shall we simply lapse into an indistinguishable part of the
+      vast universe that compasses us round? At the thought we seem to stand
+      straining our gaze, on the shore of the great sea of knowledge, only to
+      watch the fog roll in, and hide from our view even those headlands of hope
+      that, like beseeching hands, stretch out into the deep.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So more materially. If individuality be a delusion of the mind, what
+      motive potent enough to excite endeavor in the breast of an ordinary
+      mortal remains? Philosophers, indeed, might still work for the advancement
+      of mankind, but mankind itself would not continue long to labor
+      energetically for what should profit only the common weal. Take away the
+      stimulus of individuality, and action is paralyzed at once. For with most
+      men the promptings of personal advantage only afford sufficient incentive
+      to effort. Destroy this force, then any consideration due it lapses, and
+      socialism is not only justified, it is raised instantly into an axiom of
+      life. The community, in that case, becomes itself the unit, the
+      indivisible atom of existence. Socialism, then communism, then nihilism,
+      follow in inevitable sequence. That even the Far Oriental, with all his
+      numbing impersonality, has not touched this goal may at least suggest that
+      individuality is a fact.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But first, what do we know about its existence ourselves?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Very early in the course of every thoughtful childhood an event takes
+      place, by the side of which, to the child himself, all other events sink
+      into insignificance. It is not one that is recognized and chronicled by
+      the world, for it is wholly unconnected with action. No one but the child
+      is aware of its occurrence, and he never speaks of it to others. Yet to
+      that child it marks an epoch. So intensely individual does it seem that
+      the boy is afraid to avow it, while in reality so universal is it that
+      probably no human being has escaped its influence. Though subjective
+      purely, it has more vividness than any external event; and though strictly
+      intrinsic to life, it is more startling than any accident of fate or
+      fortune. This experience of the boy's, at once so singular and yet so
+      general, is nothing less than the sudden revelation to him one day of the
+      fact of his own personality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Somewhere about the time when sensation is giving place to sensitiveness
+      as the great self-educator, and the knowledge gained by the five bodily
+      senses is being fused into the wisdom of that mental one we call common
+      sense, the boy makes a discovery akin to the act of waking up. All at once
+      he becomes conscious of himself; and the consciousness has about it a
+      touch of the uncanny. Hitherto he has been aware only of matter; he now
+      first realizes mind. Unwarned, unprepared, he is suddenly ushered before
+      being, and stands awe-struck in the presence of&mdash;himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If the introduction to his own identity was startling, there is nothing
+      reassuring in the feeling that this strange acquaintanceship must last.
+      For continue it does. It becomes an unsought intimacy he cannot shake off.
+      Like to his own shadow he cannot escape it. To himself a man cannot but be
+      at home. For years this alter ego haunts him, for he imagines it an
+      idiosyncrasy of his own, a morbid peculiarity he dare not confide to any
+      one, for fear of being thought a fool. Not till long afterwards, when he
+      has learned to live as a matter of course with his ever-present ghost,
+      does he discover that others have had like familiars themselves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sometimes this dawn of consciousness is preceded by a long twilight of
+      soul-awakening; but sometimes, upon more sensitive and subtler natures,
+      the light breaks with all the suddenness of a sunrise at the equator,
+      revealing to the mind's eye an unsuspected world of self within. But in
+      whatever way we may awake to it, the sense of personality, when first
+      realized, appears already, like the fabled Goddess of Wisdom, full grown
+      in the brain. From the moment when we first remember ourselves we seem to
+      be as old as we ever seem to others afterwards to become. We grow, indeed,
+      in knowledge, in wisdom, in experience, as our years increase, but deep
+      down in our heart of hearts we are still essentially the same. To be sure,
+      people pay us more deference than they did, which suggests a doubt at
+      times whether we may not have changed; small boys of a succeeding
+      generation treat us with a respect that causes us inwardly to smile, as we
+      think how little we differ from them, if they but knew it. For at bottom
+      we are not conscious of change from that morning, long ago, when first we
+      realized ourselves. We feel just as young now as we felt old then. We are
+      but amused at the world's discrimination where we can detect no
+      difference.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Every human being has been thus "twice born": once as matter, once as
+      mind. Nor is this second birth the birthright only of mankind. All the
+      higher animals probably, possibly even the lower too, have experienced
+      some such realization of individual identity. However that may be,
+      certainly to all races of men has come this revelation; only the degree in
+      which they have felt its force has differed immensely. It is one thing to
+      the apathetic, fatalistic Turk, and quite another matter to an energetic,
+      nervous American. Facts, fancies, faiths, all show how wide is the
+      variance in feelings. With them no introspective [greek]cnzhi seauton
+      overexcites the consciousness of self. But with us; as with those of old
+      possessed of devils, it comes to startle and stays to distress. Too apt is
+      it to prove an ever-present, undesirable double. Too often does it play
+      the part of uninvited spectre at the feast, whose presence no one save its
+      unfortunate victim suspects. The haunting horror of his own identity is to
+      natures far less eccentric than Kenelm Chillingly's only too common a
+      curse. To this companionship, paradoxical though it sound, is principally
+      due the peculiar loneliness of childhood. For nothing is so isolating as a
+      persistent idea which one dares not confide.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And yet,&mdash;stranger paradox still,&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. With
+      us the idea seems the bitter fruit of material philosophy; by them it was
+      looked upon as the fairest flower of their faith. What is dreaded now as
+      the impious suggestion of the godless four thousand years ago was
+      reverenced as a sacred tenet of religion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Shorter even than his short threescore years and ten is that soul's life
+      of which man is directly cognizant. Bounded by two seemingly impersonal
+      states is the personal consciousness of which he is made aware: the one
+      the infantile existence that precedes his boyish discovery, the other the
+      gloom that grows with years,&mdash;two twilights that fringe the two
+      borders of his day. But with the Far Oriental, life is all twilight. For
+      in Japan and China both states are found together. There, side by side
+      with the present unconsciousness of the babe exists the belief in a coming
+      unconsciousness for the man. So inseparably blended are the two that the
+      known truth of the one seems, for that very bond, to carry with it the
+      credentials of the other. Can it be that the personal, progressive West is
+      wrong, and the impersonal, impassive East right? Surely not. Is the other
+      side of the world in advance of us in mind-development, even as it
+      precedes us in the time of day; or just as our noon is its night, may it
+      not be far in our rear? Is not its seeming wisdom rather the
+      precociousness of what is destined never to go far?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Brought suddenly upon such a civilization, after the blankness of a long
+      ocean voyage, one is reminded instinctively of the feelings of that
+      bewildered individual who, after a dinner at which he had eventually
+      ceased to be himself, was by way of pleasantry left out overnight in a
+      graveyard, on their way home, by his humorously inclined companions; and
+      who, on awaking alone, in a still dubious condition, looked around him in
+      surprise, rubbed his eyes two or three times to no purpose, and finally
+      muttered in a tone of awe-struck conviction, "Well, either I'm the first
+      to rise, or I'm a long way behind time!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whether their failure to follow the natural course of evolution results in
+      bringing them in at the death just the same or not, these people are now,
+      at any rate, stationary not very far from the point at which we all set
+      out. They are still in that childish state of development before
+      self-consciousness has spoiled the sweet simplicity of nature. An
+      impersonal race seems never to have fully grown up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Partly for its own sake, partly for ours, this most distinctive feature of
+      the Far East, its marked impersonality, is well worthy particular
+      attention; for while it collaterally suggests pregnant thoughts about
+      ourselves, it directly underlies the deeper oddities of a civilization
+      which is the modern eighth wonder of the world. We shall see this as we
+      look at what these people are, at what they were, and at what they hope to
+      become; not historically, but psychologically, as one might perceive, were
+      he but wise enough, in an acorn, besides the nut itself, two oaks, that
+      one from which it fell, and that other which from it will rise. These
+      three states, which we may call its potential past, present, and future,
+      may be observed and studied in three special outgrowths of a race's
+      character: in its language, in its every-day thoughts, and in its
+      religion. For in the language of a people we find embalmed the spirit of
+      its past; in its every-day thoughts, be they of arts or sciences, is
+      wrapped up its present life; in its religion lie enfolded its dreamings of
+      a future. From out each of these three subjects in the Far East
+      impersonality stares us in the face. Upon this quality as a foundation
+      rests the Far Oriental character. It is individually rather than
+      nationally that I propose to scan it now. It is the action of a particle
+      in the wave of world-development I would watch, rather than the
+      propagation of the wave itself. Inferences about the movement of the whole
+      will follow of themselves a knowledge of the motion of its parts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But before we attack the subject esoterically, let us look a moment at the
+      man as he appears in his relation to the community. Such a glance will
+      suggest the peculiar atmosphere of impersonality that pervades the people.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      However lacking in cleverness, in merit, or in imagination a man may be,
+      there are in our Western world, if his existence there be so much as
+      noticed at all, three occasions on which he appears in print. His birth,
+      his marriage, and his death are all duly chronicled in type, perhaps as
+      sufficiently typical of the general unimportance of his life. Mention of
+      one's birth, it is true, is an aristocratic privilege, confined to the
+      world of English society. In democratic America, no doubt because all men
+      there are supposed to be born free and equal, we ignore the first event,
+      and mention only the last two episodes, about which our national
+      astuteness asserts no such effacing equality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Accepting our newspaper record as a fair enough summary of the biography
+      of an average man, let us look at these three momentous occasions in the
+      career of a Far Oriental.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0002" id="link2HCH0002">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter 2. Family.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      In the first place, then, the poor little Japanese baby is ushered into
+      this world in a sadly impersonal manner, for he is not even accorded the
+      distinction of a birthday. He is permitted instead only the much less
+      special honor of a birth-year. Not that he begins his separate existence
+      otherwise than is the custom of mortals generally, at a definite instant
+      of time, but that very little subsequent notice is ever taken of the fact.
+      On the contrary, from the moment he makes his appearance he is spoken of
+      as a year old, and this same age he continues to be considered in most
+      simple ease of calculation, till the beginning of the next calendar year.
+      When that epoch of general rejoicing arrives, he is credited with another
+      year himself. So is everybody else. New Year's day is a common birthday
+      for the community, a sort of impersonal anniversary for his whole world. A
+      like reckoning is followed in China and Korea. Upon the disadvantages of
+      being considered from one's birth up at least one year and possibly two
+      older than one really is, it lies beyond our present purpose to expatiate.
+      It is quite evident that woman has had no voice in the framing of such a
+      chronology. One would hardly imagine that man had either, so astronomic is
+      the system. A communistic age is however but an unavoidable detail of the
+      general scheme whose most suggestive feature consists in the subordination
+      of the actual birthday of the individual to the fictitious birthday of the
+      community. For it is not so much the want of commemoration shown the
+      subject as the character of the commemoration which is significant. Some
+      slight notice is indeed paid to birthdays during early childhood, but even
+      then their observance is quite secondary in importance to that of the
+      great impersonal anniversaries of the third day of the third moon and the
+      fifth day of the fifth moon. These two occasions celebrated the coming of
+      humanity into the world with an impersonality worthy of the French
+      revolutionary calendar. The first of them is called the festival of girls,
+      and commemorates the birth of girls generally, the advent of the universal
+      feminine, as one may say. The second is a corresponding anniversary for
+      boys. Owing to its sex, the latter is the greater event of the two, and in
+      consequence of its most conspicuous feature is styled the festival of
+      fishes. The fishes are hollow paper images of the "tai" from four to six
+      feet in length, tied to the top of a long pole planted in the ground and
+      tipped with a gilded ball. Holes in the paper at the mouth and the tail
+      enable the wind to inflate the body so that it floats about horizontally,
+      swaying hither and thither, and tugging at the line after the manner of a
+      living thing. The fish are emblems of good luck, and are set up in the
+      courtyard of every house where a son has been born during the year. On
+      this auspicious day Tokio is suddenly transformed into eighty square miles
+      of aquarium.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For any more personal purpose New Year's day eclipses all particular
+      anniversaries. Then everybody congratulates everybody else upon everything
+      in general, and incidentally upon being alive. Such substitution of an
+      abstract for a concrete birthday, although exceedingly convenient for
+      others, must at least conduce to self-forgetfulness on the part of its
+      proper possessor, and tend inevitably to merge the identity of the
+      individual in that of the community.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It fares hardly better with the Far Oriental in the matter of marriage.
+      Although he is, as we might think, the person most interested in the
+      result, he is permitted no say in the affair whatever. In fact, it is not
+      his affair at all, but his father's. His hand is simply made a cat's-paw
+      of. The matter is entirely a business transaction, entered into by the
+      parent and conducted through regular marriage brokers. In it he plays only
+      the part of a marionette. His revenge for being thus bartered out of what
+      might be the better half of his life, he takes eventually on the next
+      succeeding generation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His death may be said to be the most important act of his whole life. For
+      then only can his personal existence be properly considered to begin. By
+      it he joins the great company of ancestors who are to these people of
+      almost more consequence than living folk, and of much more individual
+      distinction. Particularly is this the case in China and Korea, but the
+      same respect, though in a somewhat less rigid form, is paid the dead in
+      Japan. Then at last the individual receives that recognition which was
+      denied him in the flesh. In Japan a mortuary tablet is set up to him in
+      the house and duly worshipped; on the continent the ancestors are given a
+      dwelling of their own, and even more devotedly reverenced. But in both
+      places the cult is anything but funereal. For the ancestral tombs are
+      temples and pleasure pavilions at the same time, consecrated not simply to
+      rites and ceremonies, but to family gatherings and general jollification.
+      And the fortunate defunct must feel, if he is still half as sentient as
+      his dutiful descendants suppose, that his earthly life, like other
+      approved comedies, has ended well.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Important, however, as these critical points in his career may be reckoned
+      by his relatives, they are scarcely calculated to prove equally epochal to
+      the man himself. In a community where next to no note is ever taken of the
+      anniversary of his birth, some doubt as to the special significance of
+      that red-letter day may not unnaturally creep into his own mind. While in
+      regard to his death, although it may be highly flattering for him to know
+      that he will certainly become somebody when he shall have ceased,
+      practically, to be anybody, such tardy recognition is scarcely timely
+      enough to be properly appreciated. Human nature is so earth-tied, after
+      all, that a post-mundane existence is very apt to seem immaterial as well
+      as be so.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With the old familiar landmarks of life obliterated in this wholesale
+      manner, it is to be doubted whether one of us, placed in the midst of such
+      a civilization, would know himself. He certainly would derive but scanty
+      satisfaction from the recognition if he did. Even Nirvana might seem a
+      happy limbo by comparison. With a communal, not to say a cosmic, birthday,
+      and a conventional wife, he might well deem his separate existence the
+      shadow of a shade and embrace Buddhism from mere force of circumstances.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Further investigation would not shake his opinion. For a far-oriental
+      career is thoroughly in keeping with these, its typical turning-points.
+      From one end of its course to the other it is painfully impersonal. In its
+      regular routine as in its more salient junctures, life presents itself to
+      these races a totally different affair from what it seems to us. The cause
+      lies in what is taken to be the basis of socio-biology, if one may so
+      express it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the Far East the social unit, the ultimate molecule of existence, is
+      not the individual, but the family.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We occidentals think we value family. We even parade our pretensions so
+      prominently as sometimes to tread on other people's prejudices of a like
+      nature. Yet we scarcely seem to appreciate the inheritance. For with a
+      logic which does us questionable credit, we are proud of our ancestors in
+      direct proportion to their remoteness from ourselves, thus permitting
+      Democracy to revenge its insignificance by smiling at our self-imposed
+      satire. To esteem a man in inverse ratio to the amount of remarkable blood
+      he has inherited is, to say the least, bathetic. Others, again, make
+      themselves objectionable by preferring their immediate relatives to all
+      less connected companions, and cling to their cousins so closely that
+      affection often culminates in matrimony, nature's remonstrances
+      notwithstanding. But with all the pride or pleasure which we take in the
+      members of our particular clan, our satisfaction really springs from
+      viewing them on an autocentric theory of the social system. In our own
+      eyes we are the star about which, as in Joseph's dream, our relatives
+      revolve and upon which they help to shed an added lustre. Our Ptolemaic
+      theory of society is necessitated by our tenacity to the personal
+      standpoint. This fixed idea of ours causes all else seemingly to rotate
+      about it. Such an egoistic conception is quite foreign to our longitudinal
+      antipodes. However much appearances may agree, the fundamental principles
+      upon which family consideration is based are widely different in the two
+      hemispheres. For the far-eastern social universe turns on a patricentric
+      pivot.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Upon the conception of the family as the social and political unit depends
+      the whole constitution of China. The same theory somewhat modified
+      constitutes the life-principle of Korea, of Japan, and of their less
+      advanced cousins who fill the vast centre of the Asiatic continent. From
+      the emperor on his throne to the common coolie in his hovel it is the idea
+      of kinship that knits the entire body politic together. The Empire is one
+      great family; the family is a little empire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The one developed out of the other. The patriarchal is, as is well known,
+      probably the oldest political system in the world. All nations may be said
+      to have experienced such a paternal government, but most nations outgrew
+      it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now the interesting fact about the yellow branch of the human race is, not
+      that they had so juvenile a constitution, but that they have it; that it
+      has persisted practically unchanged from prehistoric ages. It is certainly
+      surprising in this kaleidoscopic world whose pattern is constantly
+      changing as time merges one combination of its elements into another, that
+      on the other side of the globe this set should have remained the same. Yet
+      in spite of the lapse of years, in spite of the altered conditions of
+      existence, in spite of an immense advance in civilization, such a
+      primitive state of society has continued there to the present day, in all
+      its essentials what it was when as nomads the race forefathers wandered
+      peacefully or otherwise over the plains of Central Asia. The principle
+      helped them to expand; it has simply cramped them ever since. For, instead
+      of dissolving like other antiquated views, it has become, what it was
+      bound to become if it continued to last, crystallized into an institution.
+      It had practically reached this condition when it received a theoretical,
+      not to say a theological recognition which gave it mundane immortality. A
+      couple of millenniums ago Confucius consecrated filial duty by making it
+      the basis of the Chinese moral code. His hand was the finishing touch of
+      fossilification. For since the sage set his seal upon the system no one
+      has so much as dreamt of changing it. The idea of confuting Confucius
+      would be an act of impiety such as no Chinaman could possibly commit. Not
+      that the inadmissibility of argument is due really to the authority of the
+      philosopher, but that it lies ingrained in the character of the people.
+      Indeed the genius of the one may be said to have consisted in divining the
+      genius of the other. Confucius formulated the prevailing practice, and in
+      so doing helped to make it perpetual. He gave expression to the national
+      feeling, and like expressions, generally his, served to stamp the idea all
+      the more indelibly upon the national consciousness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In this manner the family from a natural relation grew into a highly
+      unnatural social anachronism. The loose ties of a roving life became
+      fetters of a fixed conventionality. Bonds originally of mutual advantage
+      hardened into restrictions by which the young were hopelessly tethered to
+      the old. Midway in its course the race undertook to turn round and face
+      backwards, as it journeyed on. Its subsequent advance could be nothing but
+      slow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The head of a family is so now in something of a corporeal sense. From him
+      emanate all its actions; to him are responsible all its parts. Any other
+      member of it is as incapable of individual expression as is the hand, or
+      the foot, or the eye of man. Indeed, Confucian doctors of divinity might
+      appropriately administer psychically to the egoistic the rebuke of the
+      Western physician to the too self-analytic youth who, finding that, after
+      eating, his digestion failed to give him what he considered its proper
+      sensations, had come to consult the doctor as to how it ought to feel.
+      "Feel! young man," he was answered, "you ought not to be aware that you
+      have a digestion." So with them, a normally constituted son knows not what
+      it is to possess a spontaneity of his own. Indeed, this very word "own,"
+      which so long ago in our own tongue took to itself the symbol of
+      possession, well exemplifies his dependent state. China furnishes the most
+      conspicuous instance of the want of individual rights. A Chinese son
+      cannot properly be said to own anything. The title to the land he tills is
+      vested absolutely in the family, of which he is an undivided thirtieth, or
+      what-not. Even the administration of the property is not his, but resides
+      in the family, represented by its head. The outward symbols of ownership
+      testify to the fact. The bourns that mark the boundaries of the fields
+      bear the names of families, not of individuals. The family, as such, is
+      the proprietor, and its lands are cultivated and enjoyed in common by all
+      the constituents of the clan. In the tenure of its real estate, the
+      Chinese family much resembles the Russian Mir. But so far as his personal
+      state is concerned, the Chinese son outslaves the Slav. For he lives at
+      home, under the immediate control of the paternal will&mdash;in the most
+      complete of serfdoms, a filial one. Even existence becomes a communal
+      affair. From the family mansion, or set of mansions, in which all its
+      members dwell, to the family mausoleum, to which they will all eventually
+      be borne, a man makes his life journey in strict company with his kin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A man's life is thus but an undivisible fraction of the family life. How
+      essentially so will appear from the following slight sketch of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To begin at the beginning, his birth is a very important event&mdash;for
+      the household, at which no one fails to rejoice except the new-comer. He
+      cries. The general joy, however, depends somewhat upon his sex. If the
+      baby chances to be a boy, everybody is immensely pleased; if a girl, there
+      is considerably less effusion shown. In the latter case the more impulsive
+      relatives are unmistakably sorry; the more philosophic evidently hope for
+      better luck next time. Both kinds make very pretty speeches, which not
+      even the speakers believe, for in the babe lottery the family is
+      considered to have drawn a blank. A delight so engendered proves how
+      little of the personal, even in prospective, attaches to its object. The
+      reason for the invidious distinction in the matter of sex lies of course
+      in an inordinate desire for the perpetuation of the family line. The
+      unfortunate infant is regarded merely in the light of a possible
+      progenitor. A boy is already potentially a father; whereas a girl, if she
+      marry at all, is bound to marry out of her own family into another, and is
+      relatively lost. The full force of the deprivation is, however, to some
+      degree tempered by the almost infinite possibilities of adoption.
+      Daughters are, therefore, not utterly unmitigable evils.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From the privacy of the domestic circle, the infant's entrance into public
+      life is performed pick-a-back. Strapped securely to the shoulders of a
+      slightly older sister, out he goes, consigned to the tender mercies of a
+      being who is scarcely more than a baby herself. The diminutiveness of the
+      nurse-perambulators is the most surprising part of the performance. The
+      tiniest of tots may be seen thus toddling round with burdens half their
+      own size. Like the dot upon the little i, the baby's head seems a natural
+      part of their childish ego.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An economy of the kind in the matter of nurses is highly suggestive. That
+      it should be practicable thus to entrust one infant to another proves the
+      precociousness of children. But this surprising maturity of the young
+      implies by a law too well known to need explanation, the consequent
+      immaturity of the race. That which has less to grow up to, naturally grows
+      up to its limit sooner. It may even be questioned whether it does not do
+      so with the more haste; on the same principle that a runner who has less
+      distance to travel not only accomplishes his course quicker, but moves
+      with relatively greater speed, or as a small planet grows old not simply
+      sooner, but comparatively faster than a larger one. Jupiter is still in
+      his fiery youth, while the moon is senile in decrepid old age, and yet his
+      separate existence began long before hers. Either hypothesis will explain
+      the abnormally early development of the Chinese race, and its subsequent
+      career of inactivity. Meanwhile the youthful nurse, in blissful ignorance
+      of the evidence which her present precocity affords against her future
+      possibilities, pursues her sports with intermittent attention to her
+      charge, whose poor little head lolls about, now on one side and now on the
+      other, in a most distressingly loose manner, an uninterested spectator of
+      the proceedings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As soon as the babe gets a trifle bigger he ceases to be ministered to and
+      begins his long course of ministering to others. His home life consists of
+      attentive subordination. The relation his obedience bears to that of
+      children elsewhere is paralleled perhaps sufficiently by the comparative
+      importance attached to precepts on the subject in the respective moral
+      codes. The commandment "honor thy father" forms a tithe of the Mosaic law,
+      while the same injunction constitutes at least one half of the Confucian
+      precepts. To the Chinese child all the parental commands are not simply
+      law to the letter, they are to be anticipated in the spirit. To do what he
+      is told is but the merest fraction of his duty; theoretically his only
+      thought is how to serve his sire. The pious Aeneas escaping from Troy
+      exemplifies his conduct when it comes to a question of domestic
+      precedence,&mdash;whose first care, it will be remembered, was for his
+      father, his next for his son, and his last for his wife. He lost his wife,
+      it may be noted in passing. Filial piety is the greatest of Chinese
+      virtues. Indeed, an undutiful son is a monstrosity, a case of moral
+      deformity. It could now hardly be otherwise. For a father sums up in
+      propria persona a whole pedigree of patriarchs whose superimposed weight
+      of authority is practically divine. This condition of servitude is never
+      outgrown by the individual, as it has never been outgrown by the race.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our boy now begins to go to school; to a day school, it need hardly be
+      specified, for a boarding school would be entirely out of keeping with the
+      family life. Here, he is given the "Trimetrical Classic" to start on, that
+      he may learn the characters by heart, picking up incidentally what ideas
+      he may. This book is followed by the "Century of Surnames," a catalogue of
+      all the clan names in China, studied like the last for the sake of the
+      characters, although the suggestion of the importance of the family
+      contained in it is probably not lost upon his youthful mind. Next comes
+      the "Thousand Character Classic," a wonderful epic as a feat of skill, for
+      of the thousand characters which it contains not a single one is repeated,
+      an absence of tautology not properly appreciated by the enforced reader.
+      Reminiscences of our own school days vividly depict the consequent
+      disgust, instead of admiration, of the boy. Three more books succeed these
+      first volumes, differing from one another in form, but in substance
+      singularly alike, treating, as they all do, of history and ethics
+      combined. For tales and morals are inseparably associated by pious
+      antiquity. Indeed, the past would seem to have lived with special
+      reference to the edification of the future. Chinamen were abnormally
+      virtuous in those golden days, barring the few unfortunates whom fate
+      needed as warning examples of depravity for succeeding ages. Except for
+      the fact that instruction as to a future life forms no part of the
+      curriculum, a far-eastern education may be said to consist of
+      Sunday-school every day in the week. For no occasion is lost by the
+      erudite authors, even in the most worldly portions of their work, for
+      preaching a slight homily on the subject in hand. The dictum of Dionysius
+      of Halicarnassus that "history is philosophy teaching by example" would
+      seem there to have become modified into "history is filiosophy teaching by
+      example." For in the instructive anecdotes every other form of merit is
+      depicted as second to that of being a dutiful son. To the practice of that
+      supreme virtue all other considerations are sacrificed. The student's aim
+      is thus kept single. At every turn of the leaves, paragons of filial piety
+      shame the youthful reader to the pitch of emulation by the epitaphic
+      records of their deeds. Portraits of the past, possibly colored, present
+      that estimable trait in so exalted a type that to any less filial a people
+      they would simply deter competition. Yet the boy implicitly believes and
+      no doubt resolves to rival what he reads. A specimen or two will amply
+      suggest the rest. In one tale the hero is held up to the unqualified
+      admiration of posterity for having starved to death his son, in an extreme
+      case of family destitution, for the sake of providing food enough for his
+      aged father. In another he unhesitatingly divorces his wife for having
+      dared to poke fun, in the shape of bodkins, at some wooden effigies of his
+      parents which he had had set up in the house for daily devotional
+      contemplation. Finally another paragon actually sells himself in
+      perpetuity as a slave that he may thus procure the wherewithal to bury
+      with due honor his anything but worthy progenitor, who had first cheated
+      his neighbors and then squandered his ill-gotten gains in riotous living.
+      Of these tales, as of certain questionable novels in a slightly different
+      line, the eventual moral is considered quite competent to redeem the
+      general immorality of the plot.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Along such a curriculum the youthful Chinaman is made to run. A very
+      similar system prevails in Japan, the difference between the two
+      consisting in quantity rather than quality. The books in the two cases are
+      much the same, and the amount read differs surprisingly little when we
+      consider that in the one case it is his own classics the student is
+      reading, in the other the Chinaman's.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If he belong to the middle class, as soon as his schooling is over he is
+      set to learn his father's trade. To undertake to learn any trade but his
+      father's would strike the family as simply preposterous. Why should he
+      adopt another line of business? And, if he did, what other business should
+      he adopt? Is his father's occupation not already there, a part of the
+      existing order of things; and is he not the son of his father and heir
+      therefore of the paternal skill? Not that such inherited aptness is
+      recognized scientifically; it is simply taken for granted instinctively.
+      It is but a halfhearted intuition, however, for the possibility of an
+      inheritance from the mother's side is as out of the question as if her
+      severance from her own family had an ex post facto effect. As for his
+      individual predilection in the matter, nature has considerately conformed
+      to custom by giving him none. He becomes a cabinet-maker, for instance,
+      because his ancestors always have been cabinet-makers. He inherits the
+      family business as a necessary part of the family name. He is born to his
+      trade, not naturally selected because of his fitness for it. But he
+      usually is amply qualified for the position, for generations of practice,
+      if only on one side of the house, accumulate a vast deal of technical
+      skill. The result of this system of clan guilds in all branches of
+      industry is sufficiently noticeable. The almost infinite superiority of
+      Japanese artisans over their European fellow-craftsmen is world-known. On
+      the other hand the tendency of the occupation in the abstract to swallow
+      up the individual in the concrete is as evident to theory as it is patent
+      in practice. Eventually the man is lost in the manner. The very names of
+      trades express the fact. The Japanese word for cabinet-maker, for example,
+      means literally cutting-thing-house, and is now applied as distinctively
+      to the man as to his shop. Nominally as well as practically the youthful
+      Japanese artisan makes his introduction to the world, much after the
+      manner of the hero of Lecocq's comic opera, the son of the house of
+      Marasquin et Cie.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If instead of belonging to the lower middle class our typical youth be
+      born of bluer blood, or if he be filled with the same desires as if he
+      were so descended, he becomes a student. Having failed to discover in the
+      school-room the futility of his country's self-vaunted learning, he
+      proceeds to devote his life to its pursuit. With an application which is
+      eminently praiseworthy, even if its object be not, he sets to work to
+      steep himself in the classics till he can perceive no merit in anything
+      else. As might be suspected, he ends by discovering in the sayings of the
+      past more meaning than the simple past ever dreamed of putting there. He
+      becomes more Confucian than Confucius. Indeed, it is fortunate for the
+      reputation of the sage that he cannot return to earth, for he might
+      disagree to his detriment with his own commentators.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such is the state of things in China and Korea. Learning, however, is not
+      dependent solely on individual interest for its wonderfully flourishing
+      condition in the Middle Kingdom, for the government abets the practice to
+      its utmost. It is itself the supreme sanction, for its posts are the
+      prizes of proficiency. Through the study of the classics lies the only
+      entrance to political power. To become a mandarin one must have passed a
+      series of competitive examinations on these very subjects, and competition
+      in this impersonal field is most keen. For while popular enthusiasm for
+      philosophy for philosophy's sake might, among any people, eventually show
+      symptoms of fatigue, it is not likely to flag where the outcome of it is
+      so substantial. Erudition carries there all earthly emoluments in its
+      train. For the man who can write the most scholastic essay on the classics
+      is forthwith permitted to amass much honor and more wealth by wronging his
+      less accomplished fellow-citizens. China is a student's paradise where the
+      possession of learning is instantly convertible into unlimited pelf.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In Japan the study of the classics was never pursued professionally. It
+      was, however, prosecuted with much zeal en amateur. The Chinese
+      bureaucratic system has been wanting. For in spite of her students, until
+      within thirty years Japan slumbered still in the Knight-time of the Middle
+      Ages, and so long as a man carried about with him continually two
+      beautiful swords he felt it incumbent upon him to use them. The happy days
+      of knight-errantry have passed. These same cavaliers of Samurai are now
+      thankful to police the streets in spectacles necessitated by the too
+      diligent study of German text, and arrest chance disturbers of the public
+      peace for a miserably small salary per month.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our youth has now reached the flowering season of life, that brief May
+      time when the whole world takes on the rose-tint, and when by all dramatic
+      laws he ought to fall in love. He does nothing of the kind. Sad to say, he
+      is a stranger to the feeling. Love, as we understand the word, is a thing
+      unknown to the Far East; fortunately, indeed, for the possession there of
+      the tender passion would be worse than useless. Its indulgence would work
+      no end of disturbance to the community at large, beside entailing much
+      misery upon its individual victim. Its exercise would probably be classed
+      with kleptomania and other like excesses of purely personal consideration.
+      The community could never permit the practice, for it strikes at the very
+      root of their whole social system.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The immense loss in happiness to these people in consequence of the
+      omission by the too parsimonious Fates of that thread, which, with us,
+      spins the whole of woman's web of life, and at least weaves the warp of
+      man's, is but incidental to the present subject; the effect of the loss
+      upon the individuality of the person himself is what concerns us now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If there is one moment in a man's life when his interest for the world at
+      large pales before the engrossing character of his own emotions, it is
+      assuredly when that man first falls in love. Then, if never before, the
+      world within excludes the world without. For of all our human passions
+      none is so isolating as the tenderest. To shut that one other being in, we
+      must of necessity shut all the rest of mankind out; and we do so with a
+      reckless trust in our own self-sufficiency which has about it a touch of
+      the sublime. The other millions are as though they were not, and we two
+      are alone in the earth, which suddenly seems to have grown unprecedentedly
+      beautiful. Indeed, it only needs such judicious depopulation to make of
+      any spot an Eden. Perhaps the early Jewish myth-makers had some such
+      thought in mind when they wrote their idyl of the cosmogony. The human
+      traits are true to-day. Then at last our souls throw aside their
+      conventional wrappings to stand revealed as they really are. Certain of
+      comprehension, the thoughts we have never dared breathe to any one before,
+      find a tongue for her who seems fore-destined to understand. The
+      long-closed floodgates of feeling are thrown wide, and our personality,
+      pent up from the time of its inception for very mistrust, sweeps forth in
+      one uncontrollable rush. For then the most reticent becomes confiding; the
+      most self-contained expands. Then every detail of our past lives assumes
+      an importance which even we had not divined. To her we tell them all,&mdash;our
+      boyish beliefs, our youthful fancies, the foolish with the fine, the witty
+      with the wise, the little with the great. Nothing then seems quite
+      unworthy, as nothing seems quite worthy enough. Flowers and weeds that we
+      plucked upon our pathway, we heap them in her lap, certain that even the
+      poorest will not be tossed aside. Small wonder that we bring as many as we
+      may when she bends her head so lovingly to each.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As our past rises in reminiscence with all its oldtime reality, no less
+      clearly does our future stand out to us in mirage. What we would be seems
+      as realizable as what we were. Seen by another beside ourselves, our
+      castles in the air take on something of the substance of stereoscopic
+      sight. Our airiest fancies seem solid facts for their reality to her, and
+      gilded by lovelight, they glitter and sparkle like a true palace of the
+      East. For once all is possible; nothing lies beyond our reach. And as we
+      talk, and she listens, we two seem to be floating off into an empyrean of
+      our own like the summer clouds above our heads, as they sail dreamily on
+      into the far-away depths of the unfathomable sky.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It would be more than mortal not to believe in ourselves when another
+      believes so absolutely in us. Our most secret thoughts are no longer
+      things to be ashamed of, for she has sanctioned them. Whatever doubt may
+      have shadowed us as to our own imaginings disappears before the smile of
+      her appreciation. That her appreciation may be prejudiced is not a
+      possibility we think of then. She understands us, or seems to do so to our
+      own better understanding of ourselves. Happy the man who is thus
+      understood! Happy even he who imagines that he is, because of her eager
+      wish to comprehend; fortunate, indeed, if in this one respect he never
+      comes to see too clearly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No such blissful infatuation falls to the lot of the Far Oriental. He
+      never is the dupe of his own desire, the willing victim of his
+      self-illusion. He is never tempted to reveal himself, and by thus
+      revealing, realize. No loving appreciation urges him on toward the
+      attainment of his own ideal. That incitement to be what he would seem to
+      be, to become what she deems becoming, he fails to feel. Custom has so far
+      fettered fancy that even the wish to communicate has vanished. He has now
+      nothing to tell; she needs no ear to hear. For she is not his love; she is
+      only his wife,&mdash;what is left of a romance when the romance is left
+      out. Worse still, she never was anything else. He has not so much as a
+      memory of her, for he did not marry her for love; he may not love of his
+      own accord, nor for the matter of that does he wish to do so. If by some
+      mischance he should so far forget to forget himself, it were much better
+      for him had he not done so, for the choice of a bride is not his, nor of a
+      bridegroom hers. Marriage to a Far Oriental is the most important
+      mercantile transaction of his whole life. It is, therefore, far too
+      weighty a matter to be entrusted to his youthful indiscretion; for
+      although the person herself is of lamentably little account in the
+      bargain, the character of her worldly circumstances is most material to
+      it. So she is contracted for with the same care one would exercise in the
+      choice of any staple business commodity. The particular sample is not
+      vital to the trade, but the grade of goods is. She is selected much as the
+      bride of the Vicar of Wakefield chose her wedding-gown, only that the one
+      was at least cut to suit, while the other is not. It is certainly easier,
+      if less fitting, to get a wife as some people do clothes, not to their own
+      order, but ready made; all the more reason when the bargain is for one's
+      son, not one's self. So the Far East, which looks at the thing from a
+      strictly paternal standpoint and ignores such trifles as personal
+      preferences, takes its boy to the broker's and fits him out. That the
+      object of such parental care does not end by murdering his unfortunate
+      spouse or making way with himself suggests how dead already is that
+      individuality which we deem to be of the very essence of the thing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marriage is thus a species of investment contracted by the existing family
+      for the sake of the prospective one, the actual participants being only
+      lay figures in the affair. Sometimes the father decides the matter
+      himself; sometimes he or the relative who stands in loco parentis calls
+      for a plebiscit on the subject; for such an extension of the suffrage has
+      gradually crept even into patriarchal institutions. The family then
+      assemble, sit in solemn conclave on the question, and decide it by vote.
+      Of course the interested parties are not asked their opinion, as it might
+      be prejudiced. The result of the conference must be highly gratifying. To
+      have one's wife chosen for one by vote of one's relatives cannot but be
+      satisfactory&mdash;to the electors. The outcome of this ballot, like that
+      of universal suffrage elsewhere, is at the best unobjectionable
+      mediocrity. Somehow such a result does not seem quite to fulfil one's
+      ideal of a wife. It is true that the upper classes of impersonal France
+      practise this method of marital selection, their conseils de famille
+      furnishing in some sort a parallel. But, as is well known, matrimony among
+      these same upper classes is largely form devoid of substance. It begins
+      impressively with a dual ceremony, the civil contract, which amounts to a
+      contract of civility between the parties, and a religious rite to render
+      the same perpetual, and there it is too apt to end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So much for the immediate influence on the man; the eventual effect on the
+      race remains to be considered. Now, if the first result be anything, the
+      second must in the end be everything. For however trifling it be in the
+      individual instance, it goes on accumulating with each successive
+      generation, like compound interest. The choosing of a wife by family
+      suffrage is not simply an exponent of the impersonal state of things, it
+      is a power toward bringing such a state of things about. A hermit seldom
+      develops to his full possibilities, and the domestic variety is no
+      exception to the rule. A man who is linked to some one that toward him
+      remains a cipher lacks surroundings inciting to psychological growth, nor
+      is he more favorably circumstanced because all his ancestors have been
+      similarly circumscribed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As if to make assurance doubly sure, natural selection here steps in to
+      further the process. To prove this with all the rigidity of demonstration
+      desirable is in the present state of erotics beyond our power. Until our
+      family trees give us something more than mere skeletons of dead branches,
+      we must perforce continue ignorant of the science of grafts. For the nonce
+      we must be content to generalize from our own premises, only rising above
+      them sufficiently to get a bird's-eye view of our neighbor's estates. Such
+      a survey has at least one advantage: the whole field of view appears
+      perfectly plain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Surveying the subject, then, from this ego-altruistic position, we can
+      perceive why matrimony, as we practise it, should result in increasing the
+      personality of our race: for the reason namely that psychical similarity
+      determines the selection. At first sight, indeed, such a natural affinity
+      would seem to have little or nothing to do with marriage. As far as
+      outsiders are capable of judging, unlikes appear to fancy one another
+      quite as gratuitously as do likes. Connubial couples are often anything
+      but twin souls. Yet our own dual use of the word "like" bears historic
+      witness to the contrary. For in this expression we have a record from
+      early Gothic times that men liked others for being like themselves. Since
+      then, our feelings have not changed materially, although our mode of
+      showing them is slightly less intense. In those simple days stranger and
+      enemy were synonymous terms, and their objects were received in a
+      corresponding spirit. In our present refined civilization we hurl epithets
+      instead of spears, and content ourselves with branding as heterodox the
+      opinions of another which do not happen to coincide with our own. The
+      instinct of self-development naturally begets this self-sided view. We
+      insensibly find those persons congenial whose ideas resemble ours, and
+      gravitate to them, as leaves on a pond do to one another, nearer and
+      nearer till they touch. Is it likely, then, that in the most important
+      case of all the rule should suddenly cease to hold? Is it to be presumed
+      that even Socrates chose Xantippe for her remarkable contrariety to
+      himself?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mere physical attraction is another matter. Corporeally considered, men
+      not infrequently fall in love with their opposites, the phenomenally tall
+      with the painfully short, the unnecessarily stout with the distressingly
+      slender. But even such inartistic juxtapositions are much less common than
+      we are apt at times to think. For it must never be forgotten that the
+      exceptional character of the phenomena renders them conspicuous, the
+      customary more consorted combinations failing to excite attention.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Besides, there exists a reason for physical incongruity which does not
+      hold psychically. Nature sanctions the one while she discountenances the
+      other. Instead of the forethought she once bestowed upon the body, it
+      receives at her hands now but the scantiest attention. Its development has
+      ceased to be an object with her. For some time past almost all her care
+      has been devoted to the evolution of the soul. The consequence is that
+      physically man is much less specialized than many other animals. In other
+      words, he is bodily less advanced in the race for competitive
+      extermination. He belongs to an antiquated, inefficient type of mammal.
+      His organism is still of the jack-of-all-trades pattern, such as prevailed
+      generally in the more youthful stages of organic life&mdash;one not
+      specially suited to any particular pursuit. Were it not for his cerebral
+      convolutions he could not compete for an instant in the struggle for
+      existence, and even the monkey would reign in his stead. But brain is more
+      effective than biceps, and a being who can kill his opponent farther off
+      than he can see him evidently needs no great excellence of body to survive
+      his foe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The field of competition has thus been transferred from matter to mind,
+      but the fight has lost none of its keenness in consequence. With the same
+      zeal with which advantageous anatomical variations were seized upon and
+      perpetuated, psychical ones are now grasped and rendered hereditary. Now
+      if opposites were to fancy and wed one another, such fortunate
+      improvements would soon be lost. They would be scattered over the
+      community at large even it they escaped entire neutralization. To prevent
+      so disastrous a result nature implants a desire for resemblance, which
+      desire man instinctively acts upon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Complete compatibility of temperament is of course a thing not to be
+      expected nor indeed to be desired, since it would defeat its own end by
+      allowing no room for variation. A fairly broad basis of agreement,
+      however, exists even when least suspected. This common ground of content
+      consists of those qualities held to be most essential by the individuals
+      concerned, although not necessarily so appearing to other people.
+      Sometimes, indeed, these qualities are still in the larvae state of
+      desires. They are none the less potent upon the man's personality on that
+      account, for the wish is always father to its own fulfilment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The want of conjugal resemblance not only works mediately on the child, it
+      works mutually on the parents; for companionship, as is well recognized,
+      tends to similarity. Now companionship is the last thing to be looked for
+      in a far-eastern couple. Where custom requires a wife to follow dutifully
+      in the wake of her husband, whenever the two go out together, there is
+      small opportunity for intercourse by the way, even were there the
+      slightest inclination to it, which there is not. The appearance of the
+      pair on an excursion is a walking satire on sociability, for the
+      comicality of the connection is quite unperceived by the performers. In
+      the privacy of the domestic circle the separation, if less humorous, is no
+      less complete. Each lives in a world of his own, largely separate in fact
+      in China and Korea, and none the less in fancy in Japan. On the continent
+      a friend of the husband would see little or nothing of the wife, and even
+      in Japan he would meet her much as we meet an upper servant in a friend's
+      house. Such a semi-attached relationship does not conduce to much mutual
+      understanding.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The remainder of our hero's uneventful existence calls for no particular
+      comment. As soon as he has children borne him he is raised ipso facto from
+      the position of a common soldier to that of a subordinate officer in the
+      family ranks. But his opportunities for the expression of individuality
+      are not one whit increased. He has simply advanced a peg in a regular
+      hierarchy of subjection. From being looked after himself he proceeds to
+      look after others. Such is the extent of the change. Even should he chance
+      to be the eldest son of the eldest son, and thus eventually end by
+      becoming the head of the family, he cannot consistently consider himself.
+      There is absolutely no place in his social cosmos for so particular a
+      thing as the ego.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With a certain grim humor suggestive of metaphysics, it may be said of his
+      whole life that it is nothing but a relative affair after all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0003" id="link2HCH0003">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter 3. Adoption.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      But one may go a step farther in this matter of the family, and by so
+      doing fare still worse with respect to individuality. There are certain
+      customs in vogue among these peoples which would seem to indicate that
+      even so generic a thing as the family is too personal to serve them for
+      ultimate social atom, and that in fact it is only the idea of the family
+      that is really important, a case of abstraction of an abstract. These
+      suggestive customs are the far-eastern practices of adoption and
+      abdication.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Adoption, with us, is a kind of domestic luxury, akin to the keeping of
+      any other pets, such as lap-dogs and canaries. It is a species of
+      self-indulgence which those who can afford it give themselves when fortune
+      has proved unpropitious, an artificial method of counteracting the
+      inequalities of fate. That such is the plain unglamoured view of the
+      procedure is shown by the age at which the object is adopted. Usually the
+      future son or daughter enters the adoptive household as an infant,
+      intentionally so on the part of the would-be parents. His ignorance of a
+      previous relationship largely increases his relative value; for the
+      possibility of his making comparisons in his own mind between a former
+      state of existence and the present one unfavorable to the latter is not
+      pleasant for the adopters to contemplate. He is therefore acquired young.
+      The amusement derived from his company is thus seen to be distinctly
+      paramount to all other considerations. No one cares so heartily to own a
+      dog which has been the property of another; a fortiori of a child. It is
+      clearly, then, not as a necessity that the babe is adopted. If such were
+      the case, if like the ancient Romans all a man wanted was the continuance
+      of the family line, he would naturally wait until the last practicable
+      moment; for he would thus save both care and expense. In the Far East
+      adoption is quite a different affair. There it is a genealogical necessity&mdash;like
+      having a father or mother. It is, indeed, of almost more importance. For
+      the great desideratum to these peoples is not ancestors but descendants.
+      Pedigrees in the land of the universal opposite are not matters of bequest
+      but of posthumous reversion. A man is not beholden to the past, he looks
+      forward to the future for inherited honors. No fame attaches to him for
+      having had an illustrious grandfather. On the contrary, it is the
+      illustrious grandson who reflects some of his own greatness back upon his
+      grandfather. If a man therefore fail to attain eminence himself, he always
+      has another chance in his descendants; for he will of necessity be
+      ennobled through the merits of those who succeed him. Such is the
+      immemorial law of the land. Fame is retroactive. This admirable system has
+      only one objection: it is posthumous in its effect. An ambitious man who
+      unfortunately lacks ability himself has to wait too long for vicarious
+      recognition. The objection is like that incident to the making of a
+      country seat out of a treeless plain by planting the same with saplings.
+      About the time the trees begin to be worth having the proprietary
+      landscape-gardener dies of old age. However, as custom permits a Far
+      Oriental no ancestral growth of timber, he is obliged to lay the seeds of
+      his own family trees. Natural offspring are on the whole easier to get,
+      and more satisfactory when got. Hence the haste with which these peoples
+      rush into matrimony. If in despite of his precipitation fate perversely
+      refuse to grant him children, he must endeavor to make good the omission
+      by artificial means. He proceeds to adopt somebody. True to instinct, he
+      chooses from preference a collateral relative. In some far-eastern lands
+      he must so restrict himself by law. In Korea, for instance, he can only
+      adopt an agnate and one of a lower generation than his own. But in Japan
+      his choice is not so limited. In so praiseworthy an act as the
+      perpetuation of his unimportant family line, it is deemed unwise in that
+      progressive land to hinder him from unconsciously bettering it by the way.
+      He is consequently permitted to adopt anybody. As people are by no means
+      averse to being adopted, the power to adopt whom he will gives him more
+      voice in the matter of his unnatural offspring than he ever had in the
+      selection of a more natural one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The adopted changes his name, of course, to take that of the family he
+      enters. As he is very frequently grown up and extensively known at the
+      time the adoption takes place, his change of cognomen occasions at first
+      some slight confusion among his acquaintance. This would be no worse,
+      however, than the change with us from the maid to the matron, and
+      intercourse would soon proceed smoothly again if people would only rest
+      content with one such domestic migration. But they do not. The fatal
+      facility of the process tempts them to repeat it. The result is
+      bewildering: a people as nomadic now in the property of their persons as
+      their forefathers were in their real estate. A man adopts another to-day
+      to unadopt him to-morrow and replace him by somebody else the day after.
+      So profoundly unimportant to them is their social identity, that they
+      bandy it about with almost farcical freedom. Perhaps it is fitting that
+      there should be some slight preparation in this world for a future
+      transmigration of souls. Still one fails to conceive that the practice can
+      be devoid of disadvantages even to its beneficiaries. To foreigners it
+      proves disastrously perplexing. For if you chance upon a man whom you have
+      not met for some time, you can never be quite sure how to accost him. If
+      you begin, "Well met, Green, how goes it?" as likely as not he replies,
+      "Finely. But I am no longer Green; I have become Brown. I was adopted last
+      month by my maternal grandfather." You of course apologize for your
+      unfortunate mistake, carefully note his change of hue for a future
+      occasion, and behold, on meeting him the next time you find he has turned
+      Black. Such a chameleon-like cognomen is very unsettling to your idea of
+      his identity, and can hardly prove reassuring to his own. The only persons
+      who reap any benefit from the doubt are those, with us unhappy,
+      individuals who possess the futile faculty of remembering faces without
+      recalling their accompanying names.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Girls, as a rule, are not adopted, being valueless genealogically. A niece
+      or grandniece to whom one has taken a great fancy might of course be
+      adopted there as elsewhere, but it would be distinctly out of the
+      every-day run, as she could never be included in the household on strict
+      business principles.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The practice of adopting is not confined to childless couples. Others may
+      find themselves in quite as unfortunate a predicament. A man may be the
+      father of a large and thriving family and yet be as destitute
+      patriarchally as if he had not a child to his name. His offspring may be
+      of the wrong sex; they may all be girls. In this untoward event the father
+      has something more on his hands than merely a houseful of daughters to
+      dispose of. In addition to securing sons-in-law, he must, unless he would
+      have his ancestral line become extinct, provide himself with a son. The
+      simplest procedure in such a case is to combine relationships in a single
+      individual, and the most self-evident person to select for the dual
+      capacity is the husband of the eldest daughter. This is the course
+      pursued. Some worthy young man is secured as spouse for the senior sister;
+      he is at the same time formally taken in as a son by the family whose
+      cognomen he assumes, and eventually becomes the head of the house. Strange
+      to say, this vista of gradually unfolding honors does not seem to prove
+      inviting. Perhaps the new-comer objects to marrying the whole family, a
+      prejudice not without parallel elsewhere. Certainly the opportunity is not
+      appreciated. Indeed, to "go out as a son-in-law," as the Japanese idiom
+      hath it, is considered demeaning to the matrimonial domestic. Like other
+      household help he wears too patently the badge of servitude. "If you have
+      three koku of rice to your name, don't do it," is the advice of the local
+      proverb&mdash;a proverb whose warning against marrying for money is the
+      more suggestive for being launched in a land where marrying for love is
+      beyond the pale of respectability. To barter one's name in this mercenary
+      manner is looked upon as derogatory to one's self-respect, although, as we
+      have seen, to part with it for any less direct remuneration is not
+      attended with the slightest loss of personal prestige. As practically the
+      unfortunate had none to lose in either event, it would seem to be a case
+      of taking away from a man that which he hath not. So contumacious a thing
+      is custom. It is indeed lucky that popular prejudice interposes some limit
+      to this fictitious method of acquiring children. A trifling predilection
+      for the real thing in sonships is absolutely vital, even to the
+      continuance of the artificial variety. For if one generation ever went in
+      exclusively for adoption, there would be no subsequent generation to
+      adopt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As it to give the finishing touch to so conventional a system of society,
+      a man can leave it under certain circumstances with even greater ease than
+      he entered it. He can become as good as dead without the necessity of
+      making way with himself. Theoretically, he can cease to live while still
+      practically existing; for it is always open to the head of a family to
+      abdicate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The word abdicate has to our ears a certain regal sound. We instinctively
+      associate the act with a king. Even the more democratic expression resign
+      suggests at once an office of public or quasi public character. To talk of
+      abdicating one's private relationships sounds absurd; one might as well
+      talk of electing his parents, it would seem to us. Such misunderstanding
+      of far-eastern social possibilities comes from our having indulged in
+      digressions from our more simple nomadic habits. If in imagination we will
+      return to our ancestral muttons and the then existing order of things, the
+      idea will not strike us as so strange; for in those early bucolic days
+      every father was a king. Family economics were the only political
+      questions in existence then. The clan was the unit. Domestic disputes were
+      state disturbances, and clan-claims the only kind of international
+      quarrels. The patriarch was both father to his people and king.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As time widened the family circle it eventually reached a point where
+      cohesion ceased to be possible. The centrifugal tendency could no longer
+      be controlled by the centripetal force. It split up into separate bodies,
+      each of them a family by itself. In their turn these again divided, and so
+      the process went on. This principle has worked universally, the only
+      difference in its action among different races being the greater or less
+      degree of the evolving motion. With us the social system has been turning
+      more and more rapidly with time. In the Far East its force, instead of
+      increasing, would seem to have decreased, enabling the nebula of its
+      original condition to keep together as a single mass, so that to-day a
+      whole nation, resembling a nebula indeed in homogeneity, is swayed by a
+      single patriarchal principle. Here, on the contrary, so rapid has the
+      motion become that even brethren find themselves scattered to the four
+      winds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An Occidental father and an Oriental head of a family are no longer really
+      correlative terms. The latter more closely resembles a king in his duties,
+      responsibilities, and functions generally. Now, in the Middle Ages in
+      Europe, when a king grew tired of affairs of state, he abdicated. So in
+      the Far East, when the head of a family has had enough of active life, he
+      abdicates, and his eldest son reigns in his stead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From that moment he ceases to belong to the body politic in any active
+      sense. Not that he is no longer a member of society nor unamenable to its
+      general laws, but that he has become a respectable declasse, as it were.
+      He has entered, so to speak, the social nirvana, a not unfitting first
+      step, as he regards it, toward entering the eventual nirvana beyond. Such
+      abdication now takes place without particular cause. After a certain time
+      of life, and long before a man grows old, it is the fashion thus to make
+      one's bow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0004" id="link2HCH0004">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter 4. Language.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      A man's personal equation, as astronomers call the effect of his
+      individuality, is kin, for all its complexity, to those simple algebraical
+      problems which so puzzled us at school. To solve either we must begin by
+      knowing the values of the constants that enter into its expression. Upon
+      the a b c's of the one, as upon those of the other, depend the
+      possibilities of the individual x.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now the constants in any man's equation are the qualities that he has
+      inherited from the past. What a man does follows from what he is, which in
+      turn is mostly dependent upon what his ancestors have been; and of all the
+      links in the long chain of mind-evolution, few are more important and more
+      suggestive than language. Actions may at the moment speak louder than
+      words, but methods of expression have as tell-tale a tongue for bygone
+      times as ways of doing things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If it should ever fall to my lot to have to settle that exceedingly vexed
+      Eastern question,&mdash;not the emancipation of ancient Greece from the
+      bondage of the modern Turk, but the emancipation of the modern college
+      student from the bond of ancient Greek,&mdash;I should propose, as a
+      solution of the dilemma, the addition of a course in Japanese to the
+      college list of required studies. It might look, I admit, like begging the
+      question for the sake of giving its answer, but the answer, I think, would
+      justify itself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is from no desire to parade a fresh hobby-horse upon the university
+      curriculum that I offer the suggestion, but because I believe that a study
+      of the Japanese language would prove the most valuable of ponies in the
+      academic pursuit of philology. In the matter of literature, indeed, we
+      should not be adding very much to our existing store, but we should gain
+      an insight into the genesis of speech that would put us at least one step
+      nearer to being present at the beginnings of human conversation. As it is
+      now, our linguistic learning is with most of us limited to a knowledge of
+      Aryan tongues, and in consequence we not only fall into the mistake of
+      thinking our way the only way, which is bad enough, but, what is far
+      worse, by not perceiving the other possible paths we quite fail to
+      appreciate the advantages or disadvantages of following our own. We are
+      the blind votaries of a species of ancestral language-worship, which, with
+      all its erudition, tends to narrow our linguistic scope. A study of
+      Japanese would free us from the fetters of any such family infatuation.
+      The inviolable rules and regulations of our mother-tongue would be found
+      to be of relative application only. For we should discover that speech is
+      a much less categorical matter than we had been led to suppose. We should
+      actually come to doubt the fundamental necessity of some of our most
+      sacred grammatical constructions; and even our reverenced Latin grammars
+      would lose that air of awful absoluteness which so impressed us in
+      boyhood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An encouraging estimate of a certain missionary puts the amount of study
+      needed by the Western student for the learning of Japanese as sufficient,
+      if expended nearer home, to equip him with any three modern European
+      languages. It is certainly true that a completely strange vocabulary, an
+      utter inversion of grammar, and an elaborate system of honorifics combine
+      to render its acquisition anything but easy. In its fundamental
+      principles, however, it is alluringly simple.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the first place, the Japanese language is pleasingly destitute of
+      personal pronouns. Not only is the obnoxious "I" conspicuous only by its
+      absence; the objectionable antagonistic "you" is also entirely suppressed,
+      while the intrusive "he" is evidently too much of a third person to be
+      wanted. Such invidious distinctions of identity apparently never thrust
+      their presence upon the simple early Tartar minds. I, you, and he, not
+      being differences due to nature, demanded, to their thinking, no
+      recognition of man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is about this vagueness of expression a freedom not without its
+      charm. It is certainly delightful to be able to speak of yourself as if
+      you were somebody else, choosing mentally for the occasion any one you may
+      happen to fancy, or, it you prefer, the possibility of soaring boldly
+      forth into the realms of the unconditioned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To us, at first sight, however, such a lack of specification appears
+      wofully incompatible with any intelligible transmission of ideas. So
+      communistic a want of discrimination between the meum and the tuum&mdash;to
+      say nothing of the claims of a possible third party&mdash;would seem to be
+      as fatal to the interchange of thoughts as it proves destructive to the
+      trafficking in commodities. Such, nevertheless, is not the result. On the
+      contrary, Japanese is as easy and as certain of comprehension as is
+      English. On ninety occasions out of a hundred, the context at once makes
+      clear the person meant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the very few really ambiguous cases, or those in which, for the sake of
+      emphasis, a pronoun is wanted, certain consecrated expressions are
+      introduced for the purpose. For eventually the more complex social
+      relations of increasing civilization compelled some sort of distant
+      recognition. Accordingly, compromises with objectionable personality were
+      effected by circumlocutions promoted to a pronoun's office, becoming thus
+      pro-pronouns, as it were. Very noncommittal expressions they are, most of
+      them, such as: "the augustness," meaning you; "that honorable side," or
+      "that corner," denoting some third person, the exact term employed in any
+      given instance scrupulously betokening the relative respect in which the
+      individual spoken of is held; while with a candor, an indefiniteness, or a
+      humility worthy so polite a people, the I is known as "selfishness," or "a
+      certain person," or "the clumsy one."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Pronominal adjectives are manufactured in the same way. "The stupid
+      father," "the awkward son," "the broken-down firm," are "mine." Were they
+      "yours," they would instantly become "the august, venerable father," "the
+      honorable son," "the exalted firm." 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Even these lame substitutes for pronouns are paraded as sparingly as
+      possible. To the Western student, who brings to the subject a brain
+      throbbing with personality, hunting in a Japanese sentence for personal
+      references is dishearteningly like "searching in the dark for a black hat
+      which is n't there;" for the brevet pronouns are commonly not on duty. To
+      employ them with the reckless prodigality that characterizes our
+      conversation would strike the Tartar mind like interspersing his talk with
+      unmeaning italics. He would regard such discourse much as we do those
+      effusive epistles of a certain type of young woman to her most intimate
+      girl friends, in which every other word is emphatically underlined.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For the most part, the absolutely necessary personal references are
+      introduced by honorifics; that is, by honorary or humble expressions. Such
+      is a portion of the latter's duty. They do a great deal of unnecessary
+      work besides.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These honorifics are, taken as a whole, one of the most interesting
+      peculiarities of Japanese, as also of Korean, just as, taken in detail,
+      they are one of its most dangerous pitfalls. For silence is indeed golden
+      compared with the chagrin of discovering that a speech which you had meant
+      for a compliment was, in fact, an insult, or the vexation of learning that
+      you have been industriously treating your servant with the deference due a
+      superior,&mdash;two catastrophes sure to follow the attempts of even the
+      most cautious of beginners. The language is so thoroughly imbued with the
+      honorific spirit that the exposure of truth in all its naked simplicity is
+      highly improper. Every idea requires to be more or less clothed in
+      courtesy before it is presentable; and the garb demanded by etiquette is
+      complex beyond conception. To begin with, there are certain preliminary
+      particles which are simply honorific, serving no other purpose whatsoever.
+      In addition to these there are for every action a small infinity of verbs,
+      each sacred to a different degree of respect. For instance, to our verb
+      "to give" corresponds a complete social scale of Japanese verbs, each
+      conveying the idea a shade more politely than its predecessor; only the
+      very lowest meaning anything so plebeian as simply "to give." Sets of
+      laudatory or depreciatory adjectives are employed in the same way. Lastly,
+      the word for "is," which strictly means "exists," expresses this existence
+      under three different forms,&mdash;in a matter-of-fact, a flowing, or an
+      inflated style; the solid, liquid, and gaseous states of conversation, so
+      to speak, to suit the person addressed. But three forms being far too few
+      for the needs of so elaborate a politeness, these are supplemented by many
+      interpolated grades.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Terms of respect are applied not only to those mortals who are held in
+      estimation higher than their fellows, but to all men indiscriminately as
+      well. The grammatical attitude of the individual toward the speaker is of
+      as much importance as his social standing, I being beneath contempt, and
+      you above criticism.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Honorifics are used not only on all possible occasions for courtesy, but
+      at times, it would seem, upon impossible ones; for in some instances the
+      most subtle diagnosis fails to reveal in them a relevancy to anybody. That
+      the commonest objects should bear titles because of their connection with
+      some particular person is comprehensible, but what excuse can be made for
+      a phrase like the following, "It respectfully does that the august seat
+      exists," all of which simply means "is," and may be applied to anything,
+      being the common word&mdash;in Japanese it is all one word now&mdash;for
+      that apparently simple idea. It would seem a sad waste of valuable
+      material. The real reason why so much distinguished consideration is shown
+      the article in question lies in the fact that it is treated as existing
+      with reference to the person addressed, and therefore becomes ipso facto
+      august.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here is a still subtler example. You are, we will suppose, at a tea-house,
+      and you wish for sugar. The following almost stereotyped conversation is
+      pretty sure to take place. I translate it literally, simply prefacing that
+      every tea-house girl, usually in the first blush of youth, is generically
+      addressed as "elder sister,"&mdash;another honorific, at least so
+      considered in Japan.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+ You clap your hands.  (Enter tea-house maiden.)
+
+ You.  Hai, elder sister, augustly exists there sugar?
+
+ The T. H. M.  The honorable sugar, augustly is it?
+
+ You.  So, augustly.
+
+ The T. H. M. He (indescribable expression of assent).
+ (Exit tea-house maiden to fetch the sugar.)
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Now, the "augustlies" go almost without saying, but why is the sugar
+      honorable? Simply because it is eventually going to be offered to you. But
+      she would have spoken of it by precisely the same respectful title, if she
+      had been obliged to inform you that there was none, in which case it never
+      could have become yours. Such is politeness. We may note, in passing, that
+      all her remarks and all yours, barring your initial question, meant
+      absolutely nothing. She understood you perfectly from the first, and you
+      knew she did; but then, if all of us were to say only what were necessary,
+      the delightful art of conversation would soon be nothing but a science.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The average Far Oriental, indeed, talks as much to no purpose as his
+      Western cousin, only in his chit-chat politeness replaces personalities.
+      With him, self is suppressed, and an ever-present regard for others is
+      substituted in its stead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A lack of personality is, as we have seen, the occasion of this courtesy;
+      it is also its cause.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That politeness should be one of the most marked results of impersonality
+      may appear surprising, yet a slight examination will show it to be a fact.
+      Looked at a posteriori, we find that where the one trait exists the other
+      is most developed, while an absence of the second seems to prevent the
+      full growth of the first. This is true both in general and in detail.
+      Courtesy increases, as we travel eastward round the world, coincidently
+      with a decrease in the sense of self. Asia is more courteous than Europe,
+      Europe than America. Particular races show the same concomitance of
+      characteristics. France, the most impersonal nation of Europe, is at the
+      same time the most polite.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Considered a priori, the connection between the two is not far to seek.
+      Impersonality, by lessening the interest in one's self, induces one to
+      take an interest in others. Introspection tends to make of man a solitary
+      animal, the absence of it a social one. The more impersonal the people,
+      the more will the community supplant the individual in the popular
+      estimation. The type becomes the interesting thing to man, as it always is
+      to nature. Then, as the social desires develop, politeness, being the
+      means to their enjoyment, develops also.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A second omission in Japanese etymology is that of gender. That words
+      should be credited with sex is a verbal anthropomorphism that would seem
+      to a Japanese exquisitely grotesque, if so be that it did not strike him
+      as actually immodest. For the absence of gender is simply symptomatic of a
+      much more vital failing, a disregard of sex. Originally, as their language
+      bears witness, the Japanese showed a childish reluctance to recognizing
+      sex at all. Usually a single sexless term was held sufficient for a given
+      species, and did duty collectively for both sexes. Only where a
+      consideration of sex thrust itself upon them, beyond the possibility of
+      evasion, did they employ for the male and the female distinctive
+      expressions. The more intimate the relation of the object to man, the more
+      imperative the discriminating name. Hence human beings possessed a fair
+      number of such special appellatives; for a man is a palpably different
+      sort of person from his grandmother, and a mother-in-law from a wife. But
+      it is noteworthy that the artificial affinities of society were as
+      carefully differentiated as the distinctions due to sex, while ancestral
+      relationships were deemed more important than either.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Animals, though treated individually most humanely, are vouchsafed but
+      scant recognition on the score of sex. With them, both sexes share one
+      common name, and commonly, indeed, this answers quite well enough. In
+      those few instances where sex enters into the question in a manner not to
+      be ignored, particles denoting "male" or "female" are prefixed to the
+      general term. How comparatively rare is the need of such specification can
+      be seen from the way in which, with us, in many species, the name of one
+      sex alone does duty indifferently for both. That of the male is the one
+      usually selected, as in the case of the dog or horse. If, however, it be
+      the female with which man has most to do, she is allowed to bestow her
+      name upon her male partner. Examples of the latter description occur in
+      the use of "cows" for "cattle," and "hens" for "fowls." A Japanese can say
+      only "fowl," defined, if absolutely necessary, as "he-fowl" or "she-fowl."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now such a slighting of one of the most potent springs of human action,
+      sex, with all that the idea involves, is not due to a pronounced
+      misogynism on the part of these people, but to a much more effective
+      neglect, a great underlying impersonality. Indifference to woman is but
+      included in a much more general indifference to mankind. The fact becomes
+      all the more evident when we descend from sex to gender. That Father Ocean
+      does not, in their verbal imagery, embrace Mother Earth, with that subtle
+      suggestion of humanity which in Aryan speech the gender of the nouns hints
+      without expressing, is not due to any lack of poesy in the Far Oriental
+      speaker, but to the essential impersonality of his mind, embodied now in
+      the very character of the words he uses. A Japanese noun is a crystallized
+      concept, handed down unchanged from the childhood of the Japanese race. So
+      primitive a conception does it represent that it is neither a total nor a
+      partial symbol, but rather the outcome of a first vague generality. The
+      word "man," for instance, means to them not one man, still less mankind,
+      but that indefinite idea which struggles for embodiment in the utterance
+      of the infant. It represents not a person, but a thing, a material fact
+      quite innocent of gender. This early state of semi-consciousness the
+      Japanese never outgrew. The world continued to present itself to their
+      minds as a collection of things. Nor did their subsequent Chinese
+      education change their view. Buddhism simply infused all things with the
+      one universal spirit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As to inanimate objects, the idea of supposing sex where there is not even
+      life is altogether too fanciful a notion for the Far Eastern mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Impersonality first fashioned the nouns, and then the nouns, by their very
+      impersonality, helped keep impersonal the thought and fettered fancy. All
+      those temptings to poesy which to the Aryan imagination lie latent in the
+      sex with which his forefathers humanized their words, never stir the
+      Tartar nor the Chinese soul. They feel the poetry of nature as much as,
+      indeed much more than, we; but it is a poetry unassociated with man. And
+      this, too, curiously enough, in spite of the fact that to explain the
+      cosmos the Chinamen invented, or perhaps only adapted, a singularly sexual
+      philosophy. For possibly, like some other portions of their intellectual
+      wealth, they stole it from India. The Chinese conception of the origin of
+      the world is based on the idea of sex. According to their notions the
+      earth was begotten. It is true that with them the cosmos started in an
+      abstract something, which self-produced two great principles; but this
+      pair once obtained, matters proceeded after the analogy of mankind. The
+      two principles at work were themselves abstract enough to have satisfied
+      the most unimpassioned of philosophers. They were simply a positive
+      essence and a negative one, correlated to sunshine and shadow, but also
+      correlated to male and female forces. Through their mutual action were
+      born the earth and the air and the water; from these, in turn, was
+      begotten man. The cosmical modus operandi was not creative nor
+      evolutionary, but sexual. The whole scheme suggests an attempt to wed
+      abstract philosophy with primitive concrete mythology.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The same sexuality distinguishes the Japanese demonology. Here the
+      physical replaces the philosophical; instead of principles we find
+      allegorical personages, but they show just the same pleasing propensity to
+      appear in pairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This attributing of sexes to the cosmos is not in the least incompatible
+      with an uninterested disregard of sex where it really exists. It is one
+      thing to admit the fact as a general law of the universe, and quite
+      another to dwell upon it as an important factor in every-day affairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How slight is the Tartar tendency to personification can be seen from a
+      glance at these same Japanese gods. They are a combination of defunct
+      ancestors and deified natural phenomena. The evolving of the first half
+      required little imagination, for fate furnished the material ready made;
+      while in conjuring up the second moiety, the spirit-evokers showed even
+      less originality. Their results were neither winsome nor sublime. The gods
+      whom they created they invested with very ordinary humanity, the usual
+      endowment of aboriginal deity, together with the customary superhuman
+      strength. If these demigods differed from others of their class, it was
+      only in being more commonplace, and in not meddling much with man. Even
+      such personification of natural forces, simple enough to be
+      self-suggested, quickly disappeared. The various awe-compelling phenomena
+      soon ceased to have any connection with the anthropomorphic noumena they
+      had begotten. For instance, the sun-goddess, we are informed, was one day
+      lured out of a cavern, where she was sulking in consequence of the
+      provoking behavior of her younger brother, by her curiosity at the sight
+      of her own face in a mirror, ingeniously placed before the entrance for
+      the purpose. But no Japanese would dream now of casting any such
+      reflections, however flattering, upon the face of the orb of day. The sun
+      has become not only quite sexless to him, but as devoid of personality as
+      it is to any Western materialist. Lesser deities suffered a like
+      unsubstantial transformation. The thunder-god, with his belt of drums,
+      upon which he beats a devil's tattoo until he is black in the face, is no
+      longer even indirectly associated with the storm. As for dryads and
+      nymphs, the beautiful creatures never inhabited Eastern Asia. Anthropoid
+      foxes and raccoons, wholly lacking in those engaging qualities that beget
+      love, and through love remembrance, take their place. Even Benten, the
+      naturalized Venus, who, like her Hellenic sister, is said to have risen
+      from the sea, is a person quite incapable of inspiring a reckless
+      infatuation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Utterly unlike was this pantheon to the pantheon of the Greeks, the
+      personifying tendency of whose Aryan mind was forever peopling nature with
+      half-human inhabitants. Under its quickening fancy the very clods grew
+      sentient. Dumb earth awoke at the call of its desire, and the beings its
+      own poesy had begotten made merry companionship for man. Then a change
+      crept over the face of things. Faith began to flicker, for want of facts
+      to feed its flame. Little by little the fires of devotion burnt themselves
+      out. At last great Pan died. The body of the old belief was consumed. But
+      though it perished, its ashes preserved its form, an unsubstantial
+      presentment of the past, to crumble in a twinkling at the touch of
+      science, but keeping yet to the poet's eye the lifelike semblance of what
+      once had been. The dead gods still live in our language and our art. Even
+      to-day the earth about us seems semiconscious to the soul, for the
+      memories they have left.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But with the Far Oriental the exorcising feeling was fear. He never fell
+      in love with his own mythological creations, and so he never embalmed
+      their memories. They were to him but explanations of facts, and had no
+      claims upon his fancy. His ideal world remained as utterly impersonal as
+      if it had never been born.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The same impersonality reappears in the matter of number. Grammatically,
+      number with them is unrecognized. There exist no such things as plural
+      forms. This singularity would be only too welcome to the foreign student,
+      were it not that in avoiding the frying-pan the Tartars fell into the
+      fire. For what they invented in place of a plural was quite as difficult
+      to memorize, and even more cumbrous to express. Instead of inflecting the
+      noun and then prefixing a number, they keep the noun unchanged and add two
+      numerals; thus at times actually employing more words to express the
+      objects than there are objects to express. One of these numerals is a
+      simple number; the other is what is known as an auxiliary numeral, a word
+      as singular in form as in function. Thus, for instance, "two men" become
+      amplified verbally into "man two individual," or, as the Chinaman puts it,
+      in pidgin English, "two piecey man." For in this respect Chinese resembles
+      Japanese, though in very little else, and pidgin English is nothing but
+      the literal translation of the Chinese idiom into Anglo-Saxon words. The
+      necessity for such elaborate qualification arises from the excessive
+      simplicity of the Japanese nouns. As we have seen, the noun is so
+      indefinite a generality that simply to multiply it by a number cannot
+      possibly produce any definite result. No exact counterpart of these nouns
+      exists in English, but some idea of the impossibility of the process may
+      be got from our word "cattle," which, prolific though it may prove in
+      fact, remains obstinately incapable of verbal multiplication. All Japanese
+      nouns being of this indefinite description, all require auxiliary
+      numerals. But as each one has its own appropriate numeral, about which a
+      mistake is unpardonable, it takes some little study merely to master the
+      etiquette of these handles to the names of things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nouns are not inflected, their cases being expressed by postpositions,
+      which, as the name implies, follow, in becoming Japanese inversion,
+      instead of preceding the word they affect. To make up, nevertheless, for
+      any lack of perplexity due to an absence of inflections, adjectives, en
+      revanche, are most elaborately conjugated. Their protean shapes are as
+      long as they are numerous, representing not only times, but conditions.
+      There are, for instance, the root form, the adverbial form, the indefinite
+      form, the attributive form, and the conclusive form, the two last being
+      conjugated through all the various voices, moods, and tenses, to say
+      nothing of all the potential forms. As one change is superposed on
+      another, the adjective ends by becoming three or four times its original
+      length. The fact is, the adjective is either adjective, adverb, or verb,
+      according to occasion. In the root form it also helps to make nouns; so
+      that it is even more generally useful than as a journalistic epithet with
+      us. As a verb, it does duty as predicate and copula combined. For such an
+      unnecessary part of speech as a real copula does not exist in Japanese. In
+      spite of the shock to the prejudices of the old school of logicians, it
+      must be confessed that the Tartars get on very well without any such
+      couplings to their trains of thought. But then we should remember that in
+      their sentences the cart is always put before the horse, and so needs only
+      to be pushed, not pulled along.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The want of a copula is another instance of the primitive character of the
+      tongue. It has its counterpart in our own baby-talk, where a quality is
+      predicated of a thing simply by placing the adjective in apposition with
+      the noun.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That the Japanese word which is commonly translated "is" is in no sense a
+      copula, but an ordinary intransitive verb, referring to a natural state,
+      and not to a logical condition, is evident in two ways. In the first
+      place, it is never used to predicate a quality directly. A Japanese does
+      not say, "The scenery is fine," but simply, "Scenery, fine." Secondly,
+      wherever this verb is indirectly employed in such a manner, it is
+      followed, not by an adjective, but by an adverb. Not "She is beautiful,"
+      but "She exists beautifully," would be the Japanese way of expressing his
+      admiration. What looks at first, therefore, like a copula turns out to be
+      merely an impersonal intransitive verb.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A negative noun is, of course, an impossibility in any language, just as a
+      negative substantive, another name for the same thing, is a direct
+      contradiction in terms. No matter how negative the idea to be given, it
+      must be conveyed by a positive expression. Even a void is grammatically
+      quite full of meaning, although unhappily empty in fact. So much is common
+      to all tongues, but Japanese carries its positivism yet further. Not only
+      has it no negative nouns, it has not even any negative pronouns nor
+      pronominal adjectives,&mdash;those convenient keepers of places for the
+      absent. "None" and "nothing" are unknown words in its vocabulary, because
+      the ideas they represent are not founded on observed facts, but upon
+      metaphysical abstractions. Such terms are human-born, not earth-begotten
+      concepts, and so to the Far Oriental, who looks at things from the point
+      of view of nature, not of man, negation takes another form. Usually it is
+      introduced by the verbs, because the verbs, for the most part, relate to
+      human actions, and it is man, not nature, who is responsible for the
+      omission in question. After all, it does seem more fitting to say, "I am
+      ignorant of everything," than "I know nothing." It is indeed you who are
+      wanting, not the thing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The question of verbs leads us to another matter bearing on the subject of
+      impersonality; namely, the arrangement of the words in a Japanese
+      sentence. The Tartar mode of grammatical construction is very nearly the
+      inverse of our own. The fundamental rule of Japanese syntax is, that
+      qualifying words precede the words they qualify; that is, an idea is
+      elaborately modified before it is so much as expressed. This practice
+      places the hearer at some awkward preliminary disadvantage, inasmuch as
+      the story is nearly over before he has any notion what it is all about;
+      but really it puts the speaker to much more trouble, for he is obliged to
+      fashion his whole sentence complete in his brain before he starts to
+      speak. This is largely in consequence of two omissions in Tartar
+      etymology. There are in Japanese no relative pronouns and no temporal
+      conjunctions; conjunctions, that is, for connecting consecutive events.
+      The want of these words precludes the admission of afterthoughts.
+      Postscripts in speech are impossible. The functions of relatives are
+      performed by position, explanatory or continuative clauses being made to
+      precede directly the word they affect. Ludicrous anachronisms, not unlike
+      those experienced by Alice in her looking-glass journey, are occasioned by
+      this practice. For example, "The merry monarch who ended by falling a
+      victim to profound melancholia" becomes "To profound melancholia a victim
+      by falling ended merry monarch," and the sympathetic hearer weeps first
+      and laughs afterward, when chronologically he should be doing precisely
+      the opposite.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A like inversion of the natural order of things results from the absence
+      of temporal conjunctions. In Japanese, though nouns can be added, actions
+      cannot; you can say "hat and coat," but not "dressed and came."
+      Conjunctions are used only for space, never for time. Objects that exist
+      together can be joined in speech, but it is not allowable thus to connect
+      consecutive events. "Having dressed, came" is the Japanese idiom. To speak
+      otherwise would be to violate the unities. For a Japanese sentence is a
+      single rounded whole, not a bunch of facts loosely tied together. It is as
+      much a unit in its composition as a novel or a drama is with us. Such
+      artistic periods, however, are anything but convenient. In their nicely
+      contrived involution they strikingly resemble those curious nests of
+      Chinese boxes, where entire shells lie closely packed one within another,&mdash;a
+      very marvel of ingenious and perfectly unnecessary construction. One must
+      be antipodally comprehensive to entertain the idea; as it is, the idea
+      entertains us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the same general plan, the nouns precede the verbs in the sentence, and
+      are in every way the more important parts of speech. The consequence is
+      that in ordinary conversation the verbs come so late in the day that they
+      not infrequently get left out altogether. For the Japanese are much given
+      to docking their phrases, a custom the Germans might do well to adopt.
+      Now, nouns denote facts, while verbs express action, and action, as
+      considered in human speech, is mostly of human origin. In this precedence
+      accorded the impersonal element in language over the personal, we observe
+      again the comparative importance assigned the two. In Japanese estimation,
+      the first place belongs to nature, the second only to man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As if to mark beyond a doubt the insignificance of the part man plays in
+      their thought, sentences are usually subjectless. Although it is a common
+      practice to begin a phrase with the central word of the idea, isolated
+      from what follows by the emphasizing particle "wa" (which means "as to,"
+      the French "quant a"), the word thus singled out for distinction is far
+      more likely to be the object of the sentence than its subject. The habit
+      is analogous to the use of our phrase "speaking of,"&mdash;that is, simply
+      an emphatic mode of introducing a fresh thought; only that with them, the
+      practice being the rule and not the exception, no correspondingly abrupt
+      effect is produced by it. Ousted thus from the post of honor, the subject
+      is not even permitted the second place. Indeed, it usually fails to put in
+      an appearance anywhere. You may search through sentence after sentence
+      without meeting with the slightest suggestion of such a thing. When so
+      unusual an anomaly as a motive cause is directly adduced, it owes its
+      mention, not to the fact of being the subject, but because for other
+      reasons it happens to be the important word of the thought. The truth is,
+      the Japanese conception of events is only very vaguely subjective. An
+      action is looked upon more as happening than as being performed, as
+      impersonally rather than personally produced. The idea is due, however, to
+      anything but philosophic profundity. It springs from the most superficial
+      of childish conceptions. For the Japanese mind is quite the reverse of
+      abstract. Its consideration of things is concrete to a primitive degree.
+      The language reflects the fact. The few abstract ideas these people now
+      possess are not represented, for the most part, by pure Japanese, but by
+      imported Chinese expressions. The islanders got such general notions from
+      their foreign education, and they imported idea and word at the same time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Summing up, as it were, in propria persona the impersonality of Japanese
+      speech, the word for "man," "hito," is identical with, and probably
+      originally the same word as "hito," the numeral "one;" a noun and a
+      numeral, from which Aryan languages have coined the only impersonal
+      pronoun they possess. On the one hand, we have the German "mann;" on the
+      other, the French "on". While as if to give the official seal to the
+      oneness of man with the universe, the word mono, thing, is applied,
+      without the faintest implication of insult, to men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such, then, is the mould into which, as children, these people learn to
+      cast their thought. What an influence it must exert upon their subsequent
+      views of life we have but to ask of our own memories to know. With each
+      one of us, if we are to advance beyond the steps of the last generation,
+      there comes a time when our growing ideas refuse any longer to fit the
+      childish grooves in which we were taught to let them run. How great the
+      wrench is when this supreme moment arrives we have all felt too keenly
+      ever to forget. We hesitate, we delay, to abandon the beliefs which,
+      dating from the dawn of our being, seem to us even as a part of our very
+      selves. From the religion of our mother to the birth of our boyish first
+      love, all our early associations send down roots so deep that long after
+      our minds have outgrown them our hearts refuse to give them up. Even when
+      reason conquers at last, sentiment still throbs at the voids they
+      necessarily have left.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the Far East, this fondness for the old is further consecrated by
+      religion. The worship of ancestors sets its seal upon the traditions of
+      the past, to break which were impious as well as sad. The golden age, that
+      time when each man himself was young, has lingered on in the lands where
+      it is always morning, and where man has never passed to his prosaic noon.
+      Befitting the place is the mind we find there. As its language so clearly
+      shows, it still is in that early impersonal state to which we all awake
+      first before we become aware of that something we later know so well as
+      self.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Particularly potent with these people is their language, for a reason that
+      also lends it additional interest to us,&mdash;because it is their own.
+      Among the mass of foreign thought the Japanese imitativeness has caused
+      the nation to adopt, here is one thing which is indigenous. Half of the
+      present speech, it is true, is of Chinese importation, but conservatism
+      has kept the other half pure. From what it reveals we can see how each man
+      starts to-day with the same impersonal outlook upon life the race had
+      reached centuries ago, and which it has since kept unchanged. The man's
+      mind has done likewise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      1. Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain: The Japanese Language.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0005" id="link2HCH0005">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter 5. Nature and Art.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      We have seen how impersonal is the form which Far Eastern thought assumes
+      when it crystallizes into words. Let us turn now to a consideration of the
+      thoughts themselves before they are thus stereotyped for transmission to
+      others, and scan them as they find expression unconsciously in the man's
+      doings, or seek it consciously in his deeds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To the Far Oriental there is one subject which so permeates and pervades
+      his whole being as to be to him, not so much a conscious matter of thought
+      as an unconscious mode of thinking. For it is a thing which shapes all his
+      thoughts instead of constituting the substance of one particular set of
+      them. That subject is art. To it he is born as to a birthright. Artistic
+      perception is with him an instinct to which he intuitively conforms, and
+      for which he inherits the skill of countless generations. From the tips of
+      his fingers to the tips of his toes, in whose use he is surprisingly
+      proficient, he is the artist all over. Admirable, however, as is his
+      manual dexterity, his mental altitude is still more to be admired; for it
+      is artistic to perfection. His perception of beauty is as keen as his
+      comprehension of the cosmos is crude; for while with science he has not
+      even a speaking acquaintance, with art he is on terms of the most
+      affectionate intimacy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To the whole Far Eastern world science is a stranger. Such nescience is
+      patent even in matters seemingly scientific. For although the Chinese
+      civilization, even in the so-called modern inventions, was already old
+      while ours lay still in the cradle, it was to no scientific spirit that
+      its discoveries were due. Notwithstanding the fact that Cathay was the
+      happy possessor of gunpowder, movable type, and the compass before such
+      things were dreamt of in Europe, she owed them to no knowledge of physics,
+      chemistry, or mechanics. It was as arts, not as sciences, they were
+      invented. And it speaks volumes for her civilization that she burnt her
+      powder for fireworks, not for firearms. To the West alone belongs the
+      credit of manufacturing that article for the sake of killing people
+      instead of merely killing time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The scientific is not the Far Oriental point of view. To wish to know the
+      reasons of things, that irrepressible yearning of the Western spirit, is
+      no characteristic of the Chinaman's mind, nor is it a Tartar trait.
+      Metaphysics, a species of speculation that has usually proved peculiarly
+      attractive to mankind, probably from its not requiring any scientific
+      capital whatever, would seem the most likely place to seek it. But upon
+      such matters he has expended no imagination of his own, having quietly
+      taken on trust from India what he now professes. As for science proper, it
+      has reached at his hands only the quasimorphologic stage; that is, it
+      consists of catalogues concocted according to the ingenuity of the
+      individual and resembles the real thing about as much as a haphazard
+      arrangement of human bones might be expected to resemble a man. Not only
+      is the spirit of the subject left out altogether, but the mere outward
+      semblance is misleading. For pseudo-scientific collections of facts which
+      never rise to be classifications of phenomena forms to his idea the acme
+      of erudition. His mathematics, for example, consists of a set of empiric
+      rules, of which no explanation is ever vouchsafed the taught for the
+      simple reason that it is quite unknown to the teacher. It is not even easy
+      to decide how much of what there is is Jesuitical. Of more recent sciences
+      he has still less notion, particularly of the natural ones. Physics,
+      chemistry, geology, and the like are matters that have never entered his
+      head. Even in studies more immediately connected with obvious everyday
+      life, such as language, history, customs, it is truly remarkable how
+      little he possesses the power of generalization and inference. His
+      elaborate lists of facts are imposing typographically, but are not even
+      formally important, while his reasoning about them is as exquisite a bit
+      of scientific satire as could well be imagined.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But with the arts it is quite another matter. While you will search in
+      vain, in his civilization, for explanations of even the most simple of
+      nature's laws, you will meet at every turn with devices for the
+      beautifying of life, which may stand not unworthily beside the products of
+      nature's own skill. Whatever these people fashion, from the toy of an hour
+      to the triumphs of all time, is touched by a taste unknown elsewhere. To
+      stroll down the Broadway of Tokio of an evening is a liberal education in
+      everyday art. As you enter it there opens out in front of you a fairy-like
+      vista of illumination. Two long lines of gayly lighted shops, stretching
+      off into the distance, look out across two equally endless rows of
+      torch-lit booths, the decorous yellow gleam of the one contrasting
+      strangely with the demoniacal red flare of the other. This perspective of
+      pleasure fulfils its promise. As your feet follow your eyes you find
+      yourself in a veritable shoppers' paradise, the galaxy of twinkle
+      resolving into worlds of delight. Nor do you long remain a mere spectator;
+      for the shops open their arms to you. No cold glass reveals their charms
+      only to shut you off. Their wares lie invitingly exposed to the public,
+      seeming to you already half your own. At the very first you come to you
+      stop involuntarily, lost in admiration over what you take to be
+      bric-a-brac. It is only afterwards you learn that the object of your
+      ecstasy was the commonest of kitchen crockery. Next door you halt again,
+      this time in front of some leathern pocket-books, stamped with designs in
+      color to tempt you instantly to empty your wallet for more new ones than
+      you will ever have the means to fill. If you do succeed in tearing
+      yourself away purse-whole, it is only to fall a victim to some painted
+      fans of so exquisite a make and decoration that escape short of possession
+      is impossible. Opposed as stubbornly as you may be to idle purchase at
+      home, here you will find yourself the prey of an acute case of shopping
+      fever before you know it. Nor will it be much consolation subsequently to
+      discover that you have squandered your patrimony upon the most ordinary
+      articles of every-day use. If in despair you turn for refuge to the
+      booths, you will but have delivered yourself into the embrace of still
+      more irresistible fascinations. For the nocturnal squatters are there for
+      the express purpose of catching the susceptible. The shops were modestly
+      attractive from their nature, but the booths deliberately make eyes at
+      you, and with telling effect. The very atmosphere is bewitching. The lurid
+      smurkiness of the torches lends an appropriate weirdness to the figure of
+      the uncouthly clad pedlar who, with the politeness of the arch-fiend
+      himself, displays to an eager group the fatal fascinations of some new
+      conceit. Here the latest thing in inventions, a gutta-percha rat, which,
+      for reasons best known to the vender, scampers about squeaking with a
+      mimicry to shame the original, holds an admiring crowd spellbound with
+      mingled trepidation and delight. There a native zoetrope, indefatigable
+      round of pleasure, whose top fashioned after the type of a turbine wheel
+      enables a candle at the centre ingeniously to supply both illumination and
+      motive power at the same time, affords to as many as can find room on its
+      circumference a peep at the composite antics of a consecutively pictured
+      monkey in the act of jumping a box. Beyond this "wheel of life" lies
+      spread out on a mat a most happy family of curios, the whole of which you
+      are quite prepared to purchase en bloc. While a little farther on stands a
+      flower show which seems to be coyly beckoning to you as the blossoms nod
+      their heads to an imperceptible breeze. So one attraction fairly jostles
+      its neighbor for recognition from the gay thousands that like yourself
+      stroll past in holiday delight. Chattering children in brilliant colors,
+      voluble women and talkative men in quieter but no less picturesque
+      costumes, stream on in kaleidoscopic continuity. And you, carried along by
+      the current, wander thus for miles with the tide of pleasure-seekers,
+      till, late at night, when at last you turn reluctantly homeward, you feel
+      as one does when wakened from some too delightful dream.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Or instead of night, suppose it day and the place a temple. With those who
+      are entering you enter too through the outer gateway into the courtyard.
+      At the farther end rises a building the like of which for richness of
+      effect you have probably never beheld or even imagined. In front of you a
+      flight of white stone steps leads up to a terrace whose parapet, also of
+      stone, is diapered for half its height and open latticework the rest. This
+      piazza gives entrance to a building or set of buildings whose every detail
+      challenges the eye. Twelve pillars of snow-white wood sheathed in part
+      with bronze, arranged in four rows, make, as it were, the bones of the
+      structure. The space between the centre columns lies open. The other
+      triplets are webbed in the middle and connected, on the sides and front,
+      by grilles of wood and bronze forming on the outside a couple of
+      embrasures on either hand the entrance in which stand the guardian Nio,
+      two colossal demons, Gog and Magog. Instead of capitals, a frieze
+      bristling with Chinese lions protects the top of the pillars. Above this
+      in place of entablature rises tier upon tier of decoration, each tier
+      projecting beyond the one beneath, and the topmost of all terminating in a
+      balcony which encircles the whole second story. The parapet of this
+      balcony is one mass of ornament, and its cornice another row of lions,
+      brown instead of white. The second story is no less crowded with carving.
+      Twelve pillars make its ribs, the spaces between being filled with
+      elaborate woodwork, while on top rest more friezes, more cornices,
+      clustered with excrescences of all colors and kinds, and guarded by lions
+      innumerable. To begin to tell the details of so multi-faceted a gem were
+      artistically impossible. It is a jewel of a thousand rays, yet whose
+      beauties blend into one as the prismatic tints combine to white. And then,
+      after the first dazzle of admiration, when the spirit of curiosity urges
+      you to penetrate the centre aisle, lo and behold it is but a gate! The
+      dupe of unexpected splendor, you have been paying court to the means of
+      approach. It is only a portal after all. For as you pass through, you
+      catch a glimpse of a building beyond more gorgeous still. Like in general
+      to the first, unlike it in detail, resembling it only as the mistress may
+      the maid. But who shall convince of charm by enumerating the features of a
+      face! From the tiles of its terrace to the encrusted gables that drape it
+      as with some rich bejewelled mantle falling about it in the most graceful
+      of folds, it is the very eastern princess of a building standing in the
+      majesty of her court to give you audience.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A pebbly path, a low flight of stone steps, a pause to leave your shoes
+      without the sill, and you tread in the twilight of reverence upon the
+      moss-like mats within. The richness of its outer ornament, so impressive
+      at first, is, you discover, but prelude to the lavish luxury of its
+      interior. Lacquer, bronze, pigments, deck its ceiling and its sides in
+      such profusion that it seems to you as if art had expanded, in the
+      congenial atmosphere, into a tropical luxuriance of decoration, and grew
+      here as naturally on temples as in the jungle creepers do on trees. Yet
+      all is but setting to what the place contains; objects of bigotry and
+      virtue that appeal to the artistic as much as to the religious instincts
+      of the devout. More sacred still are the things treasured in the sanctum
+      of the priests. There you will find gems of art for whose sake only the
+      most abnormal impersonality can prevent you from breaking the tenth
+      commandment. Of the value set upon them you can form a distant
+      approximation from the exceeding richness and the amazing number of the
+      silk cloths and lacquered boxes in which they are so religiously kept. As
+      you gaze thus, amid the soul-satisfying repose of the spot, at some
+      masterpiece from the brush of Motonobu, you find yourself wondering, in a
+      fanciful sort of way, whether Buddhist contemplation is not after all only
+      another name for the contemplation of the beautiful, since devotees to the
+      one are ex officio such votaries of the other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dissimilar as are these two glimpses of Japanese existence, in one point
+      the bustling street and the hushed temple are alike,&mdash;in the nameless
+      grace that beautifies both.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This spirit is even more remarkable for its all-pervasiveness than for its
+      inherent excellence. Both objectively and subjectively its catholicity is
+      remarkable. It imbues everything, and affects everybody. So universally is
+      it applied to the daily affairs of life that there may be said to be no
+      mechanical arts in Japan simply because all such have been raised to the
+      position of fine arts. The lowest artisan is essentially an artist. Modern
+      French nomenclature on the subject, in spite of the satire to which the
+      more prosaic Anglo-Saxon has subjected it, is peculiarly applicable there.
+      To call a Japanese cook, for instance, an artist would be but the barest
+      acknowledgment of fact, for Japanese food is far more beautiful to look at
+      than agreeable to eat; while Tokio tailors are certainly masters of
+      drapery, if they are sublimely oblivious to the natural modelings of the
+      male or female form.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the other hand, art is sown, like the use of tobacco, broadcast among
+      the people. It is the birthright of the Far East, the talent it never
+      hides. Throughout the length and breadth of the land, and from the highest
+      prince to the humblest peasant, art reigns supreme.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now such a prevalence of artistic feeling implies of itself impersonality
+      in the people. At first sight it might seem as if science did the same,
+      and that in this respect the one hemisphere offset the other, and that
+      consequently both should be equally impersonal. But in the first place,
+      our masses are not imbued with the scientific spirit, as theirs are with
+      artistic sensibility. Who would expect of a mason an impersonal interest
+      in the principles of the arch, or of a plumber a non-financial devotion to
+      hydraulics? Certainly one would be wrong in crediting the masses in
+      general or European waiters in particular with much abstract love of
+      mathematics, for example. In the second place, there is an essential
+      difference in the attitude of the two subjects upon personality.
+      Emotionally, science appeals to nobody, art to everybody. Now the emotions
+      constitute the larger part of that complex bundle of ideas which we know
+      as self. A thought which is not tinged to some extent with feeling is not
+      only not personal; properly speaking, it is not even distinctively human,
+      but cosmical. In its lofty superiority to man, science is unpersonal
+      rather than impersonal. Art, on the other hand, is a familiar spirit.
+      Through the windows of the senses she finds her way into the very soul of
+      man, and makes for herself a home there. But it is to his humanity, not to
+      his individuality, that she whispers, for she speaks in that universal
+      tongue which all can understand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Examples are not wanting to substantiate theory. It is no mere coincidence
+      that the two most impersonal nations of Europe and Asia respectively, the
+      French and the Japanese, are at the same time the most artistic. Even
+      politeness, which, as we have seen, distinguishes both, is itself but a
+      form of art,&mdash;the social art of living agreeably with one's fellows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This impersonality comes out with all the more prominence when we pass
+      from the consideration of art in itself to the spirit which actuates that
+      art, and especially when we compare their spirit with our own. The
+      mainsprings of Far Eastern art may be said to be three: Nature, Religion,
+      and Humor. Incongruous collection that they are, all three witness to the
+      same trait. For the first typifies concrete impersonality, the second
+      abstract impersonality, while the province of the last is to ridicule
+      personality generally. Of the trio the first is altogether the most
+      important. Indeed, to a Far Oriental, so fundamental a part of himself is
+      his love of Nature that before we view its mirrored image it will be well
+      to look the emotion itself in the face. The Far Oriental lives in a long
+      day-dream of beauty. He muses rather than reasons, and all musing, so the
+      word itself confesses, springs from the inspiration of a Muse. But this
+      Muse appears not to him, as to the Greeks, after the fashion of a woman,
+      nor even more prosaically after the likeness of a man. Unnatural though it
+      seem to us, his inspiration seeks no human symbol. His Muse is not kin to
+      mankind. She is too impersonal for any personification, for she is Nature.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That poet whose name carries with it a certain presumption of
+      infallibility has told us that "the proper study of mankind is man;" and
+      if material advancement in consequence be any criterion of the fitness of
+      a particular mental pursuit, events have assuredly justified the saying.
+      Indeed, the Levant has helped antithetically to preach the same lesson, in
+      showing us by its own fatal example that the improper study of mankind is
+      woman, and that they who but follow the fair will inevitably degenerate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Far Oriental knows nothing of either study, and cares less. The
+      delight of self-exploration, or the possibly even greater delight of
+      losing one's self in trying to fathom femininity, is a sensation equally
+      foreign to his temperament. Neither the remarkable persistence of one's
+      own characteristics, not infrequently matter of deep regret to their
+      possessor, nor the charmingly unaccountable variability of the fairer sex,
+      at times quite as annoying, is a phenomenon sufficient to stir his
+      curiosity. Accepting, as he does, the existing state of things more as a
+      material fact than as a phase in a gradual process of development, he
+      regards humanity as but a small part of the great natural world, instead
+      of considering it the crowning glory of the whole. He recognizes man
+      merely as a fraction of the universe,&mdash;one might almost say as a
+      vulgar fraction of it, considering the low regard in which he is held,&mdash;and
+      accords him his proportionate share of attention, and no more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In his thought, nature is not accessory to man. Worthy M. Perichon, of
+      prosaic, not to say philistinic fame, had, as we remember, his travels
+      immortalized in a painting where a colossal Perichon in front almost
+      completely eclipsed a tiny Mont Blanc behind. A Far Oriental thinks
+      poetry, which may possibly account for the fact that in his mind-pictures
+      the relative importance of man and mountain stands reversed. "The
+      matchless Fuji," first of motifs in his art, admits no pilgrim as its
+      peer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nor is it to woman that turn his thoughts. Mother Earth is fairer, in his
+      eyes, than are any of her daughters. To her is given the heart that should
+      be theirs. The Far Eastern love of Nature amounts almost to a passion. To
+      the study of her ever varying moods her Japanese admirer brings an
+      impersonal adoration that combines oddly the aestheticism of a poet with
+      the asceticism of a recluse. Not that he worships in secret, however. His
+      passion is too genuine either to find disguise or seek display. With us,
+      unfortunately, the love of Nature is apt to be considered a mental
+      extravagance peculiar to poets, excusable in exact ratio to the ability to
+      give it expression. For an ordinary mortal to feel a fondness for Mother
+      Earth is a kind of folly, to be carefully concealed from his fellows. A
+      sort of shamefacedness prevents him from avowing it, as a boy at
+      boarding-school hides his homesickness, or a lad his love. He shrinks from
+      appearing less pachydermatous than the rest. Or else he flies to the other
+      extreme, and affects the odd; pretends, poses, parades, and at last
+      succeeds half in duping himself, half in deceiving other people. But with
+      Far Orientals the case is different. Their love has all the unostentatious
+      assurance of what has received the sanction of public opinion. Nor is it
+      still at that doubtful, hesitating stage when, by the instrumentality of a
+      third, its soul-harmony can suddenly be changed from the jubilant major
+      key into the despairing minor. No trace of sadness tinges his delight. He
+      has long since passed this melancholy phase of erotic misery, if so be
+      that the course of his true love did not always run smooth, and is now
+      well on in matrimonial bliss. The very look of the land is enough to
+      betray the fact. In Japan the landscape has an air of domesticity about
+      it, patent even to the most casual observer. Wherever the Japanese has
+      come in contact with the country he has made her unmistakably his own. He
+      has touched her to caress, not injure, and it seems as if Nature accepted
+      his fondness as a matter of course, and yielded him a wifely submission in
+      return. His garden is more human, even, than his house. Not only is
+      everything exquisitely in keeping with man, but natural features are
+      actually changed, plastic to the imprint of their lord and master's mind.
+      Bushes, shrubs, trees, forget to follow their original intent, and grow as
+      he wills them to; now expanding in wanton luxuriance, now contracting into
+      dwarf designs of their former selves, all to obey his caprice and please
+      his eye. Even stubborn rocks lose their wildness, and come to seem a part
+      of the almost sentient life around them. If the description of such
+      dutifulness seems fanciful, the thing itself surpasses all supposition.
+      Hedges and shrubbery, clipped into the most fantastic shapes, accept the
+      suggestion of the pruning-knife as if man's wishes were their own whims.
+      Manikin maples, Tom Thumb trees, a foot high and thirty years old, with
+      all the gnarls and knots and knuckles of their fellows of the forest, grow
+      in his parterres, their native vitality not a whit diminished. And they
+      are not regarded as monstrosities but only as the most natural of
+      artificialities; for they are a part of a horticultural whole. To walk
+      into a Japanese garden is like wandering of a sudden into one of those
+      strange worlds we see reflected in the polished surface of a concave
+      mirror, where all but the observer himself is transformed into a fantastic
+      miniature of the reality. In that quaint fairyland diminutive rivers flow
+      gracefully under tiny trees, past mole-hill mountains, till they fall at
+      last into lilliputian lakes, almost smothered for the flowers that grow
+      upon their banks; while in the extreme distance of a couple of rods the
+      cone of a Fuji ten feet high looks approvingly down upon a scene which
+      would be nationally incomplete without it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But besides the delights of domesticity which the Japanese enjoys daily in
+      Nature's company, he has his acces de tendresse, too. When he feels thus
+      specially stirred, he invites a chosen few of his friends, equally
+      infatuated, and together they repair to some spot noted for its scenery.
+      It may be a waterfall, or some dreamy pond overhung by trees, or the
+      distant glimpse of a mountain peak framed in picture-wise between the
+      nearer hills; or, at their appropriate seasons, the blossoming of the many
+      tree flowers, which in eastern Asia are beautiful beyond description. For
+      he appreciates not only places, but times. One spot is to be seen at
+      sunrise, another by moonlight; one to be visited in the spring-time,
+      another in the fall. But wherever or whenever it be, a tea-house, placed
+      to command the best view of the sight, stands ready to receive him. For
+      nature's beauties are too well recognized to remain the exclusive property
+      of the first chance lover. People flock to view nature as we do to see a
+      play, and privacy is as impossible as it is unsought. Indeed, the aversion
+      to publicity is simply a result of the sense of self, and therefore
+      necessarily not a feature of so impersonal a civilization. Aesthetic
+      guidebooks are written for the nature-enamoured, descriptive of these
+      views which the Japanese translator quaintly calls "Sceneries," and which
+      visitors come not only from near but from far to gaze upon. In front of
+      the tea-house proper are rows of summer pavilions, in one of which the
+      party make themselves at home, while gentle little tea-house girls toddle
+      forth to serve them the invariable preliminary tea and confections. Each
+      man then produces from up his sleeve, or from out his girdle, paper, ink,
+      and brush, and proceeds to compose a poem on the beauty of the spot and
+      the feelings it calls up, which he subsequently reads to his admiring
+      companions. Hot sake is next served, which is to them what beer is to a
+      German or absinthe to a blouse; and there they sit, sip, and poetize,
+      passing their couplets, as they do their cups, in honor to one another. At
+      last, after drinking in an hour or two of scenery and sake combined, the
+      symposium of poets breaks up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sometimes, instead of a company of friends, a man will take his family,
+      wife, babies, and all, on such an outing, but the details of his holiday
+      are much the same as before. For the scenery is still the centre of
+      attraction, and in the attendant creature comforts Far Eastern etiquette
+      permits an equal enjoyment to man, woman, and child.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This love of nature is quite irrespective of social condition. All classes
+      feel its force, and freely indulge the feeling. Poor as well as rich, low
+      as well as high, contrive to gratify their poetic instincts for natural
+      scenery. As for flowers, especially tree flowers, or those of the larger
+      plants, like the lotus or the iris, the Japanese appreciation of their
+      beauty is as phenomenal as is that beauty itself. Those who can afford the
+      luxury possess the shrubs in private; those who cannot, feast their eyes
+      on the public specimens. From a sprig in a vase to a park planted on
+      purpose, there is no part of them too small or too great to be excluded
+      from Far Oriental affection. And of the two "drawing-rooms" of the Mikado
+      held every year, in April and November, both are garden-parties: the one
+      given at the time and with the title of "the cherry blossoms," and the
+      other of "the chrysanthemum."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These same tree flowers deserve more than a passing notice, not simply
+      because of their amazing beauty, which would arrest attention anywhere,
+      but for the national attitude toward them. For no better example of the
+      Japanese passion for nature could well be cited. If the anniversaries of
+      people are slightingly treated in the land of the sunrise, the same cannot
+      be said of plants. The yearly birthdays of the vegetable world are
+      observed with more than botanic enthusiasm. The regard in which they are
+      held is truly emotional, and it not actually individual in its object, at
+      least personal to the species. Each kind of tree as its season brings it
+      into flower is made the occasion of a festival. For the beauty of the
+      blossoming receives the tribute of a national admiration. From peers to
+      populace mankind turns out to witness it. Nor are these occasions few.
+      Spring in the Far East is one long chain of flower fetes, and as spring
+      begins by the end of January and lasts till the middle of June,
+      opportunities for appreciating each in turn are not half spoiled by a
+      common contemporaneousness. People have not only occasion but time to
+      admire. Indeed, spring itself is suitably respected by being dated
+      conformably to fact. Far Orientals begin their year when Nature begins
+      hers, instead of starting anachronously as we do in the very middle of the
+      dead season, much as our colleges hold their commencements, on the last in
+      place at on the first day of the academic term. So previous has the haste
+      of Western civilization become. The result is that our rejoicing partakes
+      of the incongruity of humor. The new year exists only in name. In the Far
+      East, on the other band, the calendar is made to fit the time. Men begin
+      to reckon their year some three weeks later than the Western world, just
+      as the plum-tree opens its pink white petals, as it were, in rosy
+      reflection of the snow that lies yet upon the ground. But the coldness of
+      the weather does not in the least deter people from thronging the spot in
+      which the trees grow, where they spend hours in admiration, and end by
+      pinning appropriate poems on the twigs for later comers to peruse.
+      Fleeting as the flowers are in fact, they live forever in fancy. For they
+      constitute one of the commonest motifs of both painting and poetry. A
+      branch just breaking into bloom seen against the sunrise sky, or a bough
+      bending its blossoms to the bosom of a stream, is subject enough for their
+      greatest masters, who thus wed, as it were, two arts in one,&mdash;the
+      spirit of poesy with pictorial form. This plum-tree is but a blossom.
+      Precocious harbinger of a host of flowers, its gay heralding over, it
+      vanishes not to be recalled, for it bears no edible fruit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The next event in the series might fairly be called phenomenal. Early in
+      April takes place what is perhaps as superb a sight as anything in this
+      world, the blossoming of the cherry-trees. Indeed, it is not easy to do
+      the thing justice in description. If the plum invited admiration, the
+      cherry commands it; for to see the sakura in flower for the first time is
+      to experience a new sensation. Familiar as a man may be with cherry
+      blossoms at home, the sight there bursts upon him with the dazzling effect
+      of a revelation. Such is the profusion of flowers that the tree seems to
+      have turned into a living mass of rosy light. No leaves break the
+      brilliance. The snowy-pink petals drape the branches entirely, yet so
+      delicately, one deems it all a veil donned for the tree's nuptials with
+      the spring. For nothing could more completely personify the spirit of the
+      spring-time. You can almost fancy it some dryad decked for her bridal, in
+      maidenly day-dreaming too lovely to last. For like the plum the cherry
+      fails in its fruit to fulfil the promise of its flower.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It would be strange indeed if so much beauty received no recognition, but
+      it is even more strange that recognition should be so complete and so
+      universal as it is. Appreciation is not confined to the cultivated few; it
+      is shown quite as enthusiastically by the masses. The popularity of the
+      plants is all-embracing. The common people are as sensitive to their
+      beauty as are the upper classes. Private gratification, roseate as it is,
+      pales beside the public delight. Indeed, not content with what revelation
+      Nature makes of herself of her own accord, man has multiplied her
+      manifestations. Spots suitable to their growth have been peopled by him
+      with trees. Sometimes they stand in groups like star-clusters, as in Oji,
+      crowning a hill; sometimes, as at Mukojima, they line an avenue for miles,
+      dividing the blue river on the one hand from the blue-green rice-fields on
+      the other,&mdash;a floral milky way of light. But wherever the trees may
+      be, there at their flowering season are to be found throngs of admirers.
+      For in crowds people go out to see the sight, multitudes streaming
+      incessantly to and fro beneath their blossoms as the time of day
+      determines the turn of the human tide. To the Occidental stranger such a
+      gathering suggests some social loadstone; but none exists. In the
+      cherry-trees alone lies the attraction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For one week out of the fifty-two the cherry-tree stands thus glorified, a
+      vision of beauty prolonged somewhat by the want of synchronousness of the
+      different kinds. Then the petals fall. What was a nuptial veil becomes a
+      winding-sheet, covering the sod as with winter's winding-sheet of snow,
+      destined itself to disappear, and the tree is nothing but a common
+      cherry-tree once more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But flowers are by no means over because the cherry blossoms are past. A
+      brief space, and the same crowds that flocked to the cherry turn to the
+      wistaria. Gardens are devoted to the plants, and the populace greatly
+      given to the gardens. There they go to sit and gaze at the grape-like
+      clusters of pale purple flowers that hang more than a cubit long over the
+      wooden trellis, and grow daily down toward their own reflections in the
+      pond beneath, vying with one another in Narcissus-like endeavor. And the
+      people, as they sip their tea on the veranda opposite, behold a doubled
+      delight, the flower itself and its mirrored image stretching to kiss.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After the wistaria comes the tree-peony, and then the iris, with its
+      trefoil flowers broader than a man may span, and at all colors under the
+      sky. To one who has seen the great Japanese fleur-de-lis, France looks
+      ludicrously infelicitous in her choice of emblem.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the list grows too long, limited as it is only by its own annual
+      repetition. We have as yet reached but the first week in June; the summer
+      and autumn are still to come, the first bringing the lotus for its crown,
+      and the second the chrysanthemum. And lazily grand the lotus is, itself
+      the embodiment of the spirit of the drowsy August air, the very essence of
+      Buddha-like repose. The castle moats are its special domain, which in this
+      its flowering season it wrests wholly from their more proper occupant&mdash;the
+      water. A dense growth of leather-like leaves, above which rise in majestic
+      isolation the solitary flowers, encircles the outer rampart, shutting the
+      castle in as it might be the palace of the Sleeping Beauty. In the
+      delightful dreaminess that creeps over one as he stands thus before some
+      old daimyo's former abode in the heart of Japan, he forgets all his
+      metaphysical difficulties about Nirvana, for he fancies he has found it,
+      one long Lotus afternoon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then last, but in some sort first, since it has been taken for the
+      imperial insignia, comes the chrysanthemum. The symmetry of its shape well
+      fits it to symbolize the completeness of perfection which the Mikado, the
+      son of heaven, mundanely represents. It typifies, too, the fullness of the
+      year; for it marks, as it were, the golden wedding of the spring, the
+      reminiscence in November of the nuptials of the May. Its own color,
+      however, is not confined to gold. It may be of almost any hue and within
+      the general limits of a circle of any form. Now it is a chariot wheel with
+      petals for spokes; now a ball of fire with lambent tongues of flame; while
+      another kind seems the button of some natural legion of honor, and still
+      another a pin-wheel in Nature's own day-fireworks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Admired as a thing of beauty for its own sake, it is also used merely as a
+      material for artistic effects; for among the quaintest of such conceits
+      are the Japanese Jarley chrysanthemum works. Every November in the
+      florists' gardens that share the temple grounds at Asakusa may be seen
+      groups of historical and mythological figures composed entirely of
+      chrysanthemum flowers. These effigies are quite worthy of comparison with
+      their London cousins, being sufficiently life-like to terrify children and
+      startle anybody. To come suddenly, on turning a corner, upon a colossal
+      warrior, deterrently uncouth and frightfully battle-clad, in the act of
+      dispatching a fallen foe, is a sensation not instantly dispelled by the
+      fact that he is made of flowers. The practice, at least, bears witness to
+      an artistic ingenuity of no mean merit, and to a horticulture ably carried
+      on, if somewhat eccentrically applied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From the passing of the chrysanthemum dates the dead season. But it is
+      suitably short-lived. Sometimes as early as November, the plum-tree is
+      already blossoming again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Even from so imperfectly gathered a garland it will be seen that the
+      Japanese do not lack for opportunities to admire, nor do they turn coldly
+      away from what they are given. Indeed, they may be said to live in a
+      chronic state of flower-fever; but in spite of the vast amount of
+      admiration which they bestow on plants, it is not so much the quantity of
+      that admiration as the quality of it which is remarkable. The intense
+      appreciation shown the subject by the Far Oriental is something whose very
+      character seems strange to us, and when in addition we consider that it
+      permeates the entire people from the commonest coolie to the most
+      aesthetic courtier, it becomes to our comprehension a state of things
+      little short of inexplicable. To call it artistic sensibility is to use
+      too limited a term, for it pervades the entire people; rather is it a
+      sixth sense of a natural, because national description; for the trait
+      differs from our corresponding feeling in degree, and especially in
+      universality enough to merit the distinction. Their care for tree flowers
+      is not confined to a cultivation, it is a cult. It approaches to a sort of
+      natural nature-worship, an adoration in which nothing is personified. For
+      the emotion aroused in the Far Oriental is just as truly an emotion as it
+      was to the Greek; but whereas the Greek personified its object, the
+      Japanese admires that object for what it is. To think of the cherry-tree,
+      for instance, as a woman, would be to his mind a conception transcending
+      even the limits of the ludicrous.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0006" id="link2HCH0006">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter 6. Art.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      That nature, not man, is their beau ideal, the source of inspiration to
+      them, is evident again on looking at their art. The same spirit that makes
+      of them such wonderful landscape gardeners and such wonder-full landscape
+      gazers shows itself unmistakably in their paintings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The current impression that Japanese pictorial ambition, and consequent
+      skill, is confined to the representation of birds and flowers, though
+      entirely erroneous as it stands, has a grain of truth behind it. This idea
+      is due to the attitude of the foreign observers, and was in fact a tribute
+      to Japanese technique rather than an appreciation of Far Eastern artistic
+      feeling. The truth is, the foreigners brought to the subject their own
+      Western criteria of merit, and judged everything by these standards. Such
+      works naturally commended themselves most as had least occasion to deviate
+      from their canons. The simplest pictures, therefore, were pronounced the
+      best. Paintings of birds and flowers were thus admitted to be fine,
+      because their realism spoke for itself. Of the exquisite poetic feeling of
+      their landscape paintings the foreign critics were not at first conscious,
+      because it was not expressed in terms with which they were familiar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But first impressions, here as elsewhere, are valuable. One is very apt to
+      turn to them again from the reasoning of his second thoughts. Flora and
+      fauna are a conspicuous feature of Far Asiatic art, because they enter as
+      details of the subject-matter of the artist's thoughts and day-dreams.
+      These birds and flowers are his sujets de genre. Where we should select a
+      phase of human life for effective isolation, they choose instead a bit of
+      nature. A spray of grass or a twig of cherry-blossoms is motif enough for
+      them. To their thought its beauty is amply suggestive. For to the Far
+      Oriental all nature is sympathetically sentient. His admiration, instead
+      of being centred on man, embraces the universe. His art reflects it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Leaving out of consideration, for the moment, minor though still important
+      distinctions in tone, treatment, and technique, the great fundamental
+      difference between Western and Far Eastern art lies in its attitude toward
+      humanity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With us, from the time of the Greeks to the present day, man has been the
+      cynosure of artistic eyes; with them he has never been vouchsafed more
+      than a casual, not to say a cursory glance, even woman failing to rivet
+      his attention. One of our own writers has said that, without passing the
+      bounds of due respect, a man is permitted two looks at any woman he may
+      meet, one to recognize, one to admire. A Japanese ordinarily never dreams
+      of taking but one,&mdash;if indeed he goes so far as that,&mdash;the
+      first. It is the omitting to take that second look that has left him what
+      he is. Not that Fortune has been unpropitious; only blind. Fate has
+      offered him opportunity enough; too much, perhaps. For in Japan the
+      exposure of the female form is without a parallel in latitude. Never nude,
+      it is frequently naked. The result artistically is much the same, though
+      the cause be different. For it is a fatal mistake to suppose the Japanese
+      an immodest people. According to their own standards, they are exceedingly
+      modest. No respectable Japanese woman would, for instance, ever for a
+      moment turn out her toes in walking. It is considered immodest to do so.
+      Their code is, however, not so whimsical as this bit of etiquette might
+      suggest. The intent is with them the touchstone of propriety. In their
+      eyes a state of nature is not a state of indecency. Whatever exposure is
+      required for convenience is right; whatever unnecessary, wrong. Such an
+      Eden-like condition of society would seem to be the very spot for a
+      something like the modern French school of art to have developed in. And
+      yet it is just that study of the nude which has from immemorial antiquity
+      been entirely neglected in the Far East. An ancient Greek, to say nothing
+      of a modern Parisian, would have shocked a Japanese. Yet we are shocked by
+      them. We are astounded at the sights we see in their country villages,
+      while they in their turn marvel at the exhibitions they witness in our
+      city theatres. At their watering-places the two sexes bathe promiscuously
+      together in all the simplicity of nature; but for a Japanese woman to
+      appear on the stage in any character, however proper, would be deemed
+      indecent. The difference between the two hemispheres may be said to
+      consist in an artless liberty on the one hand, and artistic license on the
+      other. Their unwritten code of propriety on the subject seems to be, "You
+      must see, but you may not observe."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These people live more in accordance with their code of propriety than we
+      do with ours. All classes alike conform to it. The adjective
+      "respectable," used above as a distinction in speaking of woman, was in
+      reality superfluous, for all women there, as far as appearance goes, are
+      respectable. Even the most abandoned creature does not betray her status
+      by her behavior. The reason of this uniformity and its psychological
+      importance I shall discuss later.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This form of modesty, a sort of want of modesty of form, has no connection
+      whatever with sex. It applies with equal force to the male figure, which
+      is even more exposed than the female, and offers anatomical suggestions
+      invaluable alike to the artistic and medical professions,&mdash;suggestions
+      that are equally ignored by both. The coolies are frequently possessed of
+      physiques which would have delighted Michael Angelo; and as for the
+      phenomenal corpulency of the wrestlers, it would have made of the place a
+      very paradise for Rubens. In regard to the doctors,&mdash;for to call them
+      surgeons would be to give a name to what does not exist,&mdash;a lack of
+      scientific zeal has been the cause of their not investigating what tempts
+      too seductively, we should imagine, to be ignored. Acupuncture, or the
+      practice of sticking long pins into any part of the patient's body that
+      may happen to be paining him, pretty much irrespective of anatomical
+      position, is the nearest approach to surgery of which they are guilty, and
+      proclaims of itself the in corpore vili character of the thing operated
+      upon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nor does the painter owe anything to science. He represents humanity
+      simply as he sees it in its every-day costume; and it betokens the highest
+      powers of generalized observation that he produces the results he does. In
+      his drawings, man is shown, not as he might look in the primitive, or
+      privitive, simplicity of his ancestral Garden of Eden, but as he does look
+      in the ordinary wear and tear of his present garments. Civilization has
+      furnished him with clothes, and he prefers, when he has his picture taken,
+      to keep them on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In dealing with man, the Far Oriental artist is emphatically a realist; it
+      is when he turns to nature that he becomes ideal. But by ideal is not
+      meant here conventional. That term of reproach is a misnomer, founded upon
+      a mistake. His idealism is simply the outcome of his love, which, like all
+      human love, transfigures its object. The Far Oriental has plenty of this,
+      which, if sometimes a delusion, seems also second sight, but it is
+      peculiarly impersonal. His color-blindness to the warm, blood-red end of
+      the spectrum of life in no wise affects his perception of the colder
+      beauty of the great blues and greens of nature. To their poetry he is ever
+      sensitive. His appreciation of them is something phenomenal, and his power
+      of presentation worthy his appreciation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A Japanese painting is a poem rather than a picture. It portrays an
+      emotion called up by a scene, and not the scene itself in all its
+      elaborate complexity. It undertakes to give only so much of it as is vital
+      to that particular feeling, and intentionally omits all irrelevant
+      details. It is the expression caught from a glimpse of the soul of nature
+      by the soul of man; the mirror of a mood, passing, perhaps, in fact, but
+      perpetuated thus to fancy. Being an emotion, its intensity is directly
+      proportional to the singleness with which it possesses the thoughts. The
+      Far Oriental fully realizes the power of simplicity. This principle is his
+      fundamental canon of pictorial art. To understand his paintings, it is
+      from this standpoint they must be regarded; not as soulless photographs of
+      scenery, but as poetic presentations of the spirit of the scenes. The very
+      charter of painting depends upon its not giving us charts. And if with us
+      a long poem be a contradiction in terms, a full picture is with them as
+      self-condemnatory a production. From the contemplation of such works of
+      art as we call finished, one is apt, after he has once appreciated Far
+      Eastern taste, to rise with an unpleasant feeling of satiety, as if he has
+      eaten too much at the feast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Their paintings, by comparison, we call sketches. Is not our would-be
+      slight unwittingly the reverse? Is not a sketch, after all, fuller of
+      meaning, to one who knows how to read it, than a finished affair, which is
+      very apt to end with itself, barren of fruit? Does not one's own
+      imagination elude one's power to portray it? Is it not forever flitting
+      will-o'-the-wisp-like ahead of us just beyond exact definition? For the
+      soul of art lies in what art can suggest, and nothing is half so
+      suggestive as the half expressed, not even a double entente. To hint a
+      great deal by displaying a little is more vital to effect than the
+      cleverest representation of the whole. The art of partially revealing is
+      more telling, even, than the ars celare artem. Who has not suspected
+      through a veil a fairer face than veil ever hid? Who has not been
+      delightedly duped by the semi-disclosures of a dress? The principle is
+      just as true in any one branch of art as it is of the attempted
+      developments by one of the suggestions of another. Yet who but has thus
+      felt its force? Who has not had a shock of day-dream desecration on
+      chancing upon an illustrated edition of some book whose story he had lain
+      to heart? Portraits of people, pictures of places, he does not know, and
+      yet which purport to be his! And I venture to believe that to more than
+      one of us the exquisite pathos of the Bride of Lammermoor is gone when
+      Lucia warbles her woes, be it never so entrancingly, to an admiring house.
+      It almost seems as if the garish publicity of using her name for operatic
+      title were a special intervention of the Muse, that we might the less
+      connect song with story,&mdash;two sensations that, like two lights,
+      destroy one another by mutual interference.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Against this preference shown the sketch it may be urged that to
+      appreciate such suggestions presupposes as much art in the public as in
+      the painter. But the ability to appreciate a thing when expressed is but
+      half that necessary to express it. Some understanding must exist in the
+      observer for any work to be intelligible. It is only a question of degree.
+      The greater the art-sense in the person addressed, the more had better be
+      left to it. Now in Japan the public is singularly artistic. In fact, the
+      artistic appreciation of the masses there is something astonishing to us,
+      accustomed to our immense intellectual differences between man and man.
+      Sketches are thus peculiarly fitting to such a land.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Besides, there is a quiet modesty about the sketch which is itself taking.
+      To attempt the complete even in a fractional bit of the cosmos, like a
+      picture, has in it a difficulty akin to the logical one of proving a
+      universal negative. The possibilities of failure are enormously increased,
+      and failure is less forgiven for the assumption. Art might perhaps not
+      unwisely follow the example of science in such matters where an exhaustive
+      work, which takes the better part of a lifetime to produce, is invariably
+      entitled by its erudite author an Elementary Treatise on the subject in
+      hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To aid the effect due to simplicity of conception steps in the Far
+      Oriental's wonderful technique. His brush-strokes are very few in number,
+      but each one tells. They are laid on with a touch which is little short of
+      marvelous, and requires heredity to explain its skill. For in his method
+      there is no emending, no super-position, no change possible. What he does
+      is done once and for all. The force of it grows on you as you gaze. Each
+      stroke expresses surprisingly much, and suggests more. Even omissions are
+      made significant. In his painting it is visibly true that objects can be
+      rendered conspicuous by their very absence. You are quite sure you see
+      what on scrutiny you discover to be only the illusion of inevitable
+      inference. The Far Oriental artist understands the power of suggestion
+      well; for imagination always fills in the picture better than the brush,
+      however perfect be its skill.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Even the neglect of certain general principles which we consider vital to
+      effect, such as the absence of shadows and the lack of perspective, proves
+      not to be of the importance we imagine. We discover in these paintings how
+      immaterial, artistically, was Peter Schlimmel's sad loss, and how
+      perfectly possible it is to make bits of discontinuous distance take the
+      place effectively of continuous space.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Far Eastern pictures are epigrams rather than descriptions. They present a
+      bit of nature with the terseness of a maxim of La Rochefoucault, and they
+      delight as aphorisms do by their insight and the happy conciseness of its
+      expression. Few aphorisms are absolutely true, but then boldness more than
+      makes up for what they lack in verity. So complex a subject is life that
+      to state a truth with all its accompanying limitations is to weaken it at
+      once. Exceptions, while demonstrating the rule, do not tend to emphasize
+      it. And though the whole truth is essential to science, such
+      exhaustiveness is by no means a canon of art.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Parallels are not wanting at home. What they do with space in their
+      paintings do we not with time in the case of our comedies, those acted
+      pictures of life? Should we not refuse to tolerate a play that insisted on
+      furnishing us with a full perspective of its characters' past? And yet of
+      the two, it is far perferable, artistically, to be given too much in
+      sequence than too much at once. The Chinese, who put much less into a
+      painting than what we deem indispensable, delight in dramas that last six
+      weeks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To give a concluding touch of life to my necessarily skeleton-like
+      generalities, memory pictures me a certain painting of Okio's which I fell
+      in love with at first sight. It is of a sunrise on the coast of Japan. A
+      long line of surf is seen tumbling in to you from out a bank of mist, just
+      piercing which shows the blood-red disk of the rising sun, while over the
+      narrow strip of breaking rollers three cranes are slowly sailing north.
+      And that is all you see. You do not see the shore; you do not see the
+      main; you are looking but at the border-land of that great unknown, the
+      heaving ocean still slumbering beneath its chilly coverlid of mist, out of
+      which come the breakers, and the sun, and the cranes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So much for the more serious side of Japanese fancy; a look at the lighter
+      leads to the same conclusion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Hand in hand with his keen poetic sensibility goes a vivid sense of humor,&mdash;two
+      traits that commonly, indeed, are found Maying together over the meadows
+      of imagination. For, as it might be put,
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  "The heart that is soonest awake to the flowers
+   Is also the first to be touched by the fun."
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The Far Oriental well exemplifies this fact. His art, wherever fun is
+      possible, fairly bubbles over with laughter. From the oldest masters down
+      to Hokusai, it is constantly welling up in the drollest conceits. It is of
+      all descriptions, too. Now it lurks in merry ambush, like the faint
+      suggestion of a smile on an otherwise serious face, so subtile that the
+      observer is left wondering whether the artist could have meant what seems
+      more like one's own ingenious discovery; now it breaks out into the
+      broadest of grins, absurd juxtapositions of singularly happy
+      incongruities. For Hokusai's caricatures and Hendschel's sketches might be
+      twins. If there is a difference, it lies not so much in the artist's work
+      as in the greater generality of its appreciation. Humor flits easily there
+      at the sea-level of the multitude. For the Japanese temperament is ever on
+      the verge of a smile which breaks out with catching naivete at the first
+      provocation. The language abounds in puns which are not suffered to lie
+      idle, and even poetry often hinges on certain consecrated plays on words.
+      From the very constitution of the people there is of course nothing
+      selfish in the national enjoyment. A man is quite as ready to laugh at his
+      own expense as at his neighbor's, a courtesy which his neighbor cordially
+      returns.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now the ludicrous is essentially human in its application. The principle
+      of the synthesis of contradictories, popularly known by the name of humor,
+      is necessarily limited in its field to man. For whether it have to do
+      wholly with actions, or partly with the words that express them, whether
+      it be presented in the shape of a pun or a pleasantry, it is in
+      incongruous contrasts that its virtue lies. It is the unexpected that
+      provokes the smile. Now no such incongruity exists in nature; man enjoys a
+      monopoly of the power of making himself ridiculous. So pleasant is
+      pleasantry that we do indeed cultivate it beyond its proper pale. But it
+      is only by personifying Nature, and gratuitously attributing to her errors
+      of which she is incapable, that we can make fun of her; as, for instance,
+      when we hold the weather up to ridicule by way of impotent revenge. But
+      satires upon the clown-like character of our climate, which, after the
+      lamest sort of a spring, somehow manages a capital fall, would in the Far
+      East be as out of keeping with fancy as with fact. To a Japanese, who
+      never personifies anything, such innocent irony is unmeaning. Besides, it
+      would be also untrue. For his May carries no suggestion of unfulfilment in
+      its name.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Those Far Eastern paintings which have to do with man fall for the most
+      part under one of two heads, the facetious and the historical. The latter
+      implies no particularly intimate concern for man in himself, for the past
+      has very little personality for the present. As for the former, its
+      attention is, if anything, derogatory to him, for we are always shy of
+      making fun of what we feel to be too closely a part of ourselves. But
+      impersonality has prevented the Far Oriental from having much amour
+      propre. He has no particular aversion to caricaturing himself. Few
+      Europeans, perhaps, would have cared to perpetrate a self-portrait like
+      one painted by the potter Kinsei, which was sold me one day as an amusing
+      tour de force by a facetious picture-dealer. It is a composite picture of
+      a new kind, a Japanese variety of type face. The great potter, who was
+      also apparently no mean painter, has combined three aspects of himself in
+      a single representation. At first sight the portrait appears to be simply
+      a full front view of a somewhat moon-faced citizen; but as you continue to
+      gaze, it suddenly dawns on you that there are two other individuals, one
+      on either side, hob-nobbing in profile with the first, the lines of the
+      features being ingeniously made to do double duty; and when this aspect of
+      the thing has once struck you, you cannot look at the picture without
+      seeing all three citizens simultaneously. The result is doubtless more
+      effective as a composition than flattering as a likeness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Far Eastern sculpture, by its secondary importance among Far Eastern arts,
+      witnesses again to the secondary importance assigned to man at our mental
+      antipodes. In this art, owing to its necessary limitations, the
+      representation of nature in its broader sense is impossible. For in the
+      first place, whatever the subject, it must be such as it is possible to
+      present in one continuous piece; disconnected adjuncts, as, for instance,
+      a flock of birds flying, which might be introduced with great effect in
+      painting, being here practically beyond the artist's reach. Secondly, the
+      material being of uniform appearance, as a rule, color, or even shading,
+      vital points in landscape portrayal, is out of the question, unless the
+      piece were subsequently painted, as in Grecian sculptures, a custom which
+      is not practised in China or Japan. Lastly, another fact fatal to the
+      representation of landscape is the size. The reduced scale of the
+      reproduction suggests falsity at once, a falsity whose belittlement the
+      mind can neither forget nor forgive. Plain sculpture is therefore
+      practically limited to statuary, either of men or animals. The result is
+      that in their art, where landscape counts for so much, sculpture plays a
+      very minor part. In what little there is, Nature's place is taken by
+      Buddha. For there are two classes of statues, divided the one from the
+      other by that step which separates the sublime from the ridiculous,
+      namely, the colossal and the diminutive. There is no happy human mean. Of
+      the first kind are the beautiful bronze figures of the Buddha, like the
+      Kamakura Buddha, fifty feet high and ninety-seven feet round, in whose
+      face all that is grand and noble lies sleeping, the living representation
+      of Nirvana; and of the second, those odd little ornaments known as
+      netsuke, comical carvings for the most part, grotesque figures of men and
+      monkeys, saints and sinners, gods and devils. Appealing bits of ivory,
+      bone, or wood they are, in which the dumb animals are as speaking
+      likenesses as their human fellows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The other arts show the same motif in their decorations. Pottery and
+      lacquer alike witness the respective positions assigned to the serious and
+      the comic in Far Eastern feeling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Far Oriental makes fun of man and makes love to Nature; and it almost
+      seems as if Nature heard his silent prayer, and smiled upon him in
+      acceptance; as if the love-light lent her face the added beauty that it
+      lends the maid's. For nowhere in this world, probably, is she lovelier
+      than in Japan: a climate of long, happy means and short extremes, months
+      of spring and months of autumn, with but a few weeks of winter in between;
+      a land of flowers, where the lotus and the cherry, the plum and wistaria,
+      grow wantonly side by side; a land where the bamboo embosoms the maple,
+      where the pine at last has found its palm-tree, and the tropic and the
+      temperate zones forget their separate identity in one long
+      self-obliterating kiss.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0007" id="link2HCH0007">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter 7. Religion.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      In regard to their religion, nations, like individuals, seem singularly
+      averse to practising what they have preached. Whether it be that his
+      self-constructed idols prove to the maker too suggestive of his own
+      intellectual chisel to deceive him for long, or whether sacred soil, like
+      less hallowed ground, becomes after a time incapable of responding to
+      repeated sowings of the same seed, certain it is that in spiritual matters
+      most peoples have grown out of conceit with their own conceptions. An
+      individual may cling with a certain sentiment to the religion of his
+      mother, but nations have shown anything but a foolish fondness for the
+      sacred superstitions of their great-grandfathers. To the charm of creation
+      succeeds invariably the bitter-sweet after-taste of criticism, and man
+      would not be the progressive animal he is if he long remained in love with
+      his own productions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What his future will be is too engrossing a subject, and one too deeply
+      shrouded in mystery, not to be constantly pictured anew. No wonder that
+      the consideration at that country toward which mankind is ever being
+      hastened should prove as absorbing to fancy as contemplated earthly
+      journeys proverbially are. Few people but have laid out skeleton tours
+      through its ideal regions, and perhaps, as in the mapping beforehand of
+      merely mundane travels, one element of attraction has always consisted in
+      the possible revision of one's routes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Besides, there is a fascination about the foreign merely because it is
+      such. Distance lends enchantment to the views of others, and never more so
+      than when those views are religious visions. An enthusiast has certainly a
+      greater chance of being taken for a god among a people who do not know him
+      intimately as a man. So with his doctrines. The imported is apt to seem
+      more important than the home-made; as the far-off bewitches more easily
+      than the near. But just as castles in the air do not commonly become the
+      property of their builders, so mansions in the skies almost as frequently
+      have failed of direct inheritance. Rather strikingly has this proved the
+      case with what are to-day the two most powerful religions of the world,&mdash;Buddhism
+      and Christianity. Neither is now the belief of its founder's people. What
+      was Aryan-born has become Turanian-bred, and what was Semitic by
+      conception is at present Aryan by adoption. The possibilities of another's
+      hereafter look so much rosier than the limitations of one's own present!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Few pastimes are more delightful than tossing pebbles into some still,
+      dark pool, and watching the ripples that rise responsive, as they run in
+      ever widening circles to the shore. Most of us have felt its fascination
+      second only to that of the dotted spiral of the skipping-stone, a
+      fascination not outgrown with years. There is something singularly
+      attractive in the subtle force that for a moment sways each particle only
+      to pass on to the next, a motion mysterious in its immateriality. Some
+      such pleasure must be theirs who have thrown their thoughts into the
+      hearts of men, and seen them spread in waves of feeling, whose sphere time
+      widens through the world. For like the mobile water is the mind of man,&mdash;quick
+      to catch emotions, quick to transmit them. Of all waves of feeling, this
+      is not the least true of religious ones, that, starting from their
+      birthplace, pass out to stir others, who have but humanity in common with
+      those who professed them first. Like the ripples in the pool, they leave
+      their initial converts to sink back again into comparative quiescence, as
+      they advance to throw into sudden tremors hordes of outer barbarians. In
+      both of the great religions in question this wave propagation has been
+      most marked, only the direction it took differed. Christianity went
+      westward; Buddhism travelled east. Proselytes in Asia Minor, Greece, and
+      Italy find counterparts in Eastern India, Burmah, and Thibet. Eventually
+      the taught surpassed their teachers both in zeal and numbers. Jerusalem
+      and Benares at last gave place to Rome and Lassa as sacerdotal centres.
+      Still the movement journeyed on. Popes and Lhamas remained where their
+      predecessors had founded sees, but the tide of belief surged past them in
+      its irresistible advance. Farther yet from where each faith began are to
+      be found to-day the greater part of its adherents. The home that the
+      Western hemisphere seems to promise to the one, the extreme Orient affords
+      the other. As Roman Catholicism now looks to America for its strength, so
+      Buddhism to-day finds its worshippers chiefly in China and Japan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But though the Japanese may be said to be all Buddhists, Buddhist is by no
+      means all that they are. At the time of their adoption of the great Indian
+      faith, the Japanese were already in possession of a system of superstition
+      which has held its own to this day. In fact, as the state religion of the
+      land, it has just experienced a revival, a regalvanizing of its old-time
+      energy, at the hands of some of the native archaeologists. Its sacred
+      mirror, held up to Nature, has been burnished anew. Formerly this body of
+      belief was the national faith, the Mikado, the direct descendant of the
+      early gods, being its head on earth. His reinstatement to temporal power
+      formed a very fitting first step toward reinvesting the cult with its
+      former prestige; a curious instance, indeed, of a religious revival due to
+      archaeological, not to religious zeal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This cult is the mythological inheritance of the whole eastern seaboard of
+      Asia, from Siam to Kamtchatka. In Japan it is called Shintoism. The word
+      "Shinto" means literally "the way of the gods," and the letter of its name
+      is a true exponent of the spirit of the belief. For its scriptures are
+      rather an itinerary of the gods' lives than a guide to that road by which
+      man himself may attain to immortality. Thus with a certain fitness
+      pilgrimages are its most noticeable rites. One cannot journey anywhere in
+      the heart of Japan without meeting multitudes of these pilgrims, with
+      their neat white leggings and their mushroom-like hats, nor rest at night
+      at any inn that is not hung with countless little banners of the pilgrim
+      associations, of which they all are members. Being a pilgrim there is
+      equivalent to being a tourist here, only that to the excitement of doing
+      the country is added a sustaining sense of the meritoriousness of the
+      deed. Oftener than not the objective point of the devout is the summit of
+      some noted mountain. For peaks are peculiarly sacred spots in the Shinto
+      faith. The fact is perhaps an expression of man's instinctive desire to
+      rise, as if the bodily act in some wise betokened the mental action. The
+      shrine in so exalted a position is of the simplest: a rude hut, with or
+      without the only distinctive emblems of the cult, a mirror typical of the
+      god and the pendent gohei, or zigzag strips of paper, permanent votive
+      offerings of man. As for the belief itself, it is but the deification of
+      those natural elements which aboriginal man instinctively wonders at or
+      fears, the sun, the moon, the thunder, the lightning, and the wind; all,
+      in short, that he sees, hears, and feels, yet cannot comprehend. He
+      clothes his terrors with forms which resemble the human, because he can
+      conceive of nothing else that could cause the unexpected. But the awful
+      shapes he conjures up have naught in common with himself. They are far too
+      fearful to be followed. Their way is the "highway of the gods," but no
+      Jacob's ladder for wayward man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In this externality to the human lies the reason that Shintoism and
+      Buddhism can agree so well, and can both join with Confucianism in helping
+      to form that happy family of faith which is so singular a feature of Far
+      Eastern religious capability. It is not simply that the two contrive to
+      live peaceably together; they are actually both of them implicitly
+      believed by the same individual. Millions of Japanese are good Buddhists
+      and good Shintoists at the same time. That such a combination should be
+      possible is due to the essential difference in the character of the two
+      beliefs. The one is extrinsic, the other intrinsic, in its relations to
+      the human soul. Shintoism tells man but little about himself and his
+      hereafter; Buddhism, little but about himself and what he may become. In
+      examining Far Eastern religion, therefore, for personality, or the
+      reverse, we may dismiss Shintoism as having no particular bearing upon the
+      subject. The only effect it has is indirect in furthering the natural
+      propensity of these people to an adoration of nature.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In Korea and in China, again, Confucianism is the great moral law, as by
+      reflection it is to a certain extent in Japan. But that in its turn may be
+      omitted in the present argument; inasmuch as Confucius taught confessedly
+      and designedly only a system of morals, and religiously abstained from
+      pronouncing any opinion whatever upon the character or the career of the
+      human soul.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Taouism, the third great religion of China, resembles Shintoism to this
+      extent, that it is a body of superstition, and not a form of philosophy.
+      It undertakes to provide nostrums for spiritual ills, but is dumb as to
+      the constitution of the soul for which it professes to prescribe. Its
+      pills are to be swallowed unquestioningly by the patient, and are
+      warranted to cure; and owing to the two great human frailties, fear and
+      credulity, its practice is very large. Possessing, however, no philosophic
+      diploma, it is without the pale of the present discussion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The demon-worship of Korea is a mild form of the same thing with the
+      hierarchy left out, every man there being his own spiritual adviser. An
+      ordinary Korean is born with an innate belief in malevolent spirits, whom
+      he accordingly propitiates from time to time. One of nobler birth
+      propitiates only the spirits of his own ancestors.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We come, then, by a process of elimination to a consideration of Buddhism,
+      the great philosophic faith of the whole Far East.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not uncommonly in the courtyard of a Japanese temple, in the solemn
+      half-light of the sombre firs, there stands a large stone basin, cut from
+      a single block, and filled to the brim with water. The trees, the basin,
+      and a few stone lanterns&mdash;so called from their form, and not their
+      function, for they have votive pebbles where we should look for wicks&mdash;are
+      the sole occupants of the place. Sheltered from the wind, withdrawn from
+      sound, and only piously approached by man, this antechamber of the god
+      seems the very abode of silence and rest. It might be Nirvana itself,
+      human entrance to an immortality like the god's within, so peaceful, so
+      pervasive is its calm; and in its midst is the moss-covered monolith,
+      holding in its embrace the little imprisoned pool of water. So still is
+      the spot and so clear the liquid that you know the one only as the
+      reflection of the other. Mirrored in its glassy surface appears everything
+      around it. As you peer in, far down you see a tiny bit of sky, as deep as
+      the blue is high above, across which slowly sail the passing clouds; then
+      nearer stand the trees, arching overhead, as if bending to catch glimpses
+      of themselves in that other world below; and then, nearer yet&mdash;yourself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Emblem of the spirit of man is this little pool to Far Oriental eyes.
+      Subtile as the soul is the incomprehensible water; so responsive to light
+      that it remains itself invisible; so clear that it seems illusion! Though
+      portrayer so perfect of forms about it, all we know of the thing itself is
+      that it is. Through none of the five senses do we perceive it. Neither
+      sight, nor hearing, nor taste, nor smell, nor touch can tell us it exists;
+      we feel it to be by the muscular sense alone, that blind and dumb analogue
+      for the body of what consciousness is for the soul. Only when disturbed,
+      troubled, does the water itself become visible, and then it is but the
+      surface that we see. So to the Far Oriental this still little lake
+      typifies the soul, the eventual purification of his own; a something lost
+      in reflection, self-effaced, only the alter ego of the outer world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For contemplation, not action, is the Far Oriental's ideal of life. The
+      repose of self-adjustment like that to which our whole solar system is
+      slowly tending as its death,&mdash;this to him appears, though from no
+      scientific deduction, the end of all existence. So he sits and ponders,
+      abstractly, vaguely, upon everything in general,&mdash;synonym, alas, to
+      man's finite mind, for nothing in particular,&mdash;till even the sense of
+      self seems to vanish, and through the mist-like portal of unconsciousness
+      he floats out into the vast indistinguishable sameness of Nirvana's sea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At first sight Buddhism is much more like Christianity than those of us
+      who stay at home and speculate upon it commonly appreciate. As a system of
+      philosophy it sounds exceedingly foreign, but it looks unexpectedly
+      familiar as a faith. Indeed, the one religion might well pass for the
+      counterfeit presentment of the other. The resemblance so struck the early
+      Catholic missionaries that they felt obliged to explain the remarkable
+      similarity between the two. With them ingenuous surprise instantly begot
+      ingenious sophistry. Externally, the likeness was so exact that at first
+      they could not bring themselves to believe that the Buddhist ceremonials
+      had not been filched bodily from the practices of the true faith. Finding,
+      however, that no known human agency had acted in the matter, they
+      bethought them of introducing, to account for things, a deus ex machina in
+      the shape of the devil. They were so pleased with this solution of the
+      difficulty that they imparted it at once with much pride to the natives.
+      You have indeed got, they graciously if somewhat gratuitously informed
+      them, the outward semblance of the true faith, but you are in fact the
+      miserable victims of an impious fraud. Satan has stolen the insignia of
+      divinity, and is now masquerading before you as the deity; your god is
+      really our devil,&mdash;a recognition of antipodal inversion truly worthy
+      the Jesuitical mind!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps it is not matter for great surprise that they converted but few of
+      their hearers. The suggestion was hardly so diplomatic as might have been
+      expected from so generally astute a body; for it could not make much
+      difference what the all-presiding deity was called, if his actions were
+      the same, since his motives were beyond human observation. Besides, the
+      bare idea of a foreign bogus was not very terrifying. The Chinese
+      possessed too many familiar devils of their own. But there was another and
+      a much deeper reason, which we shall come to later, why Christianity made
+      but little headway in the Far East.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it is by no means in externals only that the two religions are alike.
+      If the first glance at them awakens that peculiar sensation which most of
+      us have felt at some time or other, a sense of having seen all this
+      before, further scrutiny reveals a deeper agreement than merely in
+      appearances.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In passing from the surface into the substance, it may be mentioned
+      incidentally that the codes of morality of the two are about on a level. I
+      say incidentally, for so far as its practice, certainly, is concerned, it
+      not its preaching, morality has no more intimate connection with religion
+      than it has with art or politics. If we doubt this, we have but to examine
+      the facts. Are the most religious peoples the most moral? It needs no
+      prolonged investigation to convince us that they are not. If proof of the
+      want of a bond were required, the matter of truth-telling might be adduced
+      in point. As this is a subject upon which a slight misconception exists in
+      the minds of some evangelically persuaded persons, and because, what is
+      more generally relevant, the presence of this quality, honesty in word and
+      deed, has more than almost any other one characteristic helped to put us
+      in the van of the world's advance to-day, it may not unfittingly be cited
+      here.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The argument in the case may be put thus. Have specially religious races
+      been proportionally truth-telling ones? If not, has there been any other
+      cause at work in the development of mankind tending to increase veracity?
+      The answer to the first question has all the simplicity of a plain
+      negative. No such pleasing concomitance of characteristics is observable
+      to-day, or has been presented in the past. Permitting, however, the dead
+      past to bury its shortcomings in oblivion, let us look at the world as we
+      find it. We observe, then, that the religious spirit is quite as strong in
+      Asia as it is in Europe; if anything, that at the present time it is
+      rather stronger. The average Brahman, Mahometan, or Buddhist is quite as
+      devout as the ordinary Roman Catholic or Presbyterian. If he is somewhat
+      less given to propagandism, he is not a whit less regardful of his own
+      salvation. Yet throughout the Orient truth is a thing unknown, lies of
+      courtesy being de rigueur and lies of convenience de raison; while with
+      us, fortunately, mendacity is generally discredited. But we need not
+      travel so far for proof. The same is evident in less antipodal relations.
+      Have the least religious nations of Europe been any less truthful than the
+      most bigoted? Was fanatic Spain remarkable for veracity? Was Loyola a
+      gentleman whose assertions carried conviction other than to the stake?
+      Were the eminently mundane burghers whom he persecuted noted for a pious
+      superiority to fact? Or, to narrow the field still further, and scan the
+      circle of one's own acquaintance, are the most believing individuals among
+      them worthy of the most belief? Assuredly not.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We come, then, to the second point. Has there been any influence at work
+      to differentiate us in this respect from Far Orientals? There has. Two
+      separate causes, in fact, have conduced to the same result. The one is the
+      development of physical science; the other, the extension of trade. The
+      sole object of science being to discover truth, truth-telling is a
+      necessity of its existence. Professionally, scientists are obliged to be
+      truthful. Aliter of a Jesuit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So long as science was of the closet, its influence upon mankind generally
+      was indirect and slight; but so soon as it proceeded to stalk into the
+      street and earn its own living, its veracious character began to tell.
+      When out of its theories sprang inventions and discoveries that
+      revolutionized every-day affairs and changed the very face of things,
+      society insensibly caught its spirit. Man awoke to the inestimable value
+      of exactness. From scientists proper, the spirit filtered down through
+      every stratum of education, till to-day the average man is born exact to a
+      degree which his forefathers never dreamed of becoming. To-day, as a rule,
+      the more intelligent the individual, the more truthful he is, because the
+      more innately exact in thought, and thence in word and action. With us, to
+      lie is a sign of a want of cleverness, not of an excess of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The second cause, the extension of trade, has inculcated the same regard
+      for veracity through the pocket. For with the increase of business
+      transactions in both time and space, the telling of the truth has become a
+      financial necessity. Without it, trade would come to a standstill at once.
+      Our whole mercantile system, a modern piece of mechanism unknown to the
+      East till we imported it thither, turns on an implicit belief in the word
+      of one's neighbor. Our legal safeguards would snap like red tape were the
+      great bond of mutual trust once broken. Western civilization has to be
+      truthful, or perish.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And now for the spirits of the two beliefs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The soul of any religion realizes in one respect the Brahman idea of the
+      individual soul of man, namely, that it exists much after the manner of an
+      onion, in many concentric envelopes. Man, they tell us, is composed not of
+      a single body simply, but of several layers of body, each shell as it were
+      respectively inclosing another. The outermost is the merely material body,
+      of which we are so directly cognizant. This encases a second, more
+      spiritual, but yet not wholly free from earthly affinities. This contains
+      another, still more refined; till finally, inside of all is that
+      immaterial something which they conceive to constitute the soul. This
+      eventual residuum exemplifies the Franciscan notion of pure substance, for
+      it is a thing delightfully devoid of any attributes whatever.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We may, perhaps, not be aware of the existence of such an elaborate set of
+      encasings to our own heart of hearts, nor of a something so very
+      indefinite within, but the most casual glance at any religion will reveal
+      its truth as regards the soul of a belief. We recognize the fact outwardly
+      in the buildings erected to celebrate its worship. Not among the Jews
+      alone was the holy of holies kept veiled, to temper the divine radiance to
+      man's benighted understanding. Nor is the chancel-rail of Christianity the
+      sole survivor of the more exclusive barriers of olden times, even in the
+      Western world. In the Far East, where difficulty of access is deemed
+      indispensable to dignity, the material approaches are still manifold and
+      imposing. Court within court, building after building, isolate the shrine
+      itself from the profane familiarity of the passers-by. But though the
+      material encasings vary in number and in exclusiveness, according to the
+      temperament of the particular race concerned, the mental envelopes exist,
+      and must exist, in both hemispheres alike, so long as society resembles
+      the crust of the earth on which it dwells,&mdash;a crust composed of
+      strata that grow denser as one descends. What is clear to those on top
+      seems obscure to those below; what are weighty arguments to the second
+      have no force at all upon the first. There must necessarily be grades of
+      elevation in individual beliefs, suited to the needs and cravings of each
+      individual soul. A creed that fills the shallow with satisfaction leaves
+      but an aching void in the deep. It is not of the slightest consequence how
+      the belief starts; differentiated it is bound to become. The higher minds
+      alone can rest content with abstract imaginings; the lower must have
+      concrete realities on which to pin their faith. With them, inevitably,
+      ideals degenerate into idols. In all religions this unavoidable debasement
+      has taken place. The Roman Catholic who prays to a wooden image of Christ
+      is not one whit less idolatrous than the Buddhist who worships a bronze
+      statue of Amida Butzu. All that the common people are capable of seeing is
+      the soul-envelope, for the soul itself they are unable to appreciate.
+      Spiritually they are undiscerning, because imaginatively they are blind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now the grosser soul-envelopes of the two great European and Asiatic
+      faiths, though differing in detail, are in general parallel in structure.
+      Each boasts its full complement of saints, whose congruent catalogues are
+      equally wearisome in length. Each tells its circle of beads to help it
+      keep count of similarly endless prayers. For in both, in the popular
+      estimation, quantity is more effective to salvation than quality. In both
+      the believer practically pictures his heaven for himself, while in each
+      his hell, with a vividness that does like credit to its religious
+      imagination, is painted for him by those of the cult who are themselves
+      confident of escaping it. Into the lap of each mother church the pious
+      believer drops his little votive offering with the same affectionate zeal,
+      and in Asia, as in Europe, the mites of the many make the might of the
+      mass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But behind all this is the religion of the few,&mdash;of those to whom
+      sensuous forms cannot suffice to represent super-sensuous cravings; whose
+      god is something more than an anthropomorphic creation; to whom worship
+      means not the cramping of the body, but the expansion of the soul.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The rays of the truth, like the rays of the sun, which universally seems
+      to have been man's first adoration, have two properties equally inherent
+      in their essence, warmth and light. And as for the life of all things on
+      this globe both attributes of sunshine are necessary, so to the
+      development of that something which constitutes the ego both qualities of
+      the truth are vital. We sometimes speak of character as if it were a thing
+      wholly apart from mind; but, in fact, the two things are so interwoven
+      that to perceive the right course is the strongest possible of incentives
+      to pursue it. In the end the two are one. Now, while clearness of head is
+      all-important, kindness of heart is none the less so. The first, perhaps,
+      is more needed in our communings with ourselves, the second in our
+      commerce with others. For, dark and dense bodies that we are, we can
+      radiate affection much more effectively than we can reflect views.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That Christianity is a religion of love needs no mention; that Buddhism is
+      equally such is perhaps not so generally appreciated. But just as the
+      gospel of the disciple who loved and was loved the most begins its story
+      by telling us of the Light that came into the world, so none the less
+      surely could the Light of Asia but be also its warmth. Half of the
+      teachings of Buddhism are spent in inculcating charity. Not only to men is
+      man enjoined to show kindliness, but to all other animals as well. The
+      people practise what their scriptures preach. The effect indirectly on the
+      condition of the brutes is almost as marked as its more direct effect on
+      the character of mankind. In heart, at least, Buddhism and Christianity
+      are very close.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But here the two paths to a something beyond an earthly life diverge. Up
+      to this point the two religions are alike, but from this point on they are
+      so utterly unlike that the very similarity of all that went before only
+      suffices to make of the second the weird, life-counterfeiting shadow of
+      the first. As in a silhouette, externally the contours are all there, but
+      within is one vast blank. In relation to one's neighbor the two beliefs
+      are kin, but as regards one's self, as far apart as the West is from the
+      East. For here, at this idea of self, we are suddenly aware of standing on
+      the brink of a fathomless abyss, gazing giddily down into that great gulf
+      which divides Buddhism from Christianity. We cannot see the bottom. It is
+      a separation more profound than death; it seems to necessitate
+      annihilation. To cross it we must bury in its depths all we know as
+      ourselves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Christianity is a personal religion; Buddhism, an impersonal one. In this
+      fundamental difference lies the world-wide opposition of the two beliefs.
+      Christianity tells us to purify ourselves that we may enjoy countless
+      aeons of that bettered self hereafter; Buddhism would have us purify
+      ourselves that we may lose all sense of self for evermore.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For all that it preaches the essential vileness of the natural man,
+      Christianity is a gospel of optimism. While it affirms that at present you
+      are bad, it also affirms that this depravity is no intrinsic part of
+      yourself. It unquestioningly asserts that it is something foreign to your
+      true being. It even believes that in a more or less spiritual manner your
+      very body will survive. It essentially clings to the ego. What it
+      inculcates is really present endeavor sanctioned by the prospect of future
+      bliss. It tacitly takes for granted the desirability of personal
+      existence, and promises the certainty of personal immortality,&mdash;a
+      terror to evildoers, and a sustaining sense of coming unalloyed happiness
+      to the good. Through and through its teachings runs the feeling of the
+      fullness of life, that desire which will not die, that wish of the soul
+      which beats its wings against its earthly casement in its longing for
+      expansion beyond the narrow confines of threescore years and ten.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Buddhism, on the contrary, is the cri du coeur of pessimism. This life, it
+      says, is but a chain of sorrows. To multiply days is only to multiply
+      evil. These desires that urge us on are really cause of all our woe. We
+      think they are ourselves. We are mistaken. They are all illusion, and we
+      are victims of a mirage. This personality, this sense of self, is a cruel
+      deception and a snare. Realize once the true soul behind it, devoid of
+      attributes, therefore without this capacity for suffering, an indivisible
+      part of the great impersonal soul of nature: then, and then only, will you
+      have found happiness in the blissful quiescence of Nirvana.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With a certain poetic fitness, misery and impersonality were both present
+      in the occasion that gave the belief birth. Many have turned to the
+      consolations of religion by reason of their own wretchedness; Gautama
+      sought its help touched by the woes of others whom, in his own happy life
+      journey, he chanced one day to come across. Shocked by the sight of human
+      disease, old age, and death, sad facts to which hitherto he had been
+      sedulously kept a stranger, he renounced the world that he might find for
+      it an escape from its ills. But bliss, as he conceived it, lay not in
+      wanting to be something he was not, but in actual want of being. His quest
+      for mankind was immunity from suffering, not the active enjoyment of life.
+      In this negative way of looking at happiness, he acted in strict
+      conformity with the spirit of his world. For the doctrine of pessimism had
+      already been preached. It underlay the whole Brahman philosophy, and
+      everybody believed it implicitly. Already the East looked at this life as
+      an evil, and had affirmed for the individual spirit extinction to be
+      happier than existence. The wish for an end to the ego, the hope to be
+      eventually nothing, Gautama accepted for a truism as undeniably as the
+      Brahmans did. What he pronounced false was the Brahman prospectus of the
+      way to reach this desirable impersonal state. Their road, be said, could
+      not possibly land the traveller where it professed, since it began wrong,
+      and ended nowhere. The way, he asserted, is within a man. He has but to
+      realize the truth, and from that moment he will see his goal and the road
+      that leads there. There is no panacea for human ills, of external
+      application. The Brahman homoeopathic treatment of sin is folly. The
+      slaughtering of men and bulls cannot possibly bring life to the soul. To
+      mortify the body for the sins of the flesh is palpably futile, for in
+      desire alone lies all the ill. Quench the desire, and the deeds will die
+      of inanition. Man himself is sole cause of his own misery. Get rid, then,
+      said the Buddha, of these passions, these strivings for the sake of self,
+      that hold the true soul a prisoner. They have to do with things which we
+      know are transitory: how can they be immortal themselves? We recognize
+      them as subject to our will; they are, then, not the I.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As a man, he taught, becomes conscious that he himself is something
+      distinct from his body, so, if he reflect and ponder, he will come to see
+      that in like manner his appetites, ambitions, hopes, are really extrinsic
+      to the spirit proper. Neither heart nor head is truly the man, for he is
+      conscious of something that stands behind both. Behind desire, behind even
+      the will, lies the soul, the same for all men, one with the soul of the
+      universe. When he has once realized this eternal truth, the man has
+      entered Nirvana. For Nirvana is not an absorption of the individual soul
+      into the soul of all things, since the one has always been a part of the
+      other. Still less is it utter annihilation. It is simply the recognition
+      of the eternal oneness of the two, back through an everlasting past on
+      through an everlasting future.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such is the belief which the Japanese adopted, and which they profess
+      to-day. Such to them is to be the dawn of death's to-morrow; a blessed
+      impersonal immortality, in which all sense of self, illusion that it is,
+      shall itself have ceased to be; a long dreamless sleep, a beatified rest,
+      which no awakening shall ever disturb.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Among such a people personal Christianity converts but few. They accept
+      our material civilization, but they reject our creeds. To preach a
+      prolongation of life appears to them like preaching an extension of
+      sorrow. At most, Christianity succeeds only in making them doubters of
+      what lies beyond this life. But though professing agnosticism while they
+      live, they turn, when the shadows of death's night come on, to the bosom
+      of that faith which teaches that, whatever may have been one's earthly
+      share of happiness, "'tis something better not to be."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Strange it seems at first that those who have looked so long to the rising
+      sun for inspiration should be they who live only in a sort of lethargy of
+      life, while those who for so many centuries have turned their faces
+      steadily to the fading glory of the sunset should be the ones who have
+      embodied the spirit of progress of the world. Perhaps the light, by its
+      very rising, checks the desire to pursue; in its setting it lures one on
+      to follow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Though this religion of impersonality is not their child, it is their
+      choice. They embraced it with the rest that India taught them, centuries
+      ago. But though just as eager to learn of us now as of India then,
+      Christianity fails to commend itself. This is not due to the fact that the
+      Buddhist missionaries came by invitation, and ours do not. Nor is it due
+      to any want of personal character in these latter, but simply to an excess
+      of it in their doctrines.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For to-day the Far East is even more impersonal in its religion than are
+      those from whom that religion originally came. India has returned again to
+      its worship of Brahma, which, though impersonal enough, is less so than is
+      the gospel of Gautama. For it is passively instead of actively impersonal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Buddhism bears to Brahmanism something like the relation that
+      Protestantism does to Roman Catholicism. Both bishops and Brahmans
+      undertake to save all who shall blindly commit themselves to professional
+      guidance, while Buddhists and Protestants alike believe that a man's
+      salvation must be brought about by the action of the man himself. The
+      result is, that in the matter of individuality the two reformed beliefs
+      are further apart than those against which they severally protested. For
+      by the change the personal became more personal, and the impersonal more
+      impersonal than before. The Protestant, from having tamely allowed himself
+      to be led, began to take a lively interest in his own self-improvement;
+      while the Buddhist, from a former apathetic acquiescence in the doctrine
+      of the universally illusive, set to work energetically towards
+      self-extinction. Curious labor for a mind, that of devoting all its
+      strength to the thinking itself out of existence! Not content with being
+      born impersonal, a Far Oriental is constantly striving to make himself
+      more so.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We have seen, then, how in trying to understand these peoples we are
+      brought face to face with impersonality in each of those three expressions
+      of the human soul, speech, thought, yearning. We have looked at them first
+      from a social standpoint. We have seen how singularly little regard is
+      paid the individual from his birth to his death. How he lives his life
+      long the slave of patriarchal customs of so puerile a tendency as to be
+      practically impossible to a people really grown up. How he practises a
+      wholesale system of adoption sufficient of itself to destroy any surviving
+      regard for the ego his other relations might have left. How in his daily
+      life he gives the minimum of thought to the bettering himself in any
+      worldly sense, and the maximum of polite consideration to his neighbor.
+      How, in short, he acts toward himself as much as possible as if he were
+      another, and to that other as if he were himself. Then, not content with
+      standing stranger like upon the threshold, we have sought to see the soul
+      of their civilization in its intrinsic manifestations. We have pushed our
+      inquiry, as it were, one step nearer its home. And the same trait that was
+      apparent sociologically has been exposed in this our antipodal phase of
+      psychical research. We have seen how impersonal is his language, the
+      principal medium of communication between one soul and another; how
+      impersonal are the communings of his soul with itself. How the man turns
+      to nature instead of to his fellowman in silent sympathy. And how, when he
+      speculates upon his coming castles in the air, his most roseate desire is
+      to be but an indistinguishable particle of the sunset clouds and vanish
+      invisible as they into the starry stillness of all-embracing space.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now what does this strange impersonality betoken? Why are these peoples so
+      different from us in this most fundamental of considerations to any
+      people, the consideration of themselves? The answer leads to some
+      interesting conclusions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0008" id="link2HCH0008">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter 8. Imagination.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      If, as is the case with the moon, the earth, as she travelled round her
+      orbit turned always the same face inward, we might expect to find, between
+      the thoughts of that hemisphere which looked continually to the sun, and
+      those of the other peering eternally out at the stars, some such
+      difference as actually exists between ourselves and our longitudinal
+      antipodes. For our conception of the cosmos is of a sunlit world throbbing
+      with life, while their Nirvana finds not unfit expression in the still,
+      cold, fathomless awe of the midnight sky. That we cannot thus directly
+      account for the difference in local coloring serves but to make that
+      difference of more human interest. The dissimilarity between the Western
+      and the Far Eastern attitude of mind has in it something beyond the effect
+      of environment. For it points to the importance of the part which the
+      principle of individuality plays in the great drama daily enacting before
+      our eyes, and which we know as evolution. It shows, as I shall hope to
+      prove, that individuality bears the same relation to the development of
+      mind that the differentiation of species does to the evolution of organic
+      life: that the degree of individualization of a people is the
+      self-recorded measure of its place in the great march of mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All life, whether organic or inorganic, consists, as we know, in a change
+      from a state of simple homogeneity to one of complex heterogeneity. The
+      process is apparently the same in a nebula or a brachiopod, although much
+      more intricate in the latter. The immediate force which works this change,
+      the life principle of things, is, in the case of organic beings, a subtle
+      something which we call spontaneous variation. What this mysterious
+      impulse may be is beyond our present powers of recognition. As yet, the
+      ultimates of all things lie hidden in the womb of the vast unknown. But
+      just as in the case of a man we can tell what organs are vital, though we
+      are ignorant what the vital spark may be, so in our great cosmical laws we
+      can say in what their power resides, though we know not really what they
+      are. Whether mind be but a sublimated form of matter, or, what amounts to
+      the same thing, matter a menial kind of mind, or whether, which seems less
+      likely, it be a something incomparable with substance, of one thing we are
+      sure, the same laws of heredity govern both. In each a like chain of
+      continuity leads from the present to the dim past, a connecting clue which
+      we can follow backward in imagination. Now what spontaneous variation is
+      to the material organism, imagination, apparently, is to the mental one.
+      Just as spontaneous variation is constantly pushing the animal or the
+      plant to push out, as a vine its tendrils, in all directions, while
+      natural conditions are as constantly exercising over it a sort of
+      unconscious pruning power, so imagination is ever at work urging man's
+      mind out and on, while the sentiment of the community, commonly called
+      common sense, which simply means the point already reached by the average,
+      is as steadily tending to keep it at its own level. The environment helps,
+      in the one case as in the other, to the shaping of the development. Purely
+      physical in the first, it is both physical and psychical in the second,
+      the two reacting on each other. But in either case it is only a
+      constraining condition, not the divine impulse itself. Precisely, then, as
+      in the organism, this subtle spirit checked in one direction finds a way
+      to advance in another, and produces in consequence among an originally
+      similar set of bodies a gradual separation into species which grow wider
+      with time, so in brain evolution a like force for like reasons tends
+      inevitably to an ever-increasing individualization.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now what evidence have we that this analogy holds? Let us look at the
+      facts, first as they present themselves subjectively.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The instinct of self-preservation, that guardian angel so persistent to
+      appear when needed, owes its summons to another instinct no less strong,
+      which we may call the instinct of individuality; for with the same innate
+      tenacity with which we severally cling to life do we hold to the idea of
+      our own identity. It is not for the philosophic desire of preserving a
+      very small fraction of humanity at large that we take such pains to avoid
+      destruction; it is that we insensibly regard death as threatening to the
+      continuance of the ego, in spite of the theories of a future life which we
+      have so elaborately developed. Indeed, the psychical shrinking is really
+      the quintessence of the physical fear. We cleave to the abstract idea
+      closer even than to its concrete embodiment. Sooner would we forego this
+      earthly existence than surrender that something we know as self. For
+      sufficient cause we can imagine courting death; we cannot conceive of so
+      much as exchanging our individuality for another's, still less of
+      abandoning it altogether; for gradually a man, as he grows older, comes to
+      regard his body as, after all, separable from himself. It is the soul's
+      covering, rendered indispensable by the climatic conditions of our present
+      existence, one without which we could no longer continue to live here. To
+      forego it does not necessarily negative, so far as we yet know, the
+      possibility of living elsewhere. Some more congenial tropic may be the
+      wandering spirit's fate. But to part with the sense of self seems to be
+      like taking an eternal farewell of the soul. The Western mind shrinks
+      before the bare idea of such a thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The clinging to one's own identity, then, is now an instinct, whatever it
+      may originally have been. It is a something we inherited from our
+      ancestors and which we shall transmit more or less modified to our
+      descendants. How far back this consciousness has been felt passes the
+      possibilities of history to determine, since the recording of it
+      necessarily followed the fact. All we know is that its mention is coeval
+      with chronicle, and its origin lost in allegory. The Bible, one of the
+      oldest written records in the world, begins with a bit of mythology of a
+      very significant kind. When the Jews undertook to trace back their family
+      tree to an idyllic garden of Eden, they mentioned as growing there beside
+      the tree of life, another tree called the tree of knowledge. Of what
+      character this knowledge was is inferable from the sudden
+      self-consciousness that followed the partaking of it. So that if we please
+      we may attribute directly to Eve's indiscretion the many evils of our
+      morbid self-consciousness of the present day. But without indulging in
+      unchivalrous reflections we may draw certain morals from it of both
+      immediate and ultimate applicability.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To begin with, it is a most salutary warning to the introspective, and in
+      the second place it is a striking instance of a myth which is not a sun
+      myth; for it is essentially of human regard, an attempt on man's part to
+      explain that most peculiar attribute of his constitution, the
+      all-possessing sense of self. It looks certainly as if he was not
+      over-proud of his person that he should have deemed its recognition
+      occasion for the primal curse, and among early races the person is for a
+      good deal of the personality. What he lamented was not life but the
+      unavoidable exertion necessary to getting his daily bread, for the
+      question whether life were worth while was as futile then as now, and as
+      inconceivable really as 4-dimensional space.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We are then conscious of individuality as a force within ourselves. But
+      our knowledge by no means ends there; for we are aware of it in the case
+      of others as well.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      About certain people there exists a subtle something which leaves its
+      impress indelibly upon the consciousness of all who come in contact with
+      them. This something is a power, but a power of so indefinable a
+      description that we beg definition by calling it simply the personality of
+      the man. It is not a matter of subsequent reasoning, but of direct
+      perception. We feel it. Sometimes it charms us; sometimes it repels. But
+      we can no more be oblivious to it than we can to the temperature of the
+      air. Its possessor has but to enter the room, and insensibly we are
+      conscious of a presence. It is as if we had suddenly been placed in the
+      field of a magnetic force.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the other hand there are people who produce no effect upon us whatever.
+      They come and go with a like indifference. They are as unimportant
+      psychically as if they were any other portion of the furniture. They never
+      stir us. We might live with them for fifty years and be hardly able to
+      tell, for any influence upon ourselves, whether they existed or not. They
+      remind us of that neutral drab which certain religious sects assume to
+      show their own irrelevancy to the world. They are often most estimable
+      folk, but they are no more capable of inspiring a strong emotion than the
+      other kind are incapable of doing so. And we say the difference is due to
+      the personality or want of personality of the man. Now, in what does this
+      so-called personality consist? Not in bodily presence simply, for men
+      quite destitute of it possess the force in question; not in character
+      only, for we often disapprove of a character whose attraction we are
+      powerless to resist; not in intellect alone, for men more rational fail of
+      stirring us as these unconsciously do. In what, then? In life itself; not
+      that modicum of it, indeed, which suffices simply to keep the machine
+      moving, but in the life principle, the power which causes psychical
+      change; which makes the individual something distinct from all other
+      individuals, a being capable of proving sufficient, if need be, unto
+      himself; which shows itself, in short, as individuality. This is not a
+      mere restatement of the case, for individuality is an objective fact
+      capable of being treated by physical science. And as we know much more at
+      present about physical facts than we do of psychological problems, we may
+      be able to arrive the sooner at solution.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Individuality, personality, and the sense of self are only three different
+      aspects of one and the same thing. They are so many various views of the
+      soul according as we regard it from an intrinsic, an altruistic, or an
+      egoistic standpoint. For by individuality is not meant simply the
+      isolation in a corporeal casing of a small portion of the universal soul
+      of mankind. So far as mind goes, this would not be individuality at all,
+      but the reverse. By individuality we mean that bundle of ideas, thoughts,
+      and daydreams which constitute our separate identity, and by virtue of
+      which we feel each one of us at home within himself. Now man in his
+      mind-development is bound to become more and more distinct from his
+      neighbor. We can hardly conceive a progress so uniform as not to
+      necessitate this. It would be contrary to all we know of natural law,
+      besides contradicting daily experience. For each successive generation
+      bears unmistakable testimony to the fact. Children of the same parents are
+      never exactly like either their parents or one another, and they often
+      differ amazingly from both. In such instances they revert to type, as we
+      say; but inasmuch as the race is steadily advancing in development, such
+      reversion must resemble that of an estate which has been greatly improved
+      since its previous possession. The appearance of the quality is really the
+      sprouting of a seed whose original germ was in some sense coeval with the
+      beginning of things. This mind-seed takes root in some cases and not in
+      others, according to the soil it finds. And as certain traits develop and
+      others do not, one man turns out very differently from his neighbor. Such
+      inevitable distinction implies furthermore that the man shall be sensible
+      of it. Consciousness is the necessary attribute of mental action. Not only
+      is it the sole way we have of knowing mind; without it there would be no
+      mind to know. Not to be conscious of one's self is, mentally speaking, not
+      to be. This complex entity, this little cosmos of a world, the "I," has
+      for its very law of existence self-consciousness, while personality is the
+      effect it produces upon the consciousness of others.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But we may push our inquiry a step further, and find in imagination the
+      cause of this strange force. For imagination, or the image-making faculty,
+      may in a certain sense be said to be the creator of the world within. The
+      separate senses furnish it with material, but to it alone is due the
+      building of our castles, on premises of fact or in the air. For there is
+      no impassable gulf between the two. Coleridge's distinction that
+      imagination drew possible pictures and fancy impossible ones, is itself,
+      except as a classification, an impossible distinction to draw; for it is
+      only the inconceivable that can never be. All else is purely a matter of
+      relation. We may instance dreams which are usually considered to rank
+      among the most fanciful creations of the mind. Who has not in his dreams
+      fallen repeatedly from giddy heights and invariably escaped unhurt? If he
+      had attempted the feat in his waking moments he would assuredly have been
+      dashed to pieces at the bottom. And so we say the thing is impossible. But
+      is it? Only under the relative conditions of his mass and the earth's. If
+      the world he happens to inhabit were not its present size, but the size of
+      one of the tinier asteroids, no such disastrous results would follow a
+      chance misstep. He could there walk off precipices when too closely
+      pursued by bears&mdash;if I remember rightly the usual childish cause of
+      the same&mdash;with perfect impunity. The bear could do likewise,
+      unfortunately. We should have arrived at our conclusion even quicker had
+      we decreased the size both of the man and his world. He would not then
+      have had to tumble actually so far, and would therefore have arrived yet
+      more gently at the foot. This turns out, then, to be a mere question of
+      size. Decrease the scale of the picture, and the impossible becomes
+      possible at once. All fancies are not so easily reducible to actual facts
+      as the one we have taken, but all, perhaps, eventually may be explicable
+      in the same general way. At present we certainly cannot affirm that
+      anything may not be thus explained. For the actual is widening its field
+      every day. Even in this little world of our own we are daily discovering
+      to be fact what we should have thought fiction, like the sailor's mother
+      the tale of the flying fish. Beyond it our ken is widening still more.
+      Gulliver's travels may turn out truer than we think. Could we traverse the
+      inter-planetary ocean of ether, we might eventually find in Jupiter the
+      land of Lilliput or in Ceres some old-time country of the Brobdignagians.
+      For men constituted muscularly like ourselves would have to be
+      proportionately small in the big planet and big in the small one. Still
+      stranger things may exist around other suns. In those bright particular
+      stars&mdash;which the little girl thought pinholes in the dark canopy of
+      the sky to let the glory beyond shine through&mdash;we are finding
+      conditions of existence like yet unlike those we already know. To our
+      groping speculations of the night they almost seem, as we gaze on them in
+      their twinkling, to be winking us a sort of comprehension. Conditions may
+      exist there under which our wildest fancies may be commonplace facts.
+      There may be
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+   "Some Xanadu where Kublai can
+    a stately pleasure dome decree,"
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      and carry out his conceptions to his own disillusionment, perhaps. For if
+      the embodiment of a fancy, however complete, left nothing further to be
+      wished, imagination would have no incentive to work. Coleridge's
+      distinction does very well to separate, empirically, certain kinds of
+      imaginative concepts from certain others; but it has no real foundation in
+      fact. Nor presumably did he mean it to have. But it serves, not inaptly,
+      as a text to point out an important scientific truth, namely, that there
+      are not two such qualities of the mind, but only one. For otherwise we
+      might have supposed the fact too evident to need mention. Imagination is
+      the single source of the new, the one mainspring of psychical advance;
+      reason, like a balance-wheel, only keeping the action regular. For reason
+      is but the touchstone of experience, our own, inherited, or acquired from
+      others. It compares what we imagine with what we know, and gives us answer
+      in terms of the here and the now, which we call the actual. But the actual
+      is really nothing but the local. It does not mark the limits of the
+      possible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That imagination has been the moving spirit of the psychical world is
+      evident, whatever branch of human thought we are pleased to examine. We
+      are in the habit, in common parlance, of making a distinction between the
+      search after truth and the search after beauty, calling the one science
+      and the other art. Now while we are not slow to impute imagination to art,
+      we are by no means so ready to appreciate its connection with science. Yet
+      contrary, perhaps, to exogeric ideas on the subject, it is science rather
+      than art that demands imagination of her votaries. Not that art may not
+      involve the quality to a high degree, but that a high degree of art is
+      quite compatible with a very small amount of imagination. On the one side
+      we may instance painting. Now painting begins its career in the humble
+      capacity of copyist, a pretty poor copyist at that. At first so slight was
+      its skill that the rudest symbols sufficed. "This is a man" was
+      conventionally implied by a few scratches bearing a very distant
+      relationship to the real thing. Gradually, owing to human vanity and a
+      growing taste, pictures improved. Combinations were tried, a bit from one
+      place with a piece from another; a sort of mosaic requiring but a slight
+      amount of imagination. Not that imagination of a higher order has not been
+      called into play, although even now pictures are often happy adaptations
+      rather than creations proper. Some masters have been imaginative; others,
+      unfortunately for themselves and still more for the public, have not. For
+      that the art may attain a high degree of excellence for itself and much
+      distinction for its professors, without calling in the aid of imagination,
+      is evident enough on this side of the globe, without travelling to the
+      other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Take, on the other hand, a branch of science which, to the average layman,
+      seems peculiarly unimaginative, the science of mathematics. Yet at the
+      risk of appearing to cast doubts upon the validity of its conclusions, it
+      might be called the most imaginative product of human thought; for it is
+      simply one vast imagination based upon a few so-called axioms, which are
+      nothing more nor less than the results of experience. It is none the less
+      imaginative because its discoveries always accord subsequently with fact,
+      since man was not aware of them beforehand. Nor are its inevitable
+      conclusions inevitable to any save those possessed of the mathematician's
+      prophetic sight. Once discovered, it requires much less imagination to
+      understand them. With the light coming from in front, it is an easy matter
+      to see what lies behind one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So with other fabrics of human thought, imagination has been spinning and
+      weaving them all. From the most concrete of inventions to the most
+      abstract of conceptions the same force reveals itself upon examination;
+      for there is no gulf between what we call practical and what we consider
+      theoretical. Everything abstract is ultimately of practical use, and even
+      the most immediately utilitarian has an abstract principle at its core. We
+      are too prone to regard the present age of the world as preeminently
+      practical, much as a middle-aged man laments the witching fancies of his
+      boyhood. But, and there is more in the parallel than analogy, if the man
+      be truly imaginative he is none the less so at forty-five than he was at
+      twenty, if his imagination have taken on a more critical form; for this
+      latter half of the nineteenth century is perhaps the most imaginative
+      period the world's history has ever known. While with one hand we are
+      contriving means of transit for our ideas, and even our very voices,
+      compared to which Puck's girdle is anything but talismanic, with the other
+      we are stretching out to grasp the action of mind on mind, pushing our way
+      into the very realm of mind itself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      History tells the same story in detail; for the history of mankind,
+      imperfectly as we know it, discloses the fact that imagination, and not
+      the power of observation nor the kindred capability of perception, has
+      been the cause of soul-evolution.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The savage is but little of an imaginative being. We are tempted, at
+      times, to imagine him more so than he is, for his fanciful folk-lore. The
+      proof of which overestimation is that we find no difficulty in imagining
+      what he does, and even of imagining what he probably imagined, and finding
+      our suppositions verified by discovery. Yet his powers of observation may
+      be marvellously developed. The North American Indian tracks his foe
+      through the forest by signs unrecognizable to a white man, and he reasons
+      most astutely upon them, and still that very man turns out to be a mere
+      child when put before problems a trifle out of his beaten path. And all
+      because his forefathers had not the power to imagine something beyond what
+      they actually saw. The very essence of the force of imagination lies in
+      its ability to change a man's habitat for him. Without it, man would
+      forever have remained, not a mollusk, to be sure, but an animal simply. A
+      plant cannot change its place, an animal cannot alter its conditions of
+      existence except within very narrow bounds; man is free in the sense
+      nothing else in the world is.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What is true of individuals has been true of races. The most imaginative
+      races have proved the greatest factors in the world's advance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now after this look at our own side of the world, let us turn to the
+      other; for it is this very psychological fact that mental progression
+      implies an ever-increasing individualization, and that imagination is the
+      force at work in the process which Far Eastern civilization, taken in
+      connection with our own, reveals. In doing this, it explains incidentally
+      its own seeming anomalies, the most unaccountable of which, apparently, is
+      its existence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We have seen how impressively impersonal the Far East is. Now if
+      individuality be the natural measure of the height of civilization which a
+      nation has reached, impersonality should betoken a relatively laggard
+      position in the race. We ought, therefore, to find among these people
+      certain other characteristics corroborative of a less advanced state of
+      development. In the first place, if imagination be the impulse of which
+      increase in individuality is the resulting motion, that quality should be
+      at a minimum there. The Far Orientals ought to be a particularly
+      unimaginative set of people. Such is precisely what they are. Their lack
+      of imagination is a well-recognized fact. All who have been brought in
+      contact with them have observed it, merchants as strikingly as students.
+      Indeed, the slightest intercourse with them could not fail to make it
+      evident. Their matter-of-fact way of looking at things is truly
+      distressing, coming as it does from so artistic a people. One notices it
+      all the more for the shock. To get a prosaic answer from a man whose
+      appearance and surroundings betoken better things is not calculated to
+      dull that answer's effect. Aston, in a pamphlet on the Altaic tongues,
+      cites an instance which is so much to the point that I venture to repeat
+      it here. He was a true Chinaman, he says, who, when his English master
+      asked him what he thought of
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+   "That orbed maiden
+    With white fires laden
+    Whom mortals call the moon,"
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      replied, "My thinkee all same lamp pidgin" (pidgin meaning thing in the
+      mongrel speech, Chinese in form and English in diction, which goes by the
+      name of pidgin English).
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Their own tongues show the same prosaic character, picturesque as they
+      appear to us at first sight. That effect is due simply to the novelty to
+      us of their expressions. To talk of a pass as an "up-down" has a
+      refreshing turn to our unused ear, but it is a much more descriptive than
+      imaginative figure of speech. Nor is the phrase "the being (so) is
+      difficult," in place of "thank you," a surprisingly beautiful bit of
+      imagery, delightful as it sounds for a change. Our own tongue has, in its
+      daily vocabulary, far more suggestive expressions, only familiarity has
+      rendered us callous to their use. We employ at every instant words which,
+      could we but stop to think of them, would strike us as poetic in the ideas
+      they call up. As has been well said, they were once happy thoughts of some
+      bright particular genius bequeathed to posterity without so much as an
+      accompanying name, and which proved so popular that they soon became but
+      symbols themselves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Their languages are paralleled by their whole life. A lack of any fanciful
+      ideas is one of the most salient traits of all Far Eastern races, if
+      indeed a sad dearth of anything can properly be spoken of as salient.
+      Indirectly their want of imagination betrays itself in their every-day
+      sayings and doings, and more directly in every branch of thought.
+      Originality is not their strong point. Their utter ignorance of science
+      shows this, and paradoxical as it may seem, their art, in spite of its
+      merit and its universality, does the same. That art and imagination are
+      necessarily bound together receives no very forcible confirmation from a
+      land where, nationally speaking, at any rate, the first is easily first
+      and the last easily last, as nations go. It is to quite another quality
+      that their artistic excellence must be ascribed. That the Chinese and
+      later the Japanese have accomplished results at which the rest of the
+      world will yet live to marvel, is due to their&mdash;taste. But taste or
+      delicacy of perception has absolutely nothing to do with imagination. That
+      certain of the senses of Far Orientals are wonderfully keen, as also those
+      parts of the brain that directly respond to them, is beyond question; but
+      such sensitiveness does not in the least involve the less earth-tied
+      portions of the intellect. A peculiar responsiveness to natural beauty, a
+      sort of mental agreement with its earthly environment, is a marked feature
+      of the Japanese mind. But appreciation, however intimate, is a very
+      different thing from originality. The one is commonly the handmaid of the
+      other, but the other by no means always accompanies the one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So much for the cause; now for the effect which we might expect to find if
+      our diagnosis be correct.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If the evolving force be less active in one race than in another, three
+      relative results should follow. In the first place, the race in question
+      will at any given moment be less advanced than its fellow; secondly, its
+      rate of progress will be less rapid; and lastly, its individual members
+      will all be nearer together, just as a stream, in falling from a cliff,
+      starts one compact mass, then gradually increasing in speed, divides into
+      drops, which, growing finer and finer and farther and farther apart,
+      descend at last as spray. All three of these consequences are visible in
+      the career of the Far Eastern peoples. The first result scarcely needs to
+      be proved to us, who are only too ready to believe it without proof. It
+      is, nevertheless, a fact. Viewed unprejudicedly, their civilization is not
+      so advanced a one as our own. Although they are certainly our superiors in
+      some very desirable particulars, their whole scheme is distinctly more
+      aboriginal fundamentally. It is more finished, as far as it goes, but it
+      does not go so far. Less rude, it is more rudimentary. Indeed, as we have
+      seen, its surface-perfection really shows that nature has given less
+      thought to its substance. One may say of it that it is the adult form of a
+      lower type of mind-specification.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The second effect is scarcely less patent. How slow their progress has
+      been, if for centuries now it can be called progress at all, is
+      world-known. Chinese conservatism has passed into a proverb. The pendulum
+      of pulsation in the Middle Kingdom long since came to a stop at the medial
+      point of rest. Centre of civilization, as they call themselves, one would
+      imagine that their mind-machinery had got caught on their own dead centre,
+      and now could not be made to move. Life, which elsewhere is a condition of
+      unstable equilibrium, there is of a fatally stable kind. For the
+      Chinaman's disinclination to progress is something more than vis inertiae;
+      it has become an ardent devotion to the status quo. Jostled, he at once
+      settles back to his previous condition again; much as more materially,
+      after a lifetime spent in California, at his death his body is
+      punctiliously embalmed and sent home across five thousand miles of sea for
+      burial. With the Japanese the condition of affairs is somewhat different.
+      Their tendency to stand still is of a purely passive kind. It is a state
+      of neutral equilibrium, stationary of itself but perfectly responsive to
+      an impulse from without. Left to their own devices, they are conservative
+      enough, but they instantly copy a more advanced civilization the moment
+      they get a chance. This proclivity on their part is not out of keeping
+      with our theory. On the contrary, it is precisely what was to have been
+      expected; for we see the very same apparent contradiction in characters we
+      are thrown with every day. Imitation is the natural substitute for
+      originality. The less strong a man's personality the more prone is he to
+      adopt the ideas of others, on the same principle that a void more easily
+      admits a foreign body than does space that is already occupied; or as a
+      blank piece of paper takes a dye more brilliantly for not being already
+      tinted itself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The third result, the remarkable homogeneity of the people, is not,
+      perhaps, so universally appreciated, but it is equally evident on
+      inspection, and no less weighty in proof. Indeed, the Far Eastern state of
+      things is a kind of charade on the word; for humanity there is singularly
+      uniform. The distance between the extremes of mind-development in Japan is
+      much less than with us. This lack of divergence exists not simply in
+      certain lines of thought, but in all those characteristics by which man is
+      parted from the brutes. In reasoning power, in artistic sensibility, in
+      delicacy of perception, it is the same story. If this were simply the
+      impression at first sight, no deductions could be drawn from it, for an
+      impression of racial similarity invariably marks the first stage of
+      acquaintance of one people by another. Even in outward appearance it is
+      so. We find it at first impossible to tell the Japanese apart; they find
+      it equally impossible to differentiate us. But the present resemblance is
+      not a matter of first impressions. The fact is patent historically. The
+      men whom Japan reveres are much less removed from the common herd than is
+      the case in any Western land. And this has been so from the earliest
+      times. Shakspeares and Newtons have never existed there. Japanese humanity
+      is not the soil to grow them. The comparative absence of genius is fully
+      paralleled by the want of its opposite. Not only are the paths of
+      preeminence untrodden; the purlieus of brutish ignorance are likewise
+      unfrequented. On neither side of the great medial line is the departure of
+      individuals far or frequent. All men there are more alike;&mdash;so much
+      alike, indeed, that the place would seem to offer a sort of forlorn hope
+      for disappointed socialists. Although religious missionaries have not met
+      with any marked success among the natives, this less deserving class of
+      enthusiastic disseminators of an all-possessing belief might do well to
+      attempt it. They would find there a very virgin field of a most
+      promisingly dead level. It is true, human opposition would undoubtedly
+      prevent their tilling it, but Nature, at least, would not present quite
+      such constitutional obstacles as she wisely does with us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The individual's mind is, as it were, an isolated bit of the race mind.
+      The same set of traits will be found in each. Mental characteristics there
+      are a sort of common property, of which a certain undifferentiated portion
+      is indiscriminately allotted to every man at birth. One soul resembles
+      another so much, that in view of the patriarchal system under which they
+      all exist, there seems to the stranger a peculiar appropriateness in so
+      strong a family likeness of mind. An idea of how little one man's brain
+      differs from his neighbor's may be gathered from the fact, that while a
+      common coolie in Japan spends his spare time in playing a chess twice as
+      complicated as ours, the most advanced philosopher is still on the
+      blissfully ignorant side of the pons asinorum.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We find, then, that in all three points the Far East fulfils what our
+      theory demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is one more consideration worthy of notice. We said that the
+      environment had not been the deus ex materia in the matter; but that the
+      soul itself possessed the germ of its own evolution. This fact does not,
+      however, preclude another, that the environment has helped in the process.
+      Change of scene is beneficial to others besides invalids. How stimulating
+      to growth a different habitat can prove, when at all favorable, is perhaps
+      sufficiently shown in the case of the marguerite, which, as an emigrant
+      called white-weed, has usurped our fields. The same has been no less true
+      of peoples. Now these Far Eastern peoples, in comparison with our own
+      forefathers, have travelled very little. A race in its travels gains two
+      things: first it acquires directly a great deal from both places and
+      peoples that it meets, and secondly it is constantly put to its own
+      resources in its struggle for existence, and becomes more personal as the
+      outcome of such strife. The changed conditions, the hostile forces it
+      finds, necessitate mental ingenuity to adapt them and influence it
+      unconsciously. To see how potent these influences prove we have but to
+      look at the two great branches of the Aryan family, the one that for so
+      long now has stayed at home, and the one that went abroad. Destitute of
+      stimulus from without, the Indo-Aryan mind turned upon itself and consumed
+      in dreamy metaphysics the imagination which has made its cousins the
+      leaders in the world's progress to-day. The inevitable numbness of
+      monotony crept over the stay-at-homes. The deadly sameness of their
+      surroundings produced its unavoidable effect. The torpor of the East, like
+      some paralyzing poison, stole into their souls, and they fell into a
+      drowsy slumber only to dream in the land they had formerly wrested from
+      its possessors. Their birthright passed with their cousins into the West.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the case of the Altaic races which we are considering, cause and effect
+      mutually strengthened each other. That they did not travel more is due
+      primarily to a lack of enterprise consequent upon a lack of imagination,
+      and then their want of travel told upon their imagination. They were also
+      unfortunate in their journeying. Their travels were prematurely brought to
+      an end by that vast geographical Nirvana the Pacific Ocean, the great
+      peaceful sea as they call it themselves. That they would have journeyed
+      further is shown by the way their dreams went eastward still. They
+      themselves could not for the preventing ocean, and the lapping of its
+      waters proved a nation's lullaby.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One thing, I think, then, our glance at Far Eastern civilization has more
+      than suggested. The soul, in its progress through the world, tends
+      inevitably to individualization. Yet the more we perceive of the cosmos
+      the more do we recognize an all-pervading unity in it. Its soul must be
+      one, not many. The divine power that made all things is not itself
+      multifold. How to reconcile the ever-increasing divergence with an
+      eventual similarity is a problem at present transcending our
+      generalizations. What we know would seem to be opposed to what we must
+      infer. But perception of how we shall merge the personal in the universal,
+      though at present hidden from sight, may sometime come to us, and the
+      seemingly irreconcilable will then turn out to involve no contradiction at
+      all. For this much is certain: grand as is the great conception of
+      Buddhism, majestic as is the idea of the stately rest it would lead us to,
+      the road here below is not one the life of the world can follow. If
+      earthly existence be an evil, then Buddhism will help us ignore it; but if
+      by an impulse we cannot explain we instinctively crave activity of mind,
+      then the great gospel of Gautama touches us not; for to abandon self&mdash;egoism,
+      that is, not selfishness is the true vacuum which nature abhors. As for
+      Far Orientals, they themselves furnish proof against themselves. That
+      impersonality is not man's earthly goal they unwittingly bear witness; for
+      they are not of those who will survive. Artistic attractive people that
+      they are, their civilization is like their own tree flowers, beautiful
+      blossoms destined never to bear fruit; for whatever we may conceive the
+      far future of another life to be, the immediate effect of impersonality
+      cannot but be annihilating. If these people continue in their old course,
+      their earthly career is closed. Just as surely as morning passes into
+      afternoon, so surely are these races of the Far East, if unchanged,
+      destined to disappear before the advancing nations of the West. Vanish
+      they will off the face of the earth and leave our planet the eventual
+      possession of the dwellers where the day declines. Unless their newly
+      imported ideas really take root, it is from this whole world that Japanese
+      and Koreans, as well as Chinese, will inevitably be excluded. Their
+      Nirvana is already being realized; already it has wrapped Far Eastern Asia
+      in its winding-sheet, the shroud of those whose day was but a dawn, as if
+      in prophetic keeping with the names they gave their homes,&mdash;the Land
+      of the Day's Beginning, and the Land of the Morning Calm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+
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diff --git a/old/1409.txt b/old/1409.txt
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Soul of the Far East, by Percival Lowell
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Soul of the Far East
+
+Author: Percival Lowell
+
+Posting Date: September 14, 2008 [EBook #1409]
+Release Date: August, 1998
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SOUL OF THE FAR EAST ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Eric Hutton
+
+
+
+
+
+THE SOUL OF THE FAR EAST
+
+By Percival Lowell
+
+
+Contents
+
+     Chapter 1. Individuality
+
+     Chapter 2. Family
+
+     Chapter 3. Adoption
+
+     Chapter 4. Language
+
+     Chapter 5. Nature and Art
+
+     Chapter 6. Art
+
+     Chapter 7. Religion
+
+     Chapter 8. Imagination
+
+
+
+
+Chapter 1. Individuality.
+
+The boyish belief that on the other side of our globe all things are
+of necessity upside down is startlingly brought back to the man when he
+first sets foot at Yokohama. If his initial glance does not, to be sure,
+disclose the natives in the every-day feat of standing calmly on their
+heads, an attitude which his youthful imagination conceived to be a
+necessary consequence of their geographical position, it does at least
+reveal them looking at the world as if from the standpoint of that
+eccentric posture. For they seem to him to see everything topsy-turvy.
+Whether it be that their antipodal situation has affected their brains,
+or whether it is the mind of the observer himself that has hitherto been
+wrong in undertaking to rectify the inverted pictures presented by
+his retina, the result, at all events, is undeniable. The world stands
+reversed, and, taking for granted his own uprightness, the stranger
+unhesitatingly imputes to them an obliquity of vision, a state of mind
+outwardly typified by the cat-like obliqueness of their eyes.
+
+If the inversion be not precisely of the kind he expected, it is none
+the less striking, and impressibly more real. If personal experience has
+definitely convinced him that the inhabitants of that under side of our
+planet do not adhere to it head downwards, like flies on a ceiling,--his
+early a priori deduction,--they still appear quite as antipodal,
+mentally considered. Intellectually, at least, their attitude sets
+gravity at defiance. For to the mind's eye their world is one huge,
+comical antithesis of our own. What we regard intuitively in one way
+from our standpoint, they as intuitively observe in a diametrically
+opposite manner from theirs. To speak backwards, write backwards, read
+backwards, is but the a b c of their contrariety. The inversion extends
+deeper than mere modes of expression, down into the very matter of
+thought. Ideas of ours which we deemed innate find in them no home,
+while methods which strike us as preposterously unnatural appear to
+be their birthright. From the standing of a wet umbrella on its handle
+instead of its head to dry to the striking of a match away in place
+of toward one, there seems to be no action of our daily lives, however
+trivial, but finds with them its appropriate reaction--equal but
+opposite. Indeed, to one anxious of conforming to the manners and
+customs of the country, the only road to right lies in following
+unswervingly that course which his inherited instincts assure him to be
+wrong.
+
+Yet these people are human beings; with all their eccentricities they
+are men. Physically we cannot but be cognizant of the fact, nor mentally
+but be conscious of it. Like us, indeed, and yet so unlike are they
+that we seem, as we gaze at them, to be viewing our own humanity in
+some mirth-provoking mirror of the mind,--a mirror that shows us our own
+familiar thoughts, but all turned wrong side out. Humor holds the glass,
+and we become the sport of our own reflections. But is it otherwise at
+home? Do not our personal presentments mock each of us individually
+our lives long? Who but is the daily dupe of his dressing-glass, and
+complacently conceives himself to be a very different appearing person
+from what he is, forgetting that his right side has become his left, and
+vice versa? Yet who, when by chance he catches sight in like manner of
+the face of a friend, can keep from smiling at the caricatures which the
+mirror's left-for-right reversal makes of the asymmetry of that
+friend's features,--caricatures all the more grotesque for being utterly
+unsuspected by their innocent original? Perhaps, could we once see
+ourselves as others see us, our surprise in the case of foreign peoples
+might be less pronounced.
+
+Regarding, then, the Far Oriental as a man, and not simply as
+a phenomenon, we discover in his peculiar point of view a new
+importance,--the possibility of using it stereoptically. For his
+mind-photograph of the world can be placed side by side with ours, and
+the two pictures combined will yield results beyond what either alone
+could possibly have afforded. Thus harmonized, they will help us
+to realize humanity. Indeed it is only by such a combination of two
+different aspects that we ever perceive substance and distinguish
+reality from illusion. What our two eyes make possible for material
+objects, the earth's two hemispheres may enable us to do for mental
+traits. Only the superficial never changes its expression; the
+appearance of the solid varies with the standpoint of the observer.
+In dreamland alone does everything seem plain, and there all is
+unsubstantial.
+
+To say that the Japanese are not a savage tribe is of course
+unnecessary; to repeat the remark, anything but superfluous, on the
+principle that what is a matter of common notoriety is very apt to
+prove a matter about which uncommonly little is known. At present we
+go halfway in recognition of these people by bestowing upon them a
+demi-diploma of mental development called semi-civilization, neglecting,
+however, to specify in what the fractional qualification consists.
+If the suggestion of a second moiety, as of something directly
+complementary to them, were not indirectly complimentary to ourselves,
+the expression might pass; but, as it is, the self-praise is rather too
+obvious to carry conviction. For Japan's claim to culture is not based
+solely upon the exports with which she supplements our art, nor upon the
+paper, china, and bric-a-brac with which she adorns our rooms; any more
+than Western science is adequately represented in Japan by our popular
+imports there of kerosene oil, matches, and beer. Only half civilized
+the Far East presumably is, but it is so rather in an absolute than a
+relative sense; in the sense of what might have been, not of what is. It
+is so as compared, not with us, but with the eventual possibilities of
+humanity. As yet, neither system, Western nor Eastern, is perfect enough
+to serve in all things as standard for the other. The light of truth
+has reached each hemisphere through the medium of its own mental
+crystallization, and this has polarized it in opposite ways, so that now
+the rays that are normal to the eyes of the one only produce darkness
+to those of the other. For the Japanese civilization in the sense of not
+being savagery is the equal of our own. It is not in the polish that the
+real difference lies; it is in the substance polished. In politeness, in
+delicacy, they have as a people no peers. Art has been their mistress,
+though science has never been their master. Perhaps for this very reason
+that art, not science, has been the Muse they courted, the result has
+been all the more widespread. For culture there is not the attainment
+of the few, but the common property of the people. If the peaks of
+intellect rise less eminent, the plateau of general elevation stands
+higher. But little need be said to prove the civilization of a land
+where ordinary tea-house girls are models of refinement, and common
+coolies, when not at work, play chess for pastime.
+
+If Japanese ways look odd at first sight, they but look more odd on
+closer acquaintance. In a land where, to allow one's understanding the
+freer play of indoor life, one begins, not by taking off his hat, but by
+removing his boots, he gets at the very threshold a hint that humanity
+is to be approached the wrong end to. When, after thus entering a
+house, he tries next to gain admittance to the mind of its occupant, the
+suspicion becomes a certainty. He discovers that this people talk, so
+to speak, backwards; that before he can hope to comprehend them, or
+make himself understood in return, he must learn to present his thoughts
+arranged in inverse order from the one in which they naturally suggest
+themselves to his mind. His sentences must all be turned inside out. He
+finds himself lost in a labyrinth of language. The same seems to be true
+of the thoughts it embodies. The further he goes the more obscure the
+whole process becomes, until, after long groping about for some means of
+orienting himself, he lights at last upon the clue. This clue consists
+in "the survival of the unfittest."
+
+In the civilization of Japan we have presented to us a most interesting
+case of partially arrested development; or, to speak esoterically,
+we find ourselves placed face to face with a singular example of a
+completed race-life. For though from our standpoint the evolution of
+these people seems suddenly to have come to an end in mid-career,
+looked at more intimately it shows all the signs of having fully run its
+course. Development ceased, not because of outward obstruction, but from
+purely intrinsic inability to go on. The intellectual machine was not
+shattered; it simply ran down. To this fact the phenomenon owes its
+peculiar interest. For we behold here in the case of man the same
+spectacle that we see cosmically in the case of the moon, the spectacle
+of a world that has died of old age. No weak spot in their social
+organism destroyed them from within; no epidemic, in the shape of
+foreign hordes, fell upon them from without. For in spite of the fact
+that China offers the unique example of a country that has simply lived
+to be conquered, mentally her masters have invariably become her pupils.
+Having ousted her from her throne as ruler, they proceeded to sit at
+her feet as disciples. Thus they have rather helped than hindered her
+civilization.
+
+Whatever portion of the Far East we examine we find its mental history
+to be the same story with variations. However unlike China, Korea, and
+Japan are in some respects, through the careers of all three we can
+trace the same life-spirit. It is the career of the river Jordan rising
+like any other stream from the springs among the mountains only to fall
+after a brief existence into the Dead Sea. For their vital force
+had spent itself more than a millennium ago. Already, then, their
+civilization had in its deeper developments attained its stature, and
+has simply been perfecting itself since. We may liken it to some stunted
+tree, that, finding itself prevented from growth, bastes the more
+luxuriantly to put forth flowers and fruit. For not the final but the
+medial processes were skipped. In those superficial amenities with
+which we more particularly link our idea of civilization, these peoples
+continued to grow. Their refinement, if failing to reach our standard
+in certain respects, surpasses ours considering the bare barbaric
+basis upon which it rests. For it is as true of the Japanese as of
+the proverbial Russian, though in a more scientific sense, that if you
+scratch him you will find the ancestral Tartar. But it is no less true
+that the descendants of this rude forefather have now taken on a polish
+of which their own exquisite lacquer gives but a faint reflection. The
+surface was perfected after the substance was formed. Our word finish,
+with its double meaning, expresses both the process and the result.
+
+There entered, to heighten the bizarre effect, a spirit common in minds
+that lack originality--the spirit of imitation. Though consequent enough
+upon a want of initiative, the results of this trait appear anything but
+natural to people of a more progressive past. The proverbial collar and
+pair of spurs look none the less odd to the stranger for being a mental
+instead of a bodily habit. Something akin to such a case of unnatural
+selection has there taken place. The orderly procedure of natural
+evolution was disastrously supplemented by man. For the fact that in
+the growth of their tree of knowledge the branches developed out of all
+proportion to the trunk is due to a practice of culture-grafting.
+
+From before the time when they began to leave records of their actions
+the Japanese have been a nation of importers, not of merchandise, but of
+ideas. They have invariably shown the most advanced free-trade spirit
+in preferring to take somebody else's ready-made articles rather than
+to try to produce any brand-new conceptions themselves. They continue
+to follow the same line of life. A hearty appreciation of the things of
+others is still one of their most winning traits. What they took they
+grafted bodily upon their ancestral tree, which in consequence came to
+present a most unnaturally diversified appearance. For though not unlike
+other nations in wishing to borrow, if their zeal in the matter was
+slightly excessive, they were peculiar in that they never assimilated
+what they took. They simply inserted it upon the already existing
+growth. There it remained, and throve, and blossomed, nourished by that
+indigenous Japanese sap, taste. But like grafts generally, the foreign
+boughs were not much modified by their new life-blood, nor was the tree
+in its turn at all affected by them. Connected with it only as separable
+parts of its structure, the cuttings might have been lopped off again
+without influencing perceptibly the condition of the foster-parent stem.
+The grafts in time grew to be great branches, but the trunk remained
+through it all the trunk of a sapling. In other words, the nation grew
+up to man's estate, keeping the mind of its childhood.
+
+What is thus true of the Japanese is true likewise of the Koreans and of
+the Chinese. The three peoples, indeed, form so many links in one long
+chain of borrowing. China took from India, then Korea copied China, and
+lastly Japan imitated Korea. In this simple manner they successively
+became possessed of a civilization which originally was not the property
+of any one of them. In the eagerness they all evinced in purloining
+what was not theirs, and in the perfect content with which they then
+proceeded to enjoy what they had taken, they remind us forcibly of
+that happy-go-lucky class in the community which prefers to live on
+questionable loans rather than work itself for a living. Like those same
+individuals, whatever interest the Far Eastern people may succeed in
+raising now, Nature will in the end make them pay dearly for their lack
+of principal.
+
+The Far Eastern civilization resembles, in fact, more a mechanical
+mixture of social elements than a well differentiated chemical compound.
+For in spite of the great variety of ingredients thrown into its
+caldron of destiny, as no affinity existed between them, no combination
+resulted. The power to fuse was wanting. Capability to evolve anything
+is not one of the marked characteristics of the Far East. Indeed, the
+tendency to spontaneous variation, Nature's mode of making experiments,
+would seem there to have been an enterprising faculty that was exhausted
+early. Sleepy, no doubt, from having got up betimes with the dawn, these
+dwellers in the far lands of the morning began to look upon their day
+as already well spent before they had reached its noon. They grew old
+young, and have remained much the same age ever since. What they were
+centuries ago, that at bottom they are to-day. Take away the European
+influence of the last twenty years, and each man might almost be his
+own great-grandfather. In race characteristics he is yet essentially the
+same. The traits that distinguished these peoples in the past have been
+gradually extinguishing them ever since. Of these traits, stagnating
+influences upon their career, perhaps the most important is the great
+quality of impersonality.
+
+If we take, through the earth's temperate zone, a belt of country
+whose northern and southern edges are determined by certain limiting
+isotherms, not more than half the width of the zone apart, we shall find
+that we have included in a relatively small extent of surface almost
+all the nations of note in the world, past or present. Now if we examine
+this belt, and compare the different parts of it with one another, we
+shall be struck by a remarkable fact. The peoples inhabiting it grow
+steadily more personal as we go west. So unmistakable is this gradation
+of spirit, that one is tempted to ascribe it to cosmic rather than
+to human causes. It is as marked as the change in color of the human
+complexion observable along any meridian, which ranges from black at
+the equator to blonde toward the pole. In like manner, the sense of
+self grows more intense as we follow in the wake of the setting sun, and
+fades steadily as we advance into the dawn. America, Europe, the Levant,
+India, Japan, each is less personal than the one before. We stand at the
+nearer end of the scale, the Far Orientals at the other. If with us the
+I seems to be of the very essence of the soul, then the soul of the Far
+East may be said to be Impersonality.
+
+Curious as this characteristic is as a fact, it is even more interesting
+as a factor. For what it betokens of these peoples in particular may
+suggest much about man generally. It may mark a stride in theory, if a
+standstill in practice. Possibly it may help us to some understanding
+of ourselves. Not that it promises much aid to vexed metaphysical
+questions, but as a study in sociology it may not prove so vain.
+
+And for a thing which is always with us, its discussion may be said to
+be peculiarly opportune just now. For it lies at the bottom of the most
+pressing questions of the day. Of the two great problems that stare the
+Western world in the face at the present moment, both turn to it for
+solution. Agnosticism, the foreboding silence of those who think,
+socialism, communism, and nihilism, the petulant cry of those who do
+not, alike depend ultimately for the right to be upon the truth or the
+falsity of the sense of self.
+
+For if there be no such actual thing as individuality, if the feeling
+we call by that name be naught but the transient illusion the Buddhists
+would have us believe it, any faith founded upon it as basis vanishes as
+does the picture in a revolving kaleidoscope,--less enduring even than
+the flitting phantasmagoria of a dream. If the ego be but the passing
+shadow of the material brain, at the disintegration of the gray matter
+what will become of us? Shall we simply lapse into an indistinguishable
+part of the vast universe that compasses us round? At the thought we
+seem to stand straining our gaze, on the shore of the great sea of
+knowledge, only to watch the fog roll in, and hide from our view even
+those headlands of hope that, like beseeching hands, stretch out into
+the deep.
+
+So more materially. If individuality be a delusion of the mind, what
+motive potent enough to excite endeavor in the breast of an ordinary
+mortal remains? Philosophers, indeed, might still work for the
+advancement of mankind, but mankind itself would not continue long to
+labor energetically for what should profit only the common weal. Take
+away the stimulus of individuality, and action is paralyzed at once.
+For with most men the promptings of personal advantage only afford
+sufficient incentive to effort. Destroy this force, then any
+consideration due it lapses, and socialism is not only justified, it
+is raised instantly into an axiom of life. The community, in that case,
+becomes itself the unit, the indivisible atom of existence. Socialism,
+then communism, then nihilism, follow in inevitable sequence. That even
+the Far Oriental, with all his numbing impersonality, has not touched
+this goal may at least suggest that individuality is a fact.
+
+But first, what do we know about its existence ourselves?
+
+Very early in the course of every thoughtful childhood an event takes
+place, by the side of which, to the child himself, all other events sink
+into insignificance. It is not one that is recognized and chronicled
+by the world, for it is wholly unconnected with action. No one but the
+child is aware of its occurrence, and he never speaks of it to others.
+Yet to that child it marks an epoch. So intensely individual does it
+seem that the boy is afraid to avow it, while in reality so universal
+is it that probably no human being has escaped its influence. Though
+subjective purely, it has more vividness than any external event;
+and though strictly intrinsic to life, it is more startling than any
+accident of fate or fortune. This experience of the boy's, at once so
+singular and yet so general, is nothing less than the sudden revelation
+to him one day of the fact of his own personality.
+
+Somewhere about the time when sensation is giving place to sensitiveness
+as the great self-educator, and the knowledge gained by the five bodily
+senses is being fused into the wisdom of that mental one we call common
+sense, the boy makes a discovery akin to the act of waking up. All at
+once he becomes conscious of himself; and the consciousness has about
+it a touch of the uncanny. Hitherto he has been aware only of matter;
+he now first realizes mind. Unwarned, unprepared, he is suddenly ushered
+before being, and stands awe-struck in the presence of--himself.
+
+If the introduction to his own identity was startling, there is nothing
+reassuring in the feeling that this strange acquaintanceship must last.
+For continue it does. It becomes an unsought intimacy he cannot shake
+off. Like to his own shadow he cannot escape it. To himself a man cannot
+but be at home. For years this alter ego haunts him, for he imagines it
+an idiosyncrasy of his own, a morbid peculiarity he dare not confide
+to any one, for fear of being thought a fool. Not till long afterwards,
+when he has learned to live as a matter of course with his ever-present
+ghost, does he discover that others have had like familiars themselves.
+
+Sometimes this dawn of consciousness is preceded by a long twilight of
+soul-awakening; but sometimes, upon more sensitive and subtler natures,
+the light breaks with all the suddenness of a sunrise at the equator,
+revealing to the mind's eye an unsuspected world of self within. But in
+whatever way we may awake to it, the sense of personality, when first
+realized, appears already, like the fabled Goddess of Wisdom, full grown
+in the brain. From the moment when we first remember ourselves we seem
+to be as old as we ever seem to others afterwards to become. We grow,
+indeed, in knowledge, in wisdom, in experience, as our years increase,
+but deep down in our heart of hearts we are still essentially the same.
+To be sure, people pay us more deference than they did, which suggests
+a doubt at times whether we may not have changed; small boys of a
+succeeding generation treat us with a respect that causes us inwardly to
+smile, as we think how little we differ from them, if they but knew it.
+For at bottom we are not conscious of change from that morning, long
+ago, when first we realized ourselves. We feel just as young now as we
+felt old then. We are but amused at the world's discrimination where we
+can detect no difference.
+
+Every human being has been thus "twice born": once as matter, once as
+mind. Nor is this second birth the birthright only of mankind. All the
+higher animals probably, possibly even the lower too, have experienced
+some such realization of individual identity. However that may be,
+certainly to all races of men has come this revelation; only the degree
+in which they have felt its force has differed immensely. It is one
+thing to the apathetic, fatalistic Turk, and quite another matter to an
+energetic, nervous American. Facts, fancies, faiths, all show how wide
+is the variance in feelings. With them no introspective [greek]cnzhi
+seauton overexcites the consciousness of self. But with us; as with
+those of old possessed of devils, it comes to startle and stays to
+distress. Too apt is it to prove an ever-present, undesirable double.
+Too often does it play the part of uninvited spectre at the feast,
+whose presence no one save its unfortunate victim suspects. The haunting
+horror of his own identity is to natures far less eccentric than Kenelm
+Chillingly's only too common a curse. To this companionship, paradoxical
+though it sound, is principally due the peculiar loneliness of
+childhood. 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. With us the idea seems
+the bitter fruit of material philosophy; by them it was looked upon as
+the fairest flower of their faith. What is dreaded now as the impious
+suggestion of the godless four thousand years ago was reverenced as a
+sacred tenet of religion.
+
+Shorter even than his short threescore years and ten is that soul's life
+of which man is directly cognizant. Bounded by two seemingly impersonal
+states is the personal consciousness of which he is made aware: the one
+the infantile existence that precedes his boyish discovery, the other
+the gloom that grows with years,--two twilights that fringe the two
+borders of his day. But with the Far Oriental, life is all twilight. For
+in Japan and China both states are found together. There, side by side
+with the present unconsciousness of the babe exists the belief in a
+coming unconsciousness for the man. So inseparably blended are the two
+that the known truth of the one seems, for that very bond, to carry
+with it the credentials of the other. Can it be that the personal,
+progressive West is wrong, and the impersonal, impassive East right?
+Surely not. Is the other side of the world in advance of us in
+mind-development, even as it precedes us in the time of day; or just as
+our noon is its night, may it not be far in our rear? Is not its seeming
+wisdom rather the precociousness of what is destined never to go far?
+
+Brought suddenly upon such a civilization, after the blankness of a
+long ocean voyage, one is reminded instinctively of the feelings of that
+bewildered individual who, after a dinner at which he had eventually
+ceased to be himself, was by way of pleasantry left out overnight in a
+graveyard, on their way home, by his humorously inclined companions; and
+who, on awaking alone, in a still dubious condition, looked around
+him in surprise, rubbed his eyes two or three times to no purpose, and
+finally muttered in a tone of awe-struck conviction, "Well, either I'm
+the first to rise, or I'm a long way behind time!"
+
+Whether their failure to follow the natural course of evolution results
+in bringing them in at the death just the same or not, these people are
+now, at any rate, stationary not very far from the point at which we
+all set out. They are still in that childish state of development
+before self-consciousness has spoiled the sweet simplicity of nature. An
+impersonal race seems never to have fully grown up.
+
+Partly for its own sake, partly for ours, this most distinctive feature
+of the Far East, its marked impersonality, is well worthy particular
+attention; for while it collaterally suggests pregnant thoughts about
+ourselves, it directly underlies the deeper oddities of a civilization
+which is the modern eighth wonder of the world. We shall see this as we
+look at what these people are, at what they were, and at what they hope
+to become; not historically, but psychologically, as one might perceive,
+were he but wise enough, in an acorn, besides the nut itself, two oaks,
+that one from which it fell, and that other which from it will rise.
+These three states, which we may call its potential past, present, and
+future, may be observed and studied in three special outgrowths of a
+race's character: in its language, in its every-day thoughts, and in its
+religion. For in the language of a people we find embalmed the spirit
+of its past; in its every-day thoughts, be they of arts or sciences, is
+wrapped up its present life; in its religion lie enfolded its dreamings
+of a future. From out each of these three subjects in the Far East
+impersonality stares us in the face. Upon this quality as a foundation
+rests the Far Oriental character. It is individually rather than
+nationally that I propose to scan it now. It is the action of a
+particle in the wave of world-development I would watch, rather than
+the propagation of the wave itself. Inferences about the movement of the
+whole will follow of themselves a knowledge of the motion of its parts.
+
+But before we attack the subject esoterically, let us look a moment at
+the man as he appears in his relation to the community. Such a glance
+will suggest the peculiar atmosphere of impersonality that pervades the
+people.
+
+However lacking in cleverness, in merit, or in imagination a man may
+be, there are in our Western world, if his existence there be so much as
+noticed at all, three occasions on which he appears in print. His birth,
+his marriage, and his death are all duly chronicled in type, perhaps as
+sufficiently typical of the general unimportance of his life. Mention of
+one's birth, it is true, is an aristocratic privilege, confined to the
+world of English society. In democratic America, no doubt because all
+men there are supposed to be born free and equal, we ignore the first
+event, and mention only the last two episodes, about which our national
+astuteness asserts no such effacing equality.
+
+Accepting our newspaper record as a fair enough summary of the biography
+of an average man, let us look at these three momentous occasions in the
+career of a Far Oriental.
+
+
+
+Chapter 2. Family.
+
+In the first place, then, the poor little Japanese baby is ushered into
+this world in a sadly impersonal manner, for he is not even accorded the
+distinction of a birthday. He is permitted instead only the much less
+special honor of a birth-year. Not that he begins his separate existence
+otherwise than is the custom of mortals generally, at a definite instant
+of time, but that very little subsequent notice is ever taken of the
+fact. On the contrary, from the moment he makes his appearance he is
+spoken of as a year old, and this same age he continues to be considered
+in most simple ease of calculation, till the beginning of the next
+calendar year. When that epoch of general rejoicing arrives, he is
+credited with another year himself. So is everybody else. New Year's day
+is a common birthday for the community, a sort of impersonal anniversary
+for his whole world. A like reckoning is followed in China and Korea.
+Upon the disadvantages of being considered from one's birth up at least
+one year and possibly two older than one really is, it lies beyond our
+present purpose to expatiate. It is quite evident that woman has had no
+voice in the framing of such a chronology. One would hardly imagine
+that man had either, so astronomic is the system. A communistic age
+is however but an unavoidable detail of the general scheme whose most
+suggestive feature consists in the subordination of the actual birthday
+of the individual to the fictitious birthday of the community. For it is
+not so much the want of commemoration shown the subject as the character
+of the commemoration which is significant. Some slight notice is indeed
+paid to birthdays during early childhood, but even then their observance
+is quite secondary in importance to that of the great impersonal
+anniversaries of the third day of the third moon and the fifth day of
+the fifth moon. These two occasions celebrated the coming of humanity
+into the world with an impersonality worthy of the French revolutionary
+calendar. The first of them is called the festival of girls, and
+commemorates the birth of girls generally, the advent of the universal
+feminine, as one may say. The second is a corresponding anniversary for
+boys. Owing to its sex, the latter is the greater event of the two, and
+in consequence of its most conspicuous feature is styled the festival of
+fishes. The fishes are hollow paper images of the "tai" from four to six
+feet in length, tied to the top of a long pole planted in the ground and
+tipped with a gilded ball. Holes in the paper at the mouth and the
+tail enable the wind to inflate the body so that it floats about
+horizontally, swaying hither and thither, and tugging at the line after
+the manner of a living thing. The fish are emblems of good luck, and are
+set up in the courtyard of every house where a son has been born during
+the year. On this auspicious day Tokio is suddenly transformed into
+eighty square miles of aquarium.
+
+For any more personal purpose New Year's day eclipses all particular
+anniversaries. Then everybody congratulates everybody else upon
+everything in general, and incidentally upon being alive. Such
+substitution of an abstract for a concrete birthday, although
+exceedingly convenient for others, must at least conduce to
+self-forgetfulness on the part of its proper possessor, and tend
+inevitably to merge the identity of the individual in that of the
+community.
+
+It fares hardly better with the Far Oriental in the matter of marriage.
+Although he is, as we might think, the person most interested in the
+result, he is permitted no say in the affair whatever. In fact, it
+is not his affair at all, but his father's. His hand is simply made a
+cat's-paw of. The matter is entirely a business transaction, entered
+into by the parent and conducted through regular marriage brokers. In
+it he plays only the part of a marionette. His revenge for being thus
+bartered out of what might be the better half of his life, he takes
+eventually on the next succeeding generation.
+
+His death may be said to be the most important act of his whole life.
+For then only can his personal existence be properly considered to
+begin. By it he joins the great company of ancestors who are to these
+people of almost more consequence than living folk, and of much more
+individual distinction. Particularly is this the case in China and
+Korea, but the same respect, though in a somewhat less rigid form,
+is paid the dead in Japan. Then at last the individual receives that
+recognition which was denied him in the flesh. In Japan a mortuary
+tablet is set up to him in the house and duly worshipped; on the
+continent the ancestors are given a dwelling of their own, and even
+more devotedly reverenced. But in both places the cult is anything but
+funereal. For the ancestral tombs are temples and pleasure pavilions at
+the same time, consecrated not simply to rites and ceremonies, but to
+family gatherings and general jollification. And the fortunate defunct
+must feel, if he is still half as sentient as his dutiful descendants
+suppose, that his earthly life, like other approved comedies, has ended
+well.
+
+Important, however, as these critical points in his career may be
+reckoned by his relatives, they are scarcely calculated to prove equally
+epochal to the man himself. In a community where next to no note is
+ever taken of the anniversary of his birth, some doubt as to the special
+significance of that red-letter day may not unnaturally creep into
+his own mind. While in regard to his death, although it may be highly
+flattering for him to know that he will certainly become somebody when
+he shall have ceased, practically, to be anybody, such tardy recognition
+is scarcely timely enough to be properly appreciated. Human nature is so
+earth-tied, after all, that a post-mundane existence is very apt to seem
+immaterial as well as be so.
+
+With the old familiar landmarks of life obliterated in this wholesale
+manner, it is to be doubted whether one of us, placed in the midst of
+such a civilization, would know himself. He certainly would derive but
+scanty satisfaction from the recognition if he did. Even Nirvana might
+seem a happy limbo by comparison. With a communal, not to say a cosmic,
+birthday, and a conventional wife, he might well deem his separate
+existence the shadow of a shade and embrace Buddhism from mere force of
+circumstances.
+
+Further investigation would not shake his opinion. For a far-oriental
+career is thoroughly in keeping with these, its typical turning-points.
+From one end of its course to the other it is painfully impersonal.
+In its regular routine as in its more salient junctures, life presents
+itself to these races a totally different affair from what it seems to
+us. The cause lies in what is taken to be the basis of socio-biology, if
+one may so express it.
+
+In the Far East the social unit, the ultimate molecule of existence, is
+not the individual, but the family.
+
+We occidentals think we value family. We even parade our pretensions so
+prominently as sometimes to tread on other people's prejudices of a like
+nature. Yet we scarcely seem to appreciate the inheritance. For with a
+logic which does us questionable credit, we are proud of our ancestors
+in direct proportion to their remoteness from ourselves, thus permitting
+Democracy to revenge its insignificance by smiling at our self-imposed
+satire. To esteem a man in inverse ratio to the amount of remarkable
+blood he has inherited is, to say the least, bathetic. Others, again,
+make themselves objectionable by preferring their immediate relatives
+to all less connected companions, and cling to their cousins so closely
+that affection often culminates in matrimony, nature's remonstrances
+notwithstanding. But with all the pride or pleasure which we take in
+the members of our particular clan, our satisfaction really springs from
+viewing them on an autocentric theory of the social system. In our own
+eyes we are the star about which, as in Joseph's dream, our relatives
+revolve and upon which they help to shed an added lustre. Our Ptolemaic
+theory of society is necessitated by our tenacity to the personal
+standpoint. This fixed idea of ours causes all else seemingly to
+rotate about it. Such an egoistic conception is quite foreign to
+our longitudinal antipodes. However much appearances may agree, the
+fundamental principles upon which family consideration is based are
+widely different in the two hemispheres. For the far-eastern social
+universe turns on a patricentric pivot.
+
+Upon the conception of the family as the social and political unit
+depends the whole constitution of China. The same theory somewhat
+modified constitutes the life-principle of Korea, of Japan, and of their
+less advanced cousins who fill the vast centre of the Asiatic continent.
+From the emperor on his throne to the common coolie in his hovel it is
+the idea of kinship that knits the entire body politic together. The
+Empire is one great family; the family is a little empire.
+
+The one developed out of the other. The patriarchal is, as is well
+known, probably the oldest political system in the world. All nations
+may be said to have experienced such a paternal government, but most
+nations outgrew it.
+
+Now the interesting fact about the yellow branch of the human race is,
+not that they had so juvenile a constitution, but that they have it;
+that it has persisted practically unchanged from prehistoric ages. It
+is certainly surprising in this kaleidoscopic world whose pattern is
+constantly changing as time merges one combination of its elements
+into another, that on the other side of the globe this set should have
+remained the same. Yet in spite of the lapse of years, in spite of
+the altered conditions of existence, in spite of an immense advance in
+civilization, such a primitive state of society has continued there to
+the present day, in all its essentials what it was when as nomads the
+race forefathers wandered peacefully or otherwise over the plains of
+Central Asia. The principle helped them to expand; it has simply cramped
+them ever since. For, instead of dissolving like other antiquated views,
+it has become, what it was bound to become if it continued to last,
+crystallized into an institution. It had practically reached this
+condition when it received a theoretical, not to say a theological
+recognition which gave it mundane immortality. A couple of millenniums
+ago Confucius consecrated filial duty by making it the basis of the
+Chinese moral code. His hand was the finishing touch of fossilification.
+For since the sage set his seal upon the system no one has so much as
+dreamt of changing it. The idea of confuting Confucius would be an
+act of impiety such as no Chinaman could possibly commit. Not that
+the inadmissibility of argument is due really to the authority of the
+philosopher, but that it lies ingrained in the character of the people.
+Indeed the genius of the one may be said to have consisted in divining
+the genius of the other. Confucius formulated the prevailing practice,
+and in so doing helped to make it perpetual. He gave expression to the
+national feeling, and like expressions, generally his, served to stamp
+the idea all the more indelibly upon the national consciousness.
+
+In this manner the family from a natural relation grew into a highly
+unnatural social anachronism. The loose ties of a roving life became
+fetters of a fixed conventionality. Bonds originally of mutual advantage
+hardened into restrictions by which the young were hopelessly tethered
+to the old. Midway in its course the race undertook to turn round and
+face backwards, as it journeyed on. Its subsequent advance could be
+nothing but slow.
+
+The head of a family is so now in something of a corporeal sense. From
+him emanate all its actions; to him are responsible all its parts. Any
+other member of it is as incapable of individual expression as is the
+hand, or the foot, or the eye of man. Indeed, Confucian doctors of
+divinity might appropriately administer psychically to the egoistic
+the rebuke of the Western physician to the too self-analytic youth who,
+finding that, after eating, his digestion failed to give him what he
+considered its proper sensations, had come to consult the doctor as to
+how it ought to feel. "Feel! young man," he was answered, "you ought
+not to be aware that you have a digestion." So with them, a normally
+constituted son knows not what it is to possess a spontaneity of his
+own. Indeed, this very word "own," which so long ago in our own tongue
+took to itself the symbol of possession, well exemplifies his dependent
+state. China furnishes the most conspicuous instance of the want
+of individual rights. A Chinese son cannot properly be said to own
+anything. The title to the land he tills is vested absolutely in the
+family, of which he is an undivided thirtieth, or what-not. Even the
+administration of the property is not his, but resides in the family,
+represented by its head. The outward symbols of ownership testify to the
+fact. The bourns that mark the boundaries of the fields bear the names
+of families, not of individuals. The family, as such, is the proprietor,
+and its lands are cultivated and enjoyed in common by all the
+constituents of the clan. In the tenure of its real estate, the Chinese
+family much resembles the Russian Mir. But so far as his personal state
+is concerned, the Chinese son outslaves the Slav. For he lives at home,
+under the immediate control of the paternal will--in the most complete
+of serfdoms, a filial one. Even existence becomes a communal affair.
+From the family mansion, or set of mansions, in which all its members
+dwell, to the family mausoleum, to which they will all eventually be
+borne, a man makes his life journey in strict company with his kin.
+
+A man's life is thus but an undivisible fraction of the family life. How
+essentially so will appear from the following slight sketch of it.
+
+To begin at the beginning, his birth is a very important event--for the
+household, at which no one fails to rejoice except the new-comer. He
+cries. The general joy, however, depends somewhat upon his sex. If the
+baby chances to be a boy, everybody is immensely pleased; if a girl,
+there is considerably less effusion shown. In the latter case the
+more impulsive relatives are unmistakably sorry; the more philosophic
+evidently hope for better luck next time. Both kinds make very pretty
+speeches, which not even the speakers believe, for in the babe lottery
+the family is considered to have drawn a blank. A delight so engendered
+proves how little of the personal, even in prospective, attaches to its
+object. The reason for the invidious distinction in the matter of sex
+lies of course in an inordinate desire for the perpetuation of the
+family line. The unfortunate infant is regarded merely in the light of
+a possible progenitor. A boy is already potentially a father; whereas a
+girl, if she marry at all, is bound to marry out of her own family into
+another, and is relatively lost. The full force of the deprivation is,
+however, to some degree tempered by the almost infinite possibilities of
+adoption. Daughters are, therefore, not utterly unmitigable evils.
+
+From the privacy of the domestic circle, the infant's entrance into
+public life is performed pick-a-back. Strapped securely to the shoulders
+of a slightly older sister, out he goes, consigned to the tender mercies
+of a being who is scarcely more than a baby herself. The diminutiveness
+of the nurse-perambulators is the most surprising part of the
+performance. The tiniest of tots may be seen thus toddling round with
+burdens half their own size. Like the dot upon the little i, the baby's
+head seems a natural part of their childish ego.
+
+An economy of the kind in the matter of nurses is highly suggestive.
+That it should be practicable thus to entrust one infant to another
+proves the precociousness of children. But this surprising maturity
+of the young implies by a law too well known to need explanation, the
+consequent immaturity of the race. That which has less to grow up
+to, naturally grows up to its limit sooner. It may even be questioned
+whether it does not do so with the more haste; on the same principle
+that a runner who has less distance to travel not only accomplishes his
+course quicker, but moves with relatively greater speed, or as a small
+planet grows old not simply sooner, but comparatively faster than a
+larger one. Jupiter is still in his fiery youth, while the moon is
+senile in decrepid old age, and yet his separate existence began
+long before hers. Either hypothesis will explain the abnormally
+early development of the Chinese race, and its subsequent career of
+inactivity. Meanwhile the youthful nurse, in blissful ignorance of
+the evidence which her present precocity affords against her future
+possibilities, pursues her sports with intermittent attention to her
+charge, whose poor little head lolls about, now on one side and now
+on the other, in a most distressingly loose manner, an uninterested
+spectator of the proceedings.
+
+As soon as the babe gets a trifle bigger he ceases to be ministered
+to and begins his long course of ministering to others. His home life
+consists of attentive subordination. The relation his obedience bears
+to that of children elsewhere is paralleled perhaps sufficiently by
+the comparative importance attached to precepts on the subject in the
+respective moral codes. The commandment "honor thy father" forms a tithe
+of the Mosaic law, while the same injunction constitutes at least one
+half of the Confucian precepts. To the Chinese child all the parental
+commands are not simply law to the letter, they are to be anticipated
+in the spirit. To do what he is told is but the merest fraction of his
+duty; theoretically his only thought is how to serve his sire. The pious
+Aeneas escaping from Troy exemplifies his conduct when it comes to
+a question of domestic precedence,--whose first care, it will be
+remembered, was for his father, his next for his son, and his last for
+his wife. He lost his wife, it may be noted in passing. Filial piety
+is the greatest of Chinese virtues. Indeed, an undutiful son is
+a monstrosity, a case of moral deformity. It could now hardly be
+otherwise. For a father sums up in propria persona a whole pedigree of
+patriarchs whose superimposed weight of authority is practically divine.
+This condition of servitude is never outgrown by the individual, as it
+has never been outgrown by the race.
+
+Our boy now begins to go to school; to a day school, it need hardly be
+specified, for a boarding school would be entirely out of keeping with
+the family life. Here, he is given the "Trimetrical Classic" to start
+on, that he may learn the characters by heart, picking up incidentally
+what ideas he may. This book is followed by the "Century of Surnames," a
+catalogue of all the clan names in China, studied like the last for the
+sake of the characters, although the suggestion of the importance of the
+family contained in it is probably not lost upon his youthful mind. Next
+comes the "Thousand Character Classic," a wonderful epic as a feat of
+skill, for of the thousand characters which it contains not a single
+one is repeated, an absence of tautology not properly appreciated by the
+enforced reader. Reminiscences of our own school days vividly depict the
+consequent disgust, instead of admiration, of the boy. Three more books
+succeed these first volumes, differing from one another in form, but
+in substance singularly alike, treating, as they all do, of history
+and ethics combined. For tales and morals are inseparably associated by
+pious antiquity. Indeed, the past would seem to have lived with special
+reference to the edification of the future. Chinamen were abnormally
+virtuous in those golden days, barring the few unfortunates whom fate
+needed as warning examples of depravity for succeeding ages. Except
+for the fact that instruction as to a future life forms no part of
+the curriculum, a far-eastern education may be said to consist of
+Sunday-school every day in the week. For no occasion is lost by the
+erudite authors, even in the most worldly portions of their work,
+for preaching a slight homily on the subject in hand. The dictum of
+Dionysius of Halicarnassus that "history is philosophy teaching by
+example" would seem there to have become modified into "history is
+filiosophy teaching by example." For in the instructive anecdotes every
+other form of merit is depicted as second to that of being a dutiful
+son. To the practice of that supreme virtue all other considerations are
+sacrificed. The student's aim is thus kept single. At every turn of the
+leaves, paragons of filial piety shame the youthful reader to the pitch
+of emulation by the epitaphic records of their deeds. Portraits of the
+past, possibly colored, present that estimable trait in so exalted
+a type that to any less filial a people they would simply deter
+competition. Yet the boy implicitly believes and no doubt resolves to
+rival what he reads. A specimen or two will amply suggest the rest. In
+one tale the hero is held up to the unqualified admiration of posterity
+for having starved to death his son, in an extreme case of family
+destitution, for the sake of providing food enough for his aged father.
+In another he unhesitatingly divorces his wife for having dared to poke
+fun, in the shape of bodkins, at some wooden effigies of his parents
+which he had had set up in the house for daily devotional contemplation.
+Finally another paragon actually sells himself in perpetuity as a slave
+that he may thus procure the wherewithal to bury with due honor his
+anything but worthy progenitor, who had first cheated his neighbors and
+then squandered his ill-gotten gains in riotous living. Of these tales,
+as of certain questionable novels in a slightly different line, the
+eventual moral is considered quite competent to redeem the general
+immorality of the plot.
+
+Along such a curriculum the youthful Chinaman is made to run. A very
+similar system prevails in Japan, the difference between the two
+consisting in quantity rather than quality. The books in the two cases
+are much the same, and the amount read differs surprisingly little when
+we consider that in the one case it is his own classics the student is
+reading, in the other the Chinaman's.
+
+If he belong to the middle class, as soon as his schooling is over he is
+set to learn his father's trade. To undertake to learn any trade but his
+father's would strike the family as simply preposterous. Why should
+he adopt another line of business? And, if he did, what other business
+should he adopt? Is his father's occupation not already there, a part
+of the existing order of things; and is he not the son of his father and
+heir therefore of the paternal skill? Not that such inherited aptness is
+recognized scientifically; it is simply taken for granted instinctively.
+It is but a halfhearted intuition, however, for the possibility of an
+inheritance from the mother's side is as out of the question as if her
+severance from her own family had an ex post facto effect. As for
+his individual predilection in the matter, nature has considerately
+conformed to custom by giving him none. He becomes a cabinet-maker,
+for instance, because his ancestors always have been cabinet-makers. He
+inherits the family business as a necessary part of the family name. He
+is born to his trade, not naturally selected because of his fitness for
+it. But he usually is amply qualified for the position, for generations
+of practice, if only on one side of the house, accumulate a vast deal
+of technical skill. The result of this system of clan guilds in all
+branches of industry is sufficiently noticeable. The almost infinite
+superiority of Japanese artisans over their European fellow-craftsmen
+is world-known. On the other hand the tendency of the occupation in the
+abstract to swallow up the individual in the concrete is as evident to
+theory as it is patent in practice. Eventually the man is lost in the
+manner. The very names of trades express the fact. The Japanese word for
+cabinet-maker, for example, means literally cutting-thing-house, and
+is now applied as distinctively to the man as to his shop. Nominally as
+well as practically the youthful Japanese artisan makes his introduction
+to the world, much after the manner of the hero of Lecocq's comic opera,
+the son of the house of Marasquin et Cie.
+
+If instead of belonging to the lower middle class our typical youth be
+born of bluer blood, or if he be filled with the same desires as if he
+were so descended, he becomes a student. Having failed to discover in
+the school-room the futility of his country's self-vaunted learning, he
+proceeds to devote his life to its pursuit. With an application which
+is eminently praiseworthy, even if its object be not, he sets to work to
+steep himself in the classics till he can perceive no merit in anything
+else. As might be suspected, he ends by discovering in the sayings
+of the past more meaning than the simple past ever dreamed of putting
+there. He becomes more Confucian than Confucius. Indeed, it is fortunate
+for the reputation of the sage that he cannot return to earth, for he
+might disagree to his detriment with his own commentators.
+
+Such is the state of things in China and Korea. Learning, however,
+is not dependent solely on individual interest for its wonderfully
+flourishing condition in the Middle Kingdom, for the government abets
+the practice to its utmost. It is itself the supreme sanction, for its
+posts are the prizes of proficiency. Through the study of the classics
+lies the only entrance to political power. To become a mandarin one must
+have passed a series of competitive examinations on these very subjects,
+and competition in this impersonal field is most keen. For while popular
+enthusiasm for philosophy for philosophy's sake might, among any people,
+eventually show symptoms of fatigue, it is not likely to flag where the
+outcome of it is so substantial. Erudition carries there all earthly
+emoluments in its train. For the man who can write the most scholastic
+essay on the classics is forthwith permitted to amass much honor and
+more wealth by wronging his less accomplished fellow-citizens. China
+is a student's paradise where the possession of learning is instantly
+convertible into unlimited pelf.
+
+In Japan the study of the classics was never pursued professionally.
+It was, however, prosecuted with much zeal en amateur. The Chinese
+bureaucratic system has been wanting. For in spite of her students,
+until within thirty years Japan slumbered still in the Knight-time of
+the Middle Ages, and so long as a man carried about with him continually
+two beautiful swords he felt it incumbent upon him to use them. The
+happy days of knight-errantry have passed. These same cavaliers
+of Samurai are now thankful to police the streets in spectacles
+necessitated by the too diligent study of German text, and arrest chance
+disturbers of the public peace for a miserably small salary per month.
+
+Our youth has now reached the flowering season of life, that brief
+May time when the whole world takes on the rose-tint, and when by all
+dramatic laws he ought to fall in love. He does nothing of the kind.
+Sad to say, he is a stranger to the feeling. Love, as we understand the
+word, is a thing unknown to the Far East; fortunately, indeed, for the
+possession there of the tender passion would be worse than useless. Its
+indulgence would work no end of disturbance to the community at large,
+beside entailing much misery upon its individual victim. Its exercise
+would probably be classed with kleptomania and other like excesses of
+purely personal consideration. The community could never permit the
+practice, for it strikes at the very root of their whole social system.
+
+The immense loss in happiness to these people in consequence of the
+omission by the too parsimonious Fates of that thread, which, with us,
+spins the whole of woman's web of life, and at least weaves the warp of
+man's, is but incidental to the present subject; the effect of the loss
+upon the individuality of the person himself is what concerns us now.
+
+If there is one moment in a man's life when his interest for the world
+at large pales before the engrossing character of his own emotions, it
+is assuredly when that man first falls in love. Then, if never before,
+the world within excludes the world without. For of all our human
+passions none is so isolating as the tenderest. To shut that one other
+being in, we must of necessity shut all the rest of mankind out; and we
+do so with a reckless trust in our own self-sufficiency which has about
+it a touch of the sublime. The other millions are as though they were
+not, and we two are alone in the earth, which suddenly seems to have
+grown unprecedentedly beautiful. Indeed, it only needs such judicious
+depopulation to make of any spot an Eden. Perhaps the early Jewish
+myth-makers had some such thought in mind when they wrote their idyl of
+the cosmogony. The human traits are true to-day. Then at last our souls
+throw aside their conventional wrappings to stand revealed as they
+really are. Certain of comprehension, the thoughts we have never dared
+breathe to any one before, find a tongue for her who seems fore-destined
+to understand. The long-closed floodgates of feeling are thrown wide,
+and our personality, pent up from the time of its inception for very
+mistrust, sweeps forth in one uncontrollable rush. For then the most
+reticent becomes confiding; the most self-contained expands. Then every
+detail of our past lives assumes an importance which even we had not
+divined. To her we tell them all,--our boyish beliefs, our youthful
+fancies, the foolish with the fine, the witty with the wise, the little
+with the great. Nothing then seems quite unworthy, as nothing seems
+quite worthy enough. Flowers and weeds that we plucked upon our pathway,
+we heap them in her lap, certain that even the poorest will not be
+tossed aside. Small wonder that we bring as many as we may when she
+bends her head so lovingly to each.
+
+As our past rises in reminiscence with all its oldtime reality, no less
+clearly does our future stand out to us in mirage. What we would be
+seems as realizable as what we were. Seen by another beside ourselves,
+our castles in the air take on something of the substance of
+stereoscopic sight. Our airiest fancies seem solid facts for their
+reality to her, and gilded by lovelight, they glitter and sparkle like
+a true palace of the East. For once all is possible; nothing lies beyond
+our reach. And as we talk, and she listens, we two seem to be floating
+off into an empyrean of our own like the summer clouds above our heads,
+as they sail dreamily on into the far-away depths of the unfathomable
+sky.
+
+It would be more than mortal not to believe in ourselves when another
+believes so absolutely in us. Our most secret thoughts are no longer
+things to be ashamed of, for she has sanctioned them. Whatever doubt may
+have shadowed us as to our own imaginings disappears before the smile
+of her appreciation. That her appreciation may be prejudiced is not a
+possibility we think of then. She understands us, or seems to do so to
+our own better understanding of ourselves. Happy the man who is thus
+understood! Happy even he who imagines that he is, because of her eager
+wish to comprehend; fortunate, indeed, if in this one respect he never
+comes to see too clearly.
+
+No such blissful infatuation falls to the lot of the Far Oriental.
+He never is the dupe of his own desire, the willing victim of his
+self-illusion. He is never tempted to reveal himself, and by thus
+revealing, realize. No loving appreciation urges him on toward the
+attainment of his own ideal. That incitement to be what he would seem to
+be, to become what she deems becoming, he fails to feel. Custom has so
+far fettered fancy that even the wish to communicate has vanished. He
+has now nothing to tell; she needs no ear to hear. For she is not his
+love; she is only his wife,--what is left of a romance when the romance
+is left out. Worse still, she never was anything else. He has not so
+much as a memory of her, for he did not marry her for love; he may not
+love of his own accord, nor for the matter of that does he wish to do
+so. If by some mischance he should so far forget to forget himself, it
+were much better for him had he not done so, for the choice of a bride
+is not his, nor of a bridegroom hers. Marriage to a Far Oriental is
+the most important mercantile transaction of his whole life. It is,
+therefore, far too weighty a matter to be entrusted to his youthful
+indiscretion; for although the person herself is of lamentably little
+account in the bargain, the character of her worldly circumstances is
+most material to it. So she is contracted for with the same care one
+would exercise in the choice of any staple business commodity. The
+particular sample is not vital to the trade, but the grade of goods is.
+She is selected much as the bride of the Vicar of Wakefield chose her
+wedding-gown, only that the one was at least cut to suit, while the
+other is not. It is certainly easier, if less fitting, to get a wife as
+some people do clothes, not to their own order, but ready made; all the
+more reason when the bargain is for one's son, not one's self. So the
+Far East, which looks at the thing from a strictly paternal standpoint
+and ignores such trifles as personal preferences, takes its boy to the
+broker's and fits him out. That the object of such parental care does
+not end by murdering his unfortunate spouse or making way with himself
+suggests how dead already is that individuality which we deem to be of
+the very essence of the thing.
+
+Marriage is thus a species of investment contracted by the existing
+family for the sake of the prospective one, the actual participants
+being only lay figures in the affair. Sometimes the father decides the
+matter himself; sometimes he or the relative who stands in loco parentis
+calls for a plebiscit on the subject; for such an extension of the
+suffrage has gradually crept even into patriarchal institutions. The
+family then assemble, sit in solemn conclave on the question, and
+decide it by vote. Of course the interested parties are not asked their
+opinion, as it might be prejudiced. The result of the conference must
+be highly gratifying. To have one's wife chosen for one by vote of one's
+relatives cannot but be satisfactory--to the electors. The outcome of
+this ballot, like that of universal suffrage elsewhere, is at the best
+unobjectionable mediocrity. Somehow such a result does not seem quite
+to fulfil one's ideal of a wife. It is true that the upper classes
+of impersonal France practise this method of marital selection, their
+conseils de famille furnishing in some sort a parallel. But, as is well
+known, matrimony among these same upper classes is largely form devoid
+of substance. It begins impressively with a dual ceremony, the civil
+contract, which amounts to a contract of civility between the parties,
+and a religious rite to render the same perpetual, and there it is too
+apt to end.
+
+So much for the immediate influence on the man; the eventual effect on
+the race remains to be considered. Now, if the first result be anything,
+the second must in the end be everything. For however trifling it be in
+the individual instance, it goes on accumulating with each successive
+generation, like compound interest. The choosing of a wife by family
+suffrage is not simply an exponent of the impersonal state of things, it
+is a power toward bringing such a state of things about. A hermit seldom
+develops to his full possibilities, and the domestic variety is no
+exception to the rule. A man who is linked to some one that toward him
+remains a cipher lacks surroundings inciting to psychological growth,
+nor is he more favorably circumstanced because all his ancestors have
+been similarly circumscribed.
+
+As if to make assurance doubly sure, natural selection here steps in
+to further the process. To prove this with all the rigidity of
+demonstration desirable is in the present state of erotics beyond our
+power. Until our family trees give us something more than mere skeletons
+of dead branches, we must perforce continue ignorant of the science
+of grafts. For the nonce we must be content to generalize from our own
+premises, only rising above them sufficiently to get a bird's-eye view
+of our neighbor's estates. Such a survey has at least one advantage: the
+whole field of view appears perfectly plain.
+
+Surveying the subject, then, from this ego-altruistic position, we can
+perceive why matrimony, as we practise it, should result in increasing
+the personality of our race: for the reason namely that psychical
+similarity determines the selection. At first sight, indeed, such
+a natural affinity would seem to have little or nothing to do with
+marriage. As far as outsiders are capable of judging, unlikes appear to
+fancy one another quite as gratuitously as do likes. Connubial couples
+are often anything but twin souls. Yet our own dual use of the word
+"like" bears historic witness to the contrary. For in this expression
+we have a record from early Gothic times that men liked others for being
+like themselves. Since then, our feelings have not changed materially,
+although our mode of showing them is slightly less intense. In those
+simple days stranger and enemy were synonymous terms, and their
+objects were received in a corresponding spirit. In our present refined
+civilization we hurl epithets instead of spears, and content ourselves
+with branding as heterodox the opinions of another which do not happen
+to coincide with our own. The instinct of self-development naturally
+begets this self-sided view. We insensibly find those persons congenial
+whose ideas resemble ours, and gravitate to them, as leaves on a pond do
+to one another, nearer and nearer till they touch. Is it likely, then,
+that in the most important case of all the rule should suddenly cease
+to hold? Is it to be presumed that even Socrates chose Xantippe for her
+remarkable contrariety to himself?
+
+Mere physical attraction is another matter. Corporeally considered, men
+not infrequently fall in love with their opposites, the phenomenally
+tall with the painfully short, the unnecessarily stout with the
+distressingly slender. But even such inartistic juxtapositions are much
+less common than we are apt at times to think. For it must never be
+forgotten that the exceptional character of the phenomena renders them
+conspicuous, the customary more consorted combinations failing to excite
+attention.
+
+Besides, there exists a reason for physical incongruity which does not
+hold psychically. Nature sanctions the one while she discountenances the
+other. Instead of the forethought she once bestowed upon the body, it
+receives at her hands now but the scantiest attention. Its development
+has ceased to be an object with her. For some time past almost all her
+care has been devoted to the evolution of the soul. The consequence is
+that physically man is much less specialized than many other animals.
+In other words, he is bodily less advanced in the race for competitive
+extermination. He belongs to an antiquated, inefficient type of mammal.
+His organism is still of the jack-of-all-trades pattern, such as
+prevailed generally in the more youthful stages of organic life--one not
+specially suited to any particular pursuit. Were it not for his cerebral
+convolutions he could not compete for an instant in the struggle for
+existence, and even the monkey would reign in his stead. But brain
+is more effective than biceps, and a being who can kill his opponent
+farther off than he can see him evidently needs no great excellence of
+body to survive his foe.
+
+The field of competition has thus been transferred from matter to mind,
+but the fight has lost none of its keenness in consequence. With the
+same zeal with which advantageous anatomical variations were seized upon
+and perpetuated, psychical ones are now grasped and rendered hereditary.
+Now if opposites were to fancy and wed one another, such fortunate
+improvements would soon be lost. They would be scattered over the
+community at large even it they escaped entire neutralization. To
+prevent so disastrous a result nature implants a desire for resemblance,
+which desire man instinctively acts upon.
+
+Complete compatibility of temperament is of course a thing not to be
+expected nor indeed to be desired, since it would defeat its own end
+by allowing no room for variation. A fairly broad basis of agreement,
+however, exists even when least suspected. This common ground of content
+consists of those qualities held to be most essential by the individuals
+concerned, although not necessarily so appearing to other people.
+Sometimes, indeed, these qualities are still in the larvae state of
+desires. They are none the less potent upon the man's personality on
+that account, for the wish is always father to its own fulfilment.
+
+The want of conjugal resemblance not only works mediately on the
+child, it works mutually on the parents; for companionship, as is well
+recognized, tends to similarity. Now companionship is the last thing to
+be looked for in a far-eastern couple. Where custom requires a wife to
+follow dutifully in the wake of her husband, whenever the two go out
+together, there is small opportunity for intercourse by the way, even
+were there the slightest inclination to it, which there is not.
+The appearance of the pair on an excursion is a walking satire on
+sociability, for the comicality of the connection is quite unperceived
+by the performers. In the privacy of the domestic circle the separation,
+if less humorous, is no less complete. Each lives in a world of his own,
+largely separate in fact in China and Korea, and none the less in fancy
+in Japan. On the continent a friend of the husband would see little or
+nothing of the wife, and even in Japan he would meet her much as we meet
+an upper servant in a friend's house. Such a semi-attached relationship
+does not conduce to much mutual understanding.
+
+The remainder of our hero's uneventful existence calls for no particular
+comment. As soon as he has children borne him he is raised ipso facto
+from the position of a common soldier to that of a subordinate officer
+in the family ranks. But his opportunities for the expression of
+individuality are not one whit increased. He has simply advanced a peg
+in a regular hierarchy of subjection. From being looked after himself
+he proceeds to look after others. Such is the extent of the change.
+Even should he chance to be the eldest son of the eldest son, and
+thus eventually end by becoming the head of the family, he cannot
+consistently consider himself. There is absolutely no place in his
+social cosmos for so particular a thing as the ego.
+
+With a certain grim humor suggestive of metaphysics, it may be said of
+his whole life that it is nothing but a relative affair after all.
+
+
+
+Chapter 3. Adoption.
+
+But one may go a step farther in this matter of the family, and by so
+doing fare still worse with respect to individuality. There are certain
+customs in vogue among these peoples which would seem to indicate that
+even so generic a thing as the family is too personal to serve them for
+ultimate social atom, and that in fact it is only the idea of the family
+that is really important, a case of abstraction of an abstract. These
+suggestive customs are the far-eastern practices of adoption and
+abdication.
+
+Adoption, with us, is a kind of domestic luxury, akin to the keeping
+of any other pets, such as lap-dogs and canaries. It is a species of
+self-indulgence which those who can afford it give themselves when
+fortune has proved unpropitious, an artificial method of counteracting
+the inequalities of fate. That such is the plain unglamoured view of the
+procedure is shown by the age at which the object is adopted. Usually
+the future son or daughter enters the adoptive household as an infant,
+intentionally so on the part of the would-be parents. His ignorance of
+a previous relationship largely increases his relative value; for the
+possibility of his making comparisons in his own mind between a former
+state of existence and the present one unfavorable to the latter is
+not pleasant for the adopters to contemplate. He is therefore acquired
+young. The amusement derived from his company is thus seen to be
+distinctly paramount to all other considerations. No one cares so
+heartily to own a dog which has been the property of another; a fortiori
+of a child. It is clearly, then, not as a necessity that the babe is
+adopted. If such were the case, if like the ancient Romans all a man
+wanted was the continuance of the family line, he would naturally wait
+until the last practicable moment; for he would thus save both care and
+expense. In the Far East adoption is quite a different affair. There
+it is a genealogical necessity--like having a father or mother. It is,
+indeed, of almost more importance. For the great desideratum to these
+peoples is not ancestors but descendants. Pedigrees in the land of
+the universal opposite are not matters of bequest but of posthumous
+reversion. A man is not beholden to the past, he looks forward to the
+future for inherited honors. No fame attaches to him for having had an
+illustrious grandfather. On the contrary, it is the illustrious grandson
+who reflects some of his own greatness back upon his grandfather. If
+a man therefore fail to attain eminence himself, he always has another
+chance in his descendants; for he will of necessity be ennobled through
+the merits of those who succeed him. Such is the immemorial law of the
+land. Fame is retroactive. This admirable system has only one objection:
+it is posthumous in its effect. An ambitious man who unfortunately lacks
+ability himself has to wait too long for vicarious recognition. The
+objection is like that incident to the making of a country seat out of
+a treeless plain by planting the same with saplings. About the time the
+trees begin to be worth having the proprietary landscape-gardener dies
+of old age. However, as custom permits a Far Oriental no ancestral
+growth of timber, he is obliged to lay the seeds of his own family
+trees. Natural offspring are on the whole easier to get, and more
+satisfactory when got. Hence the haste with which these peoples rush
+into matrimony. If in despite of his precipitation fate perversely
+refuse to grant him children, he must endeavor to make good the omission
+by artificial means. He proceeds to adopt somebody. True to instinct, he
+chooses from preference a collateral relative. In some far-eastern lands
+he must so restrict himself by law. In Korea, for instance, he can only
+adopt an agnate and one of a lower generation than his own. But in
+Japan his choice is not so limited. In so praiseworthy an act as the
+perpetuation of his unimportant family line, it is deemed unwise in that
+progressive land to hinder him from unconsciously bettering it by the
+way. He is consequently permitted to adopt anybody. As people are by no
+means averse to being adopted, the power to adopt whom he will gives him
+more voice in the matter of his unnatural offspring than he ever had in
+the selection of a more natural one.
+
+The adopted changes his name, of course, to take that of the family he
+enters. As he is very frequently grown up and extensively known at the
+time the adoption takes place, his change of cognomen occasions at first
+some slight confusion among his acquaintance. This would be no worse,
+however, than the change with us from the maid to the matron, and
+intercourse would soon proceed smoothly again if people would only rest
+content with one such domestic migration. But they do not. The fatal
+facility of the process tempts them to repeat it. The result is
+bewildering: a people as nomadic now in the property of their persons as
+their forefathers were in their real estate. A man adopts another to-day
+to unadopt him to-morrow and replace him by somebody else the day after.
+So profoundly unimportant to them is their social identity, that they
+bandy it about with almost farcical freedom. Perhaps it is fitting
+that there should be some slight preparation in this world for a future
+transmigration of souls. Still one fails to conceive that the practice
+can be devoid of disadvantages even to its beneficiaries. To foreigners
+it proves disastrously perplexing. For if you chance upon a man whom you
+have not met for some time, you can never be quite sure how to accost
+him. If you begin, "Well met, Green, how goes it?" as likely as not he
+replies, "Finely. But I am no longer Green; I have become Brown. I was
+adopted last month by my maternal grandfather." You of course apologize
+for your unfortunate mistake, carefully note his change of hue for a
+future occasion, and behold, on meeting him the next time you find he
+has turned Black. Such a chameleon-like cognomen is very unsettling to
+your idea of his identity, and can hardly prove reassuring to his own.
+The only persons who reap any benefit from the doubt are those, with us
+unhappy, individuals who possess the futile faculty of remembering faces
+without recalling their accompanying names.
+
+Girls, as a rule, are not adopted, being valueless genealogically. A
+niece or grandniece to whom one has taken a great fancy might of course
+be adopted there as elsewhere, but it would be distinctly out of the
+every-day run, as she could never be included in the household on strict
+business principles.
+
+The practice of adopting is not confined to childless couples. Others
+may find themselves in quite as unfortunate a predicament. A man may
+be the father of a large and thriving family and yet be as destitute
+patriarchally as if he had not a child to his name. His offspring may
+be of the wrong sex; they may all be girls. In this untoward event
+the father has something more on his hands than merely a houseful of
+daughters to dispose of. In addition to securing sons-in-law, he must,
+unless he would have his ancestral line become extinct, provide
+himself with a son. The simplest procedure in such a case is to combine
+relationships in a single individual, and the most self-evident person
+to select for the dual capacity is the husband of the eldest daughter.
+This is the course pursued. Some worthy young man is secured as spouse
+for the senior sister; he is at the same time formally taken in as a son
+by the family whose cognomen he assumes, and eventually becomes the head
+of the house. Strange to say, this vista of gradually unfolding honors
+does not seem to prove inviting. Perhaps the new-comer objects to
+marrying the whole family, a prejudice not without parallel elsewhere.
+Certainly the opportunity is not appreciated. Indeed, to "go out as a
+son-in-law," as the Japanese idiom hath it, is considered demeaning
+to the matrimonial domestic. Like other household help he wears too
+patently the badge of servitude. "If you have three koku of rice to your
+name, don't do it," is the advice of the local proverb--a proverb whose
+warning against marrying for money is the more suggestive for being
+launched in a land where marrying for love is beyond the pale of
+respectability. To barter one's name in this mercenary manner is looked
+upon as derogatory to one's self-respect, although, as we have seen, to
+part with it for any less direct remuneration is not attended with the
+slightest loss of personal prestige. As practically the unfortunate had
+none to lose in either event, it would seem to be a case of taking away
+from a man that which he hath not. So contumacious a thing is custom.
+It is indeed lucky that popular prejudice interposes some limit to this
+fictitious method of acquiring children. A trifling predilection for the
+real thing in sonships is absolutely vital, even to the continuance of
+the artificial variety. For if one generation ever went in exclusively
+for adoption, there would be no subsequent generation to adopt.
+
+As it to give the finishing touch to so conventional a system of
+society, a man can leave it under certain circumstances with even
+greater ease than he entered it. He can become as good as dead without
+the necessity of making way with himself. Theoretically, he can cease to
+live while still practically existing; for it is always open to the head
+of a family to abdicate.
+
+The word abdicate has to our ears a certain regal sound. We
+instinctively associate the act with a king. Even the more democratic
+expression resign suggests at once an office of public or quasi public
+character. To talk of abdicating one's private relationships sounds
+absurd; one might as well talk of electing his parents, it would seem to
+us. Such misunderstanding of far-eastern social possibilities comes from
+our having indulged in digressions from our more simple nomadic habits.
+If in imagination we will return to our ancestral muttons and the then
+existing order of things, the idea will not strike us as so strange; for
+in those early bucolic days every father was a king. Family economics
+were the only political questions in existence then. The clan was the
+unit. Domestic disputes were state disturbances, and clan-claims the
+only kind of international quarrels. The patriarch was both father to
+his people and king.
+
+As time widened the family circle it eventually reached a point where
+cohesion ceased to be possible. The centrifugal tendency could no
+longer be controlled by the centripetal force. It split up into separate
+bodies, each of them a family by itself. In their turn these again
+divided, and so the process went on. This principle has worked
+universally, the only difference in its action among different races
+being the greater or less degree of the evolving motion. With us the
+social system has been turning more and more rapidly with time. In the
+Far East its force, instead of increasing, would seem to have decreased,
+enabling the nebula of its original condition to keep together as a
+single mass, so that to-day a whole nation, resembling a nebula indeed
+in homogeneity, is swayed by a single patriarchal principle. Here, on
+the contrary, so rapid has the motion become that even brethren find
+themselves scattered to the four winds.
+
+An Occidental father and an Oriental head of a family are no longer
+really correlative terms. The latter more closely resembles a king
+in his duties, responsibilities, and functions generally. Now, in the
+Middle Ages in Europe, when a king grew tired of affairs of state, he
+abdicated. So in the Far East, when the head of a family has had enough
+of active life, he abdicates, and his eldest son reigns in his stead.
+
+From that moment he ceases to belong to the body politic in any active
+sense. Not that he is no longer a member of society nor unamenable to
+its general laws, but that he has become a respectable declasse, as it
+were. He has entered, so to speak, the social nirvana, a not unfitting
+first step, as he regards it, toward entering the eventual nirvana
+beyond. Such abdication now takes place without particular cause. After
+a certain time of life, and long before a man grows old, it is the
+fashion thus to make one's bow.
+
+
+
+Chapter 4. Language.
+
+A man's personal equation, as astronomers call the effect of his
+individuality, is kin, for all its complexity, to those simple
+algebraical problems which so puzzled us at school. To solve either we
+must begin by knowing the values of the constants that enter into its
+expression. Upon the a b c's of the one, as upon those of the other,
+depend the possibilities of the individual x.
+
+Now the constants in any man's equation are the qualities that he has
+inherited from the past. What a man does follows from what he is, which
+in turn is mostly dependent upon what his ancestors have been; and
+of all the links in the long chain of mind-evolution, few are more
+important and more suggestive than language. Actions may at the moment
+speak louder than words, but methods of expression have as tell-tale a
+tongue for bygone times as ways of doing things.
+
+If it should ever fall to my lot to have to settle that exceedingly
+vexed Eastern question,--not the emancipation of ancient Greece from the
+bondage of the modern Turk, but the emancipation of the modern college
+student from the bond of ancient Greek,--I should propose, as a solution
+of the dilemma, the addition of a course in Japanese to the college list
+of required studies. It might look, I admit, like begging the question
+for the sake of giving its answer, but the answer, I think, would
+justify itself.
+
+It is from no desire to parade a fresh hobby-horse upon the university
+curriculum that I offer the suggestion, but because I believe that a
+study of the Japanese language would prove the most valuable of ponies
+in the academic pursuit of philology. In the matter of literature,
+indeed, we should not be adding very much to our existing store, but we
+should gain an insight into the genesis of speech that would put us
+at least one step nearer to being present at the beginnings of human
+conversation. As it is now, our linguistic learning is with most of us
+limited to a knowledge of Aryan tongues, and in consequence we not only
+fall into the mistake of thinking our way the only way, which is bad
+enough, but, what is far worse, by not perceiving the other possible
+paths we quite fail to appreciate the advantages or disadvantages of
+following our own. We are the blind votaries of a species of ancestral
+language-worship, which, with all its erudition, tends to narrow our
+linguistic scope. A study of Japanese would free us from the fetters of
+any such family infatuation. The inviolable rules and regulations of our
+mother-tongue would be found to be of relative application only. For we
+should discover that speech is a much less categorical matter than
+we had been led to suppose. We should actually come to doubt
+the fundamental necessity of some of our most sacred grammatical
+constructions; and even our reverenced Latin grammars would lose that
+air of awful absoluteness which so impressed us in boyhood.
+
+An encouraging estimate of a certain missionary puts the amount of
+study needed by the Western student for the learning of Japanese as
+sufficient, if expended nearer home, to equip him with any three modern
+European languages. It is certainly true that a completely strange
+vocabulary, an utter inversion of grammar, and an elaborate system of
+honorifics combine to render its acquisition anything but easy. In its
+fundamental principles, however, it is alluringly simple.
+
+In the first place, the Japanese language is pleasingly destitute of
+personal pronouns. Not only is the obnoxious "I" conspicuous only by
+its absence; the objectionable antagonistic "you" is also entirely
+suppressed, while the intrusive "he" is evidently too much of a third
+person to be wanted. Such invidious distinctions of identity apparently
+never thrust their presence upon the simple early Tartar minds. I,
+you, and he, not being differences due to nature, demanded, to their
+thinking, no recognition of man.
+
+There is about this vagueness of expression a freedom not without its
+charm. It is certainly delightful to be able to speak of yourself as if
+you were somebody else, choosing mentally for the occasion any one
+you may happen to fancy, or, it you prefer, the possibility of soaring
+boldly forth into the realms of the unconditioned.
+
+To us, at first sight, however, such a lack of specification appears
+wofully incompatible with any intelligible transmission of ideas. So
+communistic a want of discrimination between the meum and the tuum--to
+say nothing of the claims of a possible third party--would seem to be
+as fatal to the interchange of thoughts as it proves destructive to the
+trafficking in commodities. Such, nevertheless, is not the result. On
+the contrary, Japanese is as easy and as certain of comprehension as is
+English. On ninety occasions out of a hundred, the context at once makes
+clear the person meant.
+
+In the very few really ambiguous cases, or those in which, for the sake
+of emphasis, a pronoun is wanted, certain consecrated expressions are
+introduced for the purpose. For eventually the more complex social
+relations of increasing civilization compelled some sort of distant
+recognition. Accordingly, compromises with objectionable personality
+were effected by circumlocutions promoted to a pronoun's office,
+becoming thus pro-pronouns, as it were. Very noncommittal expressions
+they are, most of them, such as: "the augustness," meaning you; "that
+honorable side," or "that corner," denoting some third person, the exact
+term employed in any given instance scrupulously betokening the relative
+respect in which the individual spoken of is held; while with a candor,
+an indefiniteness, or a humility worthy so polite a people, the I is
+known as "selfishness," or "a certain person," or "the clumsy one."
+
+Pronominal adjectives are manufactured in the same way. "The stupid
+father," "the awkward son," "the broken-down firm," are "mine." Were
+they "yours," they would instantly become "the august, venerable
+father," "the honorable son," "the exalted firm." [1]
+
+Even these lame substitutes for pronouns are paraded as sparingly as
+possible. To the Western student, who brings to the subject a brain
+throbbing with personality, hunting in a Japanese sentence for personal
+references is dishearteningly like "searching in the dark for a black
+hat which is n't there;" for the brevet pronouns are commonly not on
+duty. To employ them with the reckless prodigality that characterizes
+our conversation would strike the Tartar mind like interspersing his
+talk with unmeaning italics. He would regard such discourse much as we
+do those effusive epistles of a certain type of young woman to her
+most intimate girl friends, in which every other word is emphatically
+underlined.
+
+For the most part, the absolutely necessary personal references are
+introduced by honorifics; that is, by honorary or humble expressions.
+Such is a portion of the latter's duty. They do a great deal of
+unnecessary work besides.
+
+These honorifics are, taken as a whole, one of the most interesting
+peculiarities of Japanese, as also of Korean, just as, taken in detail,
+they are one of its most dangerous pitfalls. For silence is indeed
+golden compared with the chagrin of discovering that a speech which you
+had meant for a compliment was, in fact, an insult, or the vexation of
+learning that you have been industriously treating your servant with the
+deference due a superior,--two catastrophes sure to follow the attempts
+of even the most cautious of beginners. The language is so thoroughly
+imbued with the honorific spirit that the exposure of truth in all its
+naked simplicity is highly improper. Every idea requires to be more or
+less clothed in courtesy before it is presentable; and the garb demanded
+by etiquette is complex beyond conception. To begin with, there are
+certain preliminary particles which are simply honorific, serving no
+other purpose whatsoever. In addition to these there are for every
+action a small infinity of verbs, each sacred to a different degree
+of respect. For instance, to our verb "to give" corresponds a complete
+social scale of Japanese verbs, each conveying the idea a shade more
+politely than its predecessor; only the very lowest meaning anything
+so plebeian as simply "to give." Sets of laudatory or depreciatory
+adjectives are employed in the same way. Lastly, the word for "is,"
+which strictly means "exists," expresses this existence under three
+different forms,--in a matter-of-fact, a flowing, or an inflated style;
+the solid, liquid, and gaseous states of conversation, so to speak, to
+suit the person addressed. But three forms being far too few for the
+needs of so elaborate a politeness, these are supplemented by many
+interpolated grades.
+
+Terms of respect are applied not only to those mortals who are held in
+estimation higher than their fellows, but to all men indiscriminately as
+well. The grammatical attitude of the individual toward the speaker is
+of as much importance as his social standing, I being beneath contempt,
+and you above criticism.
+
+Honorifics are used not only on all possible occasions for courtesy, but
+at times, it would seem, upon impossible ones; for in some instances the
+most subtle diagnosis fails to reveal in them a relevancy to anybody.
+That the commonest objects should bear titles because of their
+connection with some particular person is comprehensible, but what
+excuse can be made for a phrase like the following, "It respectfully
+does that the august seat exists," all of which simply means "is," and
+may be applied to anything, being the common word--in Japanese it is all
+one word now--for that apparently simple idea. It would seem a sad
+waste of valuable material. The real reason why so much distinguished
+consideration is shown the article in question lies in the fact that
+it is treated as existing with reference to the person addressed, and
+therefore becomes ipso facto august.
+
+Here is a still subtler example. You are, we will suppose, at a
+tea-house, and you wish for sugar. The following almost stereotyped
+conversation is pretty sure to take place. I translate it literally,
+simply prefacing that every tea-house girl, usually in the first
+blush of youth, is generically addressed as "elder sister,"--another
+honorific, at least so considered in Japan.
+
+ You clap your hands.  (Enter tea-house maiden.)
+
+ You.  Hai, elder sister, augustly exists there sugar?
+
+ The T. H. M.  The honorable sugar, augustly is it?
+
+ You.  So, augustly.
+
+ The T. H. M. He (indescribable expression of assent).
+ (Exit tea-house maiden to fetch the sugar.)
+
+Now, the "augustlies" go almost without saying, but why is the sugar
+honorable? Simply because it is eventually going to be offered to you.
+But she would have spoken of it by precisely the same respectful title,
+if she had been obliged to inform you that there was none, in which case
+it never could have become yours. Such is politeness. We may note,
+in passing, that all her remarks and all yours, barring your initial
+question, meant absolutely nothing. She understood you perfectly from
+the first, and you knew she did; but then, if all of us were to say only
+what were necessary, the delightful art of conversation would soon be
+nothing but a science.
+
+The average Far Oriental, indeed, talks as much to no purpose as his
+Western cousin, only in his chit-chat politeness replaces personalities.
+With him, self is suppressed, and an ever-present regard for others is
+substituted in its stead.
+
+A lack of personality is, as we have seen, the occasion of this
+courtesy; it is also its cause.
+
+That politeness should be one of the most marked results of
+impersonality may appear surprising, yet a slight examination will show
+it to be a fact. Looked at a posteriori, we find that where the one
+trait exists the other is most developed, while an absence of the second
+seems to prevent the full growth of the first. This is true both in
+general and in detail. Courtesy increases, as we travel eastward round
+the world, coincidently with a decrease in the sense of self. Asia is
+more courteous than Europe, Europe than America. Particular races show
+the same concomitance of characteristics. France, the most impersonal
+nation of Europe, is at the same time the most polite.
+
+Considered a priori, the connection between the two is not far to seek.
+Impersonality, by lessening the interest in one's self, induces one
+to take an interest in others. Introspection tends to make of man a
+solitary animal, the absence of it a social one. The more impersonal
+the people, the more will the community supplant the individual in the
+popular estimation. The type becomes the interesting thing to man, as
+it always is to nature. Then, as the social desires develop, politeness,
+being the means to their enjoyment, develops also.
+
+A second omission in Japanese etymology is that of gender. That words
+should be credited with sex is a verbal anthropomorphism that would seem
+to a Japanese exquisitely grotesque, if so be that it did not strike him
+as actually immodest. For the absence of gender is simply symptomatic
+of a much more vital failing, a disregard of sex. Originally, as their
+language bears witness, the Japanese showed a childish reluctance
+to recognizing sex at all. Usually a single sexless term was held
+sufficient for a given species, and did duty collectively for both
+sexes. Only where a consideration of sex thrust itself upon them, beyond
+the possibility of evasion, did they employ for the male and the female
+distinctive expressions. The more intimate the relation of the object
+to man, the more imperative the discriminating name. Hence human beings
+possessed a fair number of such special appellatives; for a man is
+a palpably different sort of person from his grandmother, and a
+mother-in-law from a wife. But it is noteworthy that the artificial
+affinities of society were as carefully differentiated as the
+distinctions due to sex, while ancestral relationships were deemed more
+important than either.
+
+Animals, though treated individually most humanely, are vouchsafed but
+scant recognition on the score of sex. With them, both sexes share one
+common name, and commonly, indeed, this answers quite well enough. In
+those few instances where sex enters into the question in a manner not
+to be ignored, particles denoting "male" or "female" are prefixed to the
+general term. How comparatively rare is the need of such specification
+can be seen from the way in which, with us, in many species, the name of
+one sex alone does duty indifferently for both. That of the male is the
+one usually selected, as in the case of the dog or horse. If, however,
+it be the female with which man has most to do, she is allowed to bestow
+her name upon her male partner. Examples of the latter description occur
+in the use of "cows" for "cattle," and "hens" for "fowls." A Japanese
+can say only "fowl," defined, if absolutely necessary, as "he-fowl" or
+"she-fowl."
+
+Now such a slighting of one of the most potent springs of human action,
+sex, with all that the idea involves, is not due to a pronounced
+misogynism on the part of these people, but to a much more effective
+neglect, a great underlying impersonality. Indifference to woman is
+but included in a much more general indifference to mankind. The fact
+becomes all the more evident when we descend from sex to gender. That
+Father Ocean does not, in their verbal imagery, embrace Mother Earth,
+with that subtle suggestion of humanity which in Aryan speech the gender
+of the nouns hints without expressing, is not due to any lack of poesy
+in the Far Oriental speaker, but to the essential impersonality of
+his mind, embodied now in the very character of the words he uses. A
+Japanese noun is a crystallized concept, handed down unchanged from
+the childhood of the Japanese race. So primitive a conception does it
+represent that it is neither a total nor a partial symbol, but rather
+the outcome of a first vague generality. The word "man," for instance,
+means to them not one man, still less mankind, but that indefinite
+idea which struggles for embodiment in the utterance of the infant. It
+represents not a person, but a thing, a material fact quite innocent
+of gender. This early state of semi-consciousness the Japanese never
+outgrew. The world continued to present itself to their minds as a
+collection of things. Nor did their subsequent Chinese education change
+their view. Buddhism simply infused all things with the one universal
+spirit.
+
+As to inanimate objects, the idea of supposing sex where there is not
+even life is altogether too fanciful a notion for the Far Eastern mind.
+
+Impersonality first fashioned the nouns, and then the nouns, by their
+very impersonality, helped keep impersonal the thought and fettered
+fancy. All those temptings to poesy which to the Aryan imagination lie
+latent in the sex with which his forefathers humanized their words,
+never stir the Tartar nor the Chinese soul. They feel the poetry
+of nature as much as, indeed much more than, we; but it is a poetry
+unassociated with man. And this, too, curiously enough, in spite of the
+fact that to explain the cosmos the Chinamen invented, or perhaps only
+adapted, a singularly sexual philosophy. For possibly, like some other
+portions of their intellectual wealth, they stole it from India. The
+Chinese conception of the origin of the world is based on the idea of
+sex. According to their notions the earth was begotten. It is true
+that with them the cosmos started in an abstract something, which
+self-produced two great principles; but this pair once obtained, matters
+proceeded after the analogy of mankind. The two principles at work were
+themselves abstract enough to have satisfied the most unimpassioned of
+philosophers. They were simply a positive essence and a negative one,
+correlated to sunshine and shadow, but also correlated to male and
+female forces. Through their mutual action were born the earth and the
+air and the water; from these, in turn, was begotten man. The cosmical
+modus operandi was not creative nor evolutionary, but sexual. The whole
+scheme suggests an attempt to wed abstract philosophy with primitive
+concrete mythology.
+
+The same sexuality distinguishes the Japanese demonology. Here the
+physical replaces the philosophical; instead of principles we find
+allegorical personages, but they show just the same pleasing propensity
+to appear in pairs.
+
+This attributing of sexes to the cosmos is not in the least incompatible
+with an uninterested disregard of sex where it really exists. It is
+one thing to admit the fact as a general law of the universe, and quite
+another to dwell upon it as an important factor in every-day affairs.
+
+How slight is the Tartar tendency to personification can be seen from
+a glance at these same Japanese gods. They are a combination of defunct
+ancestors and deified natural phenomena. The evolving of the first half
+required little imagination, for fate furnished the material ready made;
+while in conjuring up the second moiety, the spirit-evokers showed even
+less originality. Their results were neither winsome nor sublime. The
+gods whom they created they invested with very ordinary humanity,
+the usual endowment of aboriginal deity, together with the customary
+superhuman strength. If these demigods differed from others of their
+class, it was only in being more commonplace, and in not meddling much
+with man. Even such personification of natural forces, simple enough
+to be self-suggested, quickly disappeared. The various awe-compelling
+phenomena soon ceased to have any connection with the anthropomorphic
+noumena they had begotten. For instance, the sun-goddess, we are
+informed, was one day lured out of a cavern, where she was sulking in
+consequence of the provoking behavior of her younger brother, by her
+curiosity at the sight of her own face in a mirror, ingeniously placed
+before the entrance for the purpose. But no Japanese would dream now of
+casting any such reflections, however flattering, upon the face of the
+orb of day. The sun has become not only quite sexless to him, but
+as devoid of personality as it is to any Western materialist. Lesser
+deities suffered a like unsubstantial transformation. The thunder-god,
+with his belt of drums, upon which he beats a devil's tattoo until he
+is black in the face, is no longer even indirectly associated with the
+storm. As for dryads and nymphs, the beautiful creatures never inhabited
+Eastern Asia. Anthropoid foxes and raccoons, wholly lacking in those
+engaging qualities that beget love, and through love remembrance, take
+their place. Even Benten, the naturalized Venus, who, like her Hellenic
+sister, is said to have risen from the sea, is a person quite incapable
+of inspiring a reckless infatuation.
+
+Utterly unlike was this pantheon to the pantheon of the Greeks, the
+personifying tendency of whose Aryan mind was forever peopling nature
+with half-human inhabitants. Under its quickening fancy the very clods
+grew sentient. Dumb earth awoke at the call of its desire, and the
+beings its own poesy had begotten made merry companionship for man. Then
+a change crept over the face of things. Faith began to flicker, for want
+of facts to feed its flame. Little by little the fires of devotion burnt
+themselves out. At last great Pan died. The body of the old belief
+was consumed. But though it perished, its ashes preserved its form, an
+unsubstantial presentment of the past, to crumble in a twinkling at
+the touch of science, but keeping yet to the poet's eye the lifelike
+semblance of what once had been. The dead gods still live in our
+language and our art. Even to-day the earth about us seems semiconscious
+to the soul, for the memories they have left.
+
+But with the Far Oriental the exorcising feeling was fear. He never fell
+in love with his own mythological creations, and so he never embalmed
+their memories. They were to him but explanations of facts, and had no
+claims upon his fancy. His ideal world remained as utterly impersonal as
+if it had never been born.
+
+The same impersonality reappears in the matter of number. Grammatically,
+number with them is unrecognized. There exist no such things as plural
+forms. This singularity would be only too welcome to the foreign
+student, were it not that in avoiding the frying-pan the Tartars fell
+into the fire. For what they invented in place of a plural was quite
+as difficult to memorize, and even more cumbrous to express. Instead
+of inflecting the noun and then prefixing a number, they keep the noun
+unchanged and add two numerals; thus at times actually employing more
+words to express the objects than there are objects to express. One
+of these numerals is a simple number; the other is what is known as an
+auxiliary numeral, a word as singular in form as in function. Thus, for
+instance, "two men" become amplified verbally into "man two individual,"
+or, as the Chinaman puts it, in pidgin English, "two piecey man." For in
+this respect Chinese resembles Japanese, though in very little else,
+and pidgin English is nothing but the literal translation of the
+Chinese idiom into Anglo-Saxon words. The necessity for such elaborate
+qualification arises from the excessive simplicity of the Japanese
+nouns. As we have seen, the noun is so indefinite a generality that
+simply to multiply it by a number cannot possibly produce any definite
+result. No exact counterpart of these nouns exists in English, but
+some idea of the impossibility of the process may be got from our
+word "cattle," which, prolific though it may prove in fact, remains
+obstinately incapable of verbal multiplication. All Japanese nouns being
+of this indefinite description, all require auxiliary numerals. But
+as each one has its own appropriate numeral, about which a mistake is
+unpardonable, it takes some little study merely to master the etiquette
+of these handles to the names of things.
+
+Nouns are not inflected, their cases being expressed by postpositions,
+which, as the name implies, follow, in becoming Japanese inversion,
+instead of preceding the word they affect. To make up, nevertheless, for
+any lack of perplexity due to an absence of inflections, adjectives, en
+revanche, are most elaborately conjugated. Their protean shapes are as
+long as they are numerous, representing not only times, but conditions.
+There are, for instance, the root form, the adverbial form, the
+indefinite form, the attributive form, and the conclusive form, the two
+last being conjugated through all the various voices, moods, and tenses,
+to say nothing of all the potential forms. As one change is superposed
+on another, the adjective ends by becoming three or four times its
+original length. The fact is, the adjective is either adjective, adverb,
+or verb, according to occasion. In the root form it also helps to make
+nouns; so that it is even more generally useful than as a journalistic
+epithet with us. As a verb, it does duty as predicate and copula
+combined. For such an unnecessary part of speech as a real copula does
+not exist in Japanese. In spite of the shock to the prejudices of the
+old school of logicians, it must be confessed that the Tartars get on
+very well without any such couplings to their trains of thought. But
+then we should remember that in their sentences the cart is always put
+before the horse, and so needs only to be pushed, not pulled along.
+
+The want of a copula is another instance of the primitive character of
+the tongue. It has its counterpart in our own baby-talk, where a quality
+is predicated of a thing simply by placing the adjective in apposition
+with the noun.
+
+That the Japanese word which is commonly translated "is" is in no sense
+a copula, but an ordinary intransitive verb, referring to a natural
+state, and not to a logical condition, is evident in two ways. In
+the first place, it is never used to predicate a quality directly. A
+Japanese does not say, "The scenery is fine," but simply, "Scenery,
+fine." Secondly, wherever this verb is indirectly employed in such a
+manner, it is followed, not by an adjective, but by an adverb. Not "She
+is beautiful," but "She exists beautifully," would be the Japanese way of
+expressing his admiration. What looks at first, therefore, like a copula
+turns out to be merely an impersonal intransitive verb.
+
+A negative noun is, of course, an impossibility in any language, just
+as a negative substantive, another name for the same thing, is a direct
+contradiction in terms. No matter how negative the idea to be given, it
+must be conveyed by a positive expression. Even a void is grammatically
+quite full of meaning, although unhappily empty in fact. So much is
+common to all tongues, but Japanese carries its positivism yet further.
+Not only has it no negative nouns, it has not even any negative pronouns
+nor pronominal adjectives,--those convenient keepers of places for
+the absent. "None" and "nothing" are unknown words in its vocabulary,
+because the ideas they represent are not founded on observed facts,
+but upon metaphysical abstractions. Such terms are human-born, not
+earth-begotten concepts, and so to the Far Oriental, who looks at things
+from the point of view of nature, not of man, negation takes another
+form. Usually it is introduced by the verbs, because the verbs, for the
+most part, relate to human actions, and it is man, not nature, who is
+responsible for the omission in question. After all, it does seem more
+fitting to say, "I am ignorant of everything," than "I know nothing." It
+is indeed you who are wanting, not the thing.
+
+The question of verbs leads us to another matter bearing on the subject
+of impersonality; namely, the arrangement of the words in a Japanese
+sentence. The Tartar mode of grammatical construction is very nearly
+the inverse of our own. The fundamental rule of Japanese syntax is, that
+qualifying words precede the words they qualify; that is, an idea is
+elaborately modified before it is so much as expressed. This practice
+places the hearer at some awkward preliminary disadvantage, inasmuch as
+the story is nearly over before he has any notion what it is all about;
+but really it puts the speaker to much more trouble, for he is obliged
+to fashion his whole sentence complete in his brain before he starts
+to speak. This is largely in consequence of two omissions in Tartar
+etymology. There are in Japanese no relative pronouns and no temporal
+conjunctions; conjunctions, that is, for connecting consecutive events.
+The want of these words precludes the admission of afterthoughts.
+Postscripts in speech are impossible. The functions of relatives are
+performed by position, explanatory or continuative clauses being made
+to precede directly the word they affect. Ludicrous anachronisms, not
+unlike those experienced by Alice in her looking-glass journey, are
+occasioned by this practice. For example, "The merry monarch who ended
+by falling a victim to profound melancholia" becomes "To profound
+melancholia a victim by falling ended merry monarch," and
+the sympathetic hearer weeps first and laughs afterward, when
+chronologically he should be doing precisely the opposite.
+
+A like inversion of the natural order of things results from the absence
+of temporal conjunctions. In Japanese, though nouns can be added,
+actions cannot; you can say "hat and coat," but not "dressed and came."
+Conjunctions are used only for space, never for time. Objects that
+exist together can be joined in speech, but it is not allowable thus
+to connect consecutive events. "Having dressed, came" is the Japanese
+idiom. To speak otherwise would be to violate the unities. For a
+Japanese sentence is a single rounded whole, not a bunch of facts
+loosely tied together. It is as much a unit in its composition as
+a novel or a drama is with us. Such artistic periods, however, are
+anything but convenient. In their nicely contrived involution they
+strikingly resemble those curious nests of Chinese boxes, where
+entire shells lie closely packed one within another,--a very marvel
+of ingenious and perfectly unnecessary construction. One must be
+antipodally comprehensive to entertain the idea; as it is, the idea
+entertains us.
+
+On the same general plan, the nouns precede the verbs in the sentence,
+and are in every way the more important parts of speech. The consequence
+is that in ordinary conversation the verbs come so late in the day that
+they not infrequently get left out altogether. For the Japanese are much
+given to docking their phrases, a custom the Germans might do well to
+adopt. Now, nouns denote facts, while verbs express action, and action,
+as considered in human speech, is mostly of human origin. In this
+precedence accorded the impersonal element in language over the
+personal, we observe again the comparative importance assigned the two.
+In Japanese estimation, the first place belongs to nature, the second
+only to man.
+
+As if to mark beyond a doubt the insignificance of the part man plays
+in their thought, sentences are usually subjectless. Although it is a
+common practice to begin a phrase with the central word of the idea,
+isolated from what follows by the emphasizing particle "wa" (which
+means "as to," the French "quant a"), the word thus singled out for
+distinction is far more likely to be the object of the sentence than
+its subject. The habit is analogous to the use of our phrase "speaking
+of,"--that is, simply an emphatic mode of introducing a fresh thought;
+only that with them, the practice being the rule and not the exception,
+no correspondingly abrupt effect is produced by it. Ousted thus from
+the post of honor, the subject is not even permitted the second place.
+Indeed, it usually fails to put in an appearance anywhere. You may
+search through sentence after sentence without meeting with the
+slightest suggestion of such a thing. When so unusual an anomaly as a
+motive cause is directly adduced, it owes its mention, not to the fact
+of being the subject, but because for other reasons it happens to be the
+important word of the thought. The truth is, the Japanese conception of
+events is only very vaguely subjective. An action is looked upon more
+as happening than as being performed, as impersonally rather than
+personally produced. The idea is due, however, to anything but
+philosophic profundity. It springs from the most superficial of childish
+conceptions. For the Japanese mind is quite the reverse of abstract. Its
+consideration of things is concrete to a primitive degree. The language
+reflects the fact. The few abstract ideas these people now possess are
+not represented, for the most part, by pure Japanese, but by imported
+Chinese expressions. The islanders got such general notions from their
+foreign education, and they imported idea and word at the same time.
+
+Summing up, as it were, in propria persona the impersonality of Japanese
+speech, the word for "man," "hito," is identical with, and probably
+originally the same word as "hito," the numeral "one;" a noun and a
+numeral, from which Aryan languages have coined the only impersonal
+pronoun they possess. On the one hand, we have the German "mann;" on
+the other, the French "on". While as if to give the official seal to
+the oneness of man with the universe, the word mono, thing, is applied,
+without the faintest implication of insult, to men.
+
+Such, then, is the mould into which, as children, these people learn
+to cast their thought. What an influence it must exert upon their
+subsequent views of life we have but to ask of our own memories to know.
+With each one of us, if we are to advance beyond the steps of the last
+generation, there comes a time when our growing ideas refuse any longer
+to fit the childish grooves in which we were taught to let them run. How
+great the wrench is when this supreme moment arrives we have all felt
+too keenly ever to forget. We hesitate, we delay, to abandon the beliefs
+which, dating from the dawn of our being, seem to us even as a part of
+our very selves. From the religion of our mother to the birth of our
+boyish first love, all our early associations send down roots so deep
+that long after our minds have outgrown them our hearts refuse to give
+them up. Even when reason conquers at last, sentiment still throbs at
+the voids they necessarily have left.
+
+In the Far East, this fondness for the old is further consecrated by
+religion. The worship of ancestors sets its seal upon the traditions of
+the past, to break which were impious as well as sad. The golden age,
+that time when each man himself was young, has lingered on in the
+lands where it is always morning, and where man has never passed to
+his prosaic noon. Befitting the place is the mind we find there. As its
+language so clearly shows, it still is in that early impersonal state
+to which we all awake first before we become aware of that something we
+later know so well as self.
+
+Particularly potent with these people is their language, for a reason
+that also lends it additional interest to us,--because it is their own.
+Among the mass of foreign thought the Japanese imitativeness has caused
+the nation to adopt, here is one thing which is indigenous. Half of the
+present speech, it is true, is of Chinese importation, but conservatism
+has kept the other half pure. From what it reveals we can see how each
+man starts to-day with the same impersonal outlook upon life the race
+had reached centuries ago, and which it has since kept unchanged. The
+man's mind has done likewise.
+
+
+[1] Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain: The Japanese Language.
+
+
+
+Chapter 5. Nature and Art.
+
+We have seen how impersonal is the form which Far Eastern thought
+assumes when it crystallizes into words. Let us turn now to a
+consideration of the thoughts themselves before they are thus
+stereotyped for transmission to others, and scan them as they find
+expression unconsciously in the man's doings, or seek it consciously in
+his deeds.
+
+To the Far Oriental there is one subject which so permeates and pervades
+his whole being as to be to him, not so much a conscious matter of
+thought as an unconscious mode of thinking. For it is a thing which
+shapes all his thoughts instead of constituting the substance of one
+particular set of them. That subject is art. To it he is born as to
+a birthright. Artistic perception is with him an instinct to which he
+intuitively conforms, and for which he inherits the skill of countless
+generations. From the tips of his fingers to the tips of his toes, in
+whose use he is surprisingly proficient, he is the artist all over.
+Admirable, however, as is his manual dexterity, his mental altitude
+is still more to be admired; for it is artistic to perfection. His
+perception of beauty is as keen as his comprehension of the cosmos is
+crude; for while with science he has not even a speaking acquaintance,
+with art he is on terms of the most affectionate intimacy.
+
+To the whole Far Eastern world science is a stranger. Such nescience is
+patent even in matters seemingly scientific. For although the Chinese
+civilization, even in the so-called modern inventions, was already old
+while ours lay still in the cradle, it was to no scientific spirit that
+its discoveries were due. Notwithstanding the fact that Cathay was the
+happy possessor of gunpowder, movable type, and the compass before
+such things were dreamt of in Europe, she owed them to no knowledge of
+physics, chemistry, or mechanics. It was as arts, not as sciences, they
+were invented. And it speaks volumes for her civilization that she burnt
+her powder for fireworks, not for firearms. To the West alone belongs
+the credit of manufacturing that article for the sake of killing people
+instead of merely killing time.
+
+The scientific is not the Far Oriental point of view. To wish to know
+the reasons of things, that irrepressible yearning of the Western
+spirit, is no characteristic of the Chinaman's mind, nor is it a Tartar
+trait. Metaphysics, a species of speculation that has usually proved
+peculiarly attractive to mankind, probably from its not requiring any
+scientific capital whatever, would seem the most likely place to seek
+it. But upon such matters he has expended no imagination of his own,
+having quietly taken on trust from India what he now professes. As for
+science proper, it has reached at his hands only the quasimorphologic
+stage; that is, it consists of catalogues concocted according to the
+ingenuity of the individual and resembles the real thing about as much
+as a haphazard arrangement of human bones might be expected to resemble
+a man. Not only is the spirit of the subject left out altogether,
+but the mere outward semblance is misleading. For pseudo-scientific
+collections of facts which never rise to be classifications of phenomena
+forms to his idea the acme of erudition. His mathematics, for example,
+consists of a set of empiric rules, of which no explanation is ever
+vouchsafed the taught for the simple reason that it is quite unknown to
+the teacher. It is not even easy to decide how much of what there is
+is Jesuitical. Of more recent sciences he has still less notion,
+particularly of the natural ones. Physics, chemistry, geology, and the
+like are matters that have never entered his head. Even in studies more
+immediately connected with obvious everyday life, such as language,
+history, customs, it is truly remarkable how little he possesses the
+power of generalization and inference. His elaborate lists of facts are
+imposing typographically, but are not even formally important, while his
+reasoning about them is as exquisite a bit of scientific satire as could
+well be imagined.
+
+But with the arts it is quite another matter. While you will search in
+vain, in his civilization, for explanations of even the most simple
+of nature's laws, you will meet at every turn with devices for the
+beautifying of life, which may stand not unworthily beside the products
+of nature's own skill. Whatever these people fashion, from the toy of
+an hour to the triumphs of all time, is touched by a taste unknown
+elsewhere. To stroll down the Broadway of Tokio of an evening is a
+liberal education in everyday art. As you enter it there opens out in
+front of you a fairy-like vista of illumination. Two long lines of gayly
+lighted shops, stretching off into the distance, look out across two
+equally endless rows of torch-lit booths, the decorous yellow gleam
+of the one contrasting strangely with the demoniacal red flare of the
+other. This perspective of pleasure fulfils its promise. As your feet
+follow your eyes you find yourself in a veritable shoppers' paradise,
+the galaxy of twinkle resolving into worlds of delight. Nor do you long
+remain a mere spectator; for the shops open their arms to you. No
+cold glass reveals their charms only to shut you off. Their wares lie
+invitingly exposed to the public, seeming to you already half your own.
+At the very first you come to you stop involuntarily, lost in admiration
+over what you take to be bric-a-brac. It is only afterwards you learn
+that the object of your ecstasy was the commonest of kitchen crockery.
+Next door you halt again, this time in front of some leathern
+pocket-books, stamped with designs in color to tempt you instantly to
+empty your wallet for more new ones than you will ever have the means to
+fill. If you do succeed in tearing yourself away purse-whole, it is
+only to fall a victim to some painted fans of so exquisite a make and
+decoration that escape short of possession is impossible. Opposed as
+stubbornly as you may be to idle purchase at home, here you will find
+yourself the prey of an acute case of shopping fever before you know it.
+Nor will it be much consolation subsequently to discover that you have
+squandered your patrimony upon the most ordinary articles of every-day
+use. If in despair you turn for refuge to the booths, you will but
+have delivered yourself into the embrace of still more irresistible
+fascinations. For the nocturnal squatters are there for the express
+purpose of catching the susceptible. The shops were modestly attractive
+from their nature, but the booths deliberately make eyes at you, and
+with telling effect. The very atmosphere is bewitching. The lurid
+smurkiness of the torches lends an appropriate weirdness to the figure
+of the uncouthly clad pedlar who, with the politeness of the arch-fiend
+himself, displays to an eager group the fatal fascinations of some new
+conceit. Here the latest thing in inventions, a gutta-percha rat, which,
+for reasons best known to the vender, scampers about squeaking with a
+mimicry to shame the original, holds an admiring crowd spellbound with
+mingled trepidation and delight. There a native zoetrope, indefatigable
+round of pleasure, whose top fashioned after the type of a turbine wheel
+enables a candle at the centre ingeniously to supply both illumination
+and motive power at the same time, affords to as many as can find room
+on its circumference a peep at the composite antics of a consecutively
+pictured monkey in the act of jumping a box. Beyond this "wheel of life"
+lies spread out on a mat a most happy family of curios, the whole of
+which you are quite prepared to purchase en bloc. While a little farther
+on stands a flower show which seems to be coyly beckoning to you as the
+blossoms nod their heads to an imperceptible breeze. So one attraction
+fairly jostles its neighbor for recognition from the gay thousands that
+like yourself stroll past in holiday delight. Chattering children in
+brilliant colors, voluble women and talkative men in quieter but no less
+picturesque costumes, stream on in kaleidoscopic continuity. And you,
+carried along by the current, wander thus for miles with the tide of
+pleasure-seekers, till, late at night, when at last you turn reluctantly
+homeward, you feel as one does when wakened from some too delightful
+dream.
+
+Or instead of night, suppose it day and the place a temple. With those
+who are entering you enter too through the outer gateway into the
+courtyard. At the farther end rises a building the like of which for
+richness of effect you have probably never beheld or even imagined. In
+front of you a flight of white stone steps leads up to a terrace
+whose parapet, also of stone, is diapered for half its height and open
+latticework the rest. This piazza gives entrance to a building or set
+of buildings whose every detail challenges the eye. Twelve pillars of
+snow-white wood sheathed in part with bronze, arranged in four rows,
+make, as it were, the bones of the structure. The space between the
+centre columns lies open. The other triplets are webbed in the middle
+and connected, on the sides and front, by grilles of wood and bronze
+forming on the outside a couple of embrasures on either hand the
+entrance in which stand the guardian Nio, two colossal demons, Gog
+and Magog. Instead of capitals, a frieze bristling with Chinese lions
+protects the top of the pillars. Above this in place of entablature
+rises tier upon tier of decoration, each tier projecting beyond the one
+beneath, and the topmost of all terminating in a balcony which encircles
+the whole second story. The parapet of this balcony is one mass of
+ornament, and its cornice another row of lions, brown instead of white.
+The second story is no less crowded with carving. Twelve pillars make
+its ribs, the spaces between being filled with elaborate woodwork, while
+on top rest more friezes, more cornices, clustered with excrescences of
+all colors and kinds, and guarded by lions innumerable. To begin to tell
+the details of so multi-faceted a gem were artistically impossible. It
+is a jewel of a thousand rays, yet whose beauties blend into one as the
+prismatic tints combine to white. And then, after the first dazzle of
+admiration, when the spirit of curiosity urges you to penetrate the
+centre aisle, lo and behold it is but a gate! The dupe of unexpected
+splendor, you have been paying court to the means of approach. It is
+only a portal after all. For as you pass through, you catch a glimpse
+of a building beyond more gorgeous still. Like in general to the first,
+unlike it in detail, resembling it only as the mistress may the maid.
+But who shall convince of charm by enumerating the features of a face!
+From the tiles of its terrace to the encrusted gables that drape it as
+with some rich bejewelled mantle falling about it in the most graceful
+of folds, it is the very eastern princess of a building standing in the
+majesty of her court to give you audience.
+
+A pebbly path, a low flight of stone steps, a pause to leave your shoes
+without the sill, and you tread in the twilight of reverence upon the
+moss-like mats within. The richness of its outer ornament, so impressive
+at first, is, you discover, but prelude to the lavish luxury of its
+interior. Lacquer, bronze, pigments, deck its ceiling and its sides
+in such profusion that it seems to you as if art had expanded, in the
+congenial atmosphere, into a tropical luxuriance of decoration, and grew
+here as naturally on temples as in the jungle creepers do on trees. Yet
+all is but setting to what the place contains; objects of bigotry and
+virtue that appeal to the artistic as much as to the religious instincts
+of the devout. More sacred still are the things treasured in the sanctum
+of the priests. There you will find gems of art for whose sake only
+the most abnormal impersonality can prevent you from breaking the
+tenth commandment. Of the value set upon them you can form a distant
+approximation from the exceeding richness and the amazing number of the
+silk cloths and lacquered boxes in which they are so religiously kept.
+As you gaze thus, amid the soul-satisfying repose of the spot, at some
+masterpiece from the brush of Motonobu, you find yourself wondering, in
+a fanciful sort of way, whether Buddhist contemplation is not after all
+only another name for the contemplation of the beautiful, since devotees
+to the one are ex officio such votaries of the other.
+
+Dissimilar as are these two glimpses of Japanese existence, in one point
+the bustling street and the hushed temple are alike,--in the nameless
+grace that beautifies both.
+
+This spirit is even more remarkable for its all-pervasiveness than
+for its inherent excellence. Both objectively and subjectively its
+catholicity is remarkable. It imbues everything, and affects everybody.
+So universally is it applied to the daily affairs of life that there may
+be said to be no mechanical arts in Japan simply because all such
+have been raised to the position of fine arts. The lowest artisan is
+essentially an artist. Modern French nomenclature on the subject, in
+spite of the satire to which the more prosaic Anglo-Saxon has subjected
+it, is peculiarly applicable there. To call a Japanese cook, for
+instance, an artist would be but the barest acknowledgment of fact, for
+Japanese food is far more beautiful to look at than agreeable to eat;
+while Tokio tailors are certainly masters of drapery, if they are
+sublimely oblivious to the natural modelings of the male or female form.
+
+On the other hand, art is sown, like the use of tobacco, broadcast among
+the people. It is the birthright of the Far East, the talent it never
+hides. Throughout the length and breadth of the land, and from the
+highest prince to the humblest peasant, art reigns supreme.
+
+Now such a prevalence of artistic feeling implies of itself
+impersonality in the people. At first sight it might seem as if science
+did the same, and that in this respect the one hemisphere offset the
+other, and that consequently both should be equally impersonal. But in
+the first place, our masses are not imbued with the scientific spirit,
+as theirs are with artistic sensibility. Who would expect of a mason
+an impersonal interest in the principles of the arch, or of a plumber
+a non-financial devotion to hydraulics? Certainly one would be wrong in
+crediting the masses in general or European waiters in particular with
+much abstract love of mathematics, for example. In the second place,
+there is an essential difference in the attitude of the two subjects
+upon personality. Emotionally, science appeals to nobody, art to
+everybody. Now the emotions constitute the larger part of that complex
+bundle of ideas which we know as self. A thought which is not tinged to
+some extent with feeling is not only not personal; properly speaking, it
+is not even distinctively human, but cosmical. In its lofty superiority
+to man, science is unpersonal rather than impersonal. Art, on the other
+hand, is a familiar spirit. Through the windows of the senses she finds
+her way into the very soul of man, and makes for herself a home there.
+But it is to his humanity, not to his individuality, that she whispers,
+for she speaks in that universal tongue which all can understand.
+
+Examples are not wanting to substantiate theory. It is no mere
+coincidence that the two most impersonal nations of Europe and Asia
+respectively, the French and the Japanese, are at the same time the most
+artistic. Even politeness, which, as we have seen, distinguishes both,
+is itself but a form of art,--the social art of living agreeably with
+one's fellows.
+
+This impersonality comes out with all the more prominence when we pass
+from the consideration of art in itself to the spirit which actuates
+that art, and especially when we compare their spirit with our own.
+The mainsprings of Far Eastern art may be said to be three: Nature,
+Religion, and Humor. Incongruous collection that they are, all
+three witness to the same trait. For the first typifies concrete
+impersonality, the second abstract impersonality, while the province of
+the last is to ridicule personality generally. Of the trio the first is
+altogether the most important. Indeed, to a Far Oriental, so fundamental
+a part of himself is his love of Nature that before we view its mirrored
+image it will be well to look the emotion itself in the face. The Far
+Oriental lives in a long day-dream of beauty. He muses rather than
+reasons, and all musing, so the word itself confesses, springs from
+the inspiration of a Muse. But this Muse appears not to him, as to the
+Greeks, after the fashion of a woman, nor even more prosaically after
+the likeness of a man. Unnatural though it seem to us, his inspiration
+seeks no human symbol. His Muse is not kin to mankind. She is too
+impersonal for any personification, for she is Nature.
+
+That poet whose name carries with it a certain presumption of
+infallibility has told us that "the proper study of mankind is man;" and
+if material advancement in consequence be any criterion of the fitness
+of a particular mental pursuit, events have assuredly justified the
+saying. Indeed, the Levant has helped antithetically to preach the same
+lesson, in showing us by its own fatal example that the improper
+study of mankind is woman, and that they who but follow the fair will
+inevitably degenerate.
+
+The Far Oriental knows nothing of either study, and cares less. The
+delight of self-exploration, or the possibly even greater delight of
+losing one's self in trying to fathom femininity, is a sensation equally
+foreign to his temperament. Neither the remarkable persistence of one's
+own characteristics, not infrequently matter of deep regret to their
+possessor, nor the charmingly unaccountable variability of the fairer
+sex, at times quite as annoying, is a phenomenon sufficient to stir his
+curiosity. Accepting, as he does, the existing state of things more as
+a material fact than as a phase in a gradual process of development, he
+regards humanity as but a small part of the great natural world, instead
+of considering it the crowning glory of the whole. He recognizes man
+merely as a fraction of the universe,--one might almost say as a vulgar
+fraction of it, considering the low regard in which he is held,--and
+accords him his proportionate share of attention, and no more.
+
+In his thought, nature is not accessory to man. Worthy M. Perichon, of
+prosaic, not to say philistinic fame, had, as we remember, his travels
+immortalized in a painting where a colossal Perichon in front almost
+completely eclipsed a tiny Mont Blanc behind. A Far Oriental
+thinks poetry, which may possibly account for the fact that in his
+mind-pictures the relative importance of man and mountain stands
+reversed. "The matchless Fuji," first of motifs in his art, admits no
+pilgrim as its peer.
+
+Nor is it to woman that turn his thoughts. Mother Earth is fairer, in
+his eyes, than are any of her daughters. To her is given the heart that
+should be theirs. The Far Eastern love of Nature amounts almost to a
+passion. To the study of her ever varying moods her Japanese admirer
+brings an impersonal adoration that combines oddly the aestheticism of
+a poet with the asceticism of a recluse. Not that he worships in secret,
+however. His passion is too genuine either to find disguise or seek
+display. With us, unfortunately, the love of Nature is apt to be
+considered a mental extravagance peculiar to poets, excusable in exact
+ratio to the ability to give it expression. For an ordinary mortal to
+feel a fondness for Mother Earth is a kind of folly, to be carefully
+concealed from his fellows. A sort of shamefacedness prevents him from
+avowing it, as a boy at boarding-school hides his homesickness, or a lad
+his love. He shrinks from appearing less pachydermatous than the rest.
+Or else he flies to the other extreme, and affects the odd; pretends,
+poses, parades, and at last succeeds half in duping himself, half in
+deceiving other people. But with Far Orientals the case is different.
+Their love has all the unostentatious assurance of what has received the
+sanction of public opinion. Nor is it still at that doubtful, hesitating
+stage when, by the instrumentality of a third, its soul-harmony can
+suddenly be changed from the jubilant major key into the despairing
+minor. No trace of sadness tinges his delight. He has long since passed
+this melancholy phase of erotic misery, if so be that the course of his
+true love did not always run smooth, and is now well on in matrimonial
+bliss. The very look of the land is enough to betray the fact. In Japan
+the landscape has an air of domesticity about it, patent even to the
+most casual observer. Wherever the Japanese has come in contact with
+the country he has made her unmistakably his own. He has touched her to
+caress, not injure, and it seems as if Nature accepted his fondness as
+a matter of course, and yielded him a wifely submission in return.
+His garden is more human, even, than his house. Not only is everything
+exquisitely in keeping with man, but natural features are actually
+changed, plastic to the imprint of their lord and master's mind. Bushes,
+shrubs, trees, forget to follow their original intent, and grow as he
+wills them to; now expanding in wanton luxuriance, now contracting into
+dwarf designs of their former selves, all to obey his caprice and please
+his eye. Even stubborn rocks lose their wildness, and come to seem a
+part of the almost sentient life around them. If the description of such
+dutifulness seems fanciful, the thing itself surpasses all supposition.
+Hedges and shrubbery, clipped into the most fantastic shapes, accept the
+suggestion of the pruning-knife as if man's wishes were their own whims.
+Manikin maples, Tom Thumb trees, a foot high and thirty years old, with
+all the gnarls and knots and knuckles of their fellows of the forest,
+grow in his parterres, their native vitality not a whit diminished. And
+they are not regarded as monstrosities but only as the most natural of
+artificialities; for they are a part of a horticultural whole. To walk
+into a Japanese garden is like wandering of a sudden into one of those
+strange worlds we see reflected in the polished surface of a concave
+mirror, where all but the observer himself is transformed into a
+fantastic miniature of the reality. In that quaint fairyland diminutive
+rivers flow gracefully under tiny trees, past mole-hill mountains,
+till they fall at last into lilliputian lakes, almost smothered for the
+flowers that grow upon their banks; while in the extreme distance of a
+couple of rods the cone of a Fuji ten feet high looks approvingly down
+upon a scene which would be nationally incomplete without it.
+
+But besides the delights of domesticity which the Japanese enjoys daily
+in Nature's company, he has his acces de tendresse, too. When he feels
+thus specially stirred, he invites a chosen few of his friends, equally
+infatuated, and together they repair to some spot noted for its scenery.
+It may be a waterfall, or some dreamy pond overhung by trees, or the
+distant glimpse of a mountain peak framed in picture-wise between the
+nearer hills; or, at their appropriate seasons, the blossoming of
+the many tree flowers, which in eastern Asia are beautiful beyond
+description. For he appreciates not only places, but times. One spot is
+to be seen at sunrise, another by moonlight; one to be visited in the
+spring-time, another in the fall. But wherever or whenever it be, a
+tea-house, placed to command the best view of the sight, stands ready to
+receive him. For nature's beauties are too well recognized to remain
+the exclusive property of the first chance lover. People flock to view
+nature as we do to see a play, and privacy is as impossible as it is
+unsought. Indeed, the aversion to publicity is simply a result of the
+sense of self, and therefore necessarily not a feature of so
+impersonal a civilization. Aesthetic guidebooks are written for
+the nature-enamoured, descriptive of these views which the Japanese
+translator quaintly calls "Sceneries," and which visitors come not only
+from near but from far to gaze upon. In front of the tea-house proper
+are rows of summer pavilions, in one of which the party make themselves
+at home, while gentle little tea-house girls toddle forth to serve them
+the invariable preliminary tea and confections. Each man then produces
+from up his sleeve, or from out his girdle, paper, ink, and brush, and
+proceeds to compose a poem on the beauty of the spot and the feelings
+it calls up, which he subsequently reads to his admiring companions.
+Hot sake is next served, which is to them what beer is to a German or
+absinthe to a blouse; and there they sit, sip, and poetize, passing
+their couplets, as they do their cups, in honor to one another. At
+last, after drinking in an hour or two of scenery and sake combined, the
+symposium of poets breaks up.
+
+Sometimes, instead of a company of friends, a man will take his family,
+wife, babies, and all, on such an outing, but the details of his holiday
+are much the same as before. For the scenery is still the centre of
+attraction, and in the attendant creature comforts Far Eastern etiquette
+permits an equal enjoyment to man, woman, and child.
+
+This love of nature is quite irrespective of social condition. All
+classes feel its force, and freely indulge the feeling. Poor as well as
+rich, low as well as high, contrive to gratify their poetic instincts
+for natural scenery. As for flowers, especially tree flowers, or
+those of the larger plants, like the lotus or the iris, the Japanese
+appreciation of their beauty is as phenomenal as is that beauty itself.
+Those who can afford the luxury possess the shrubs in private; those who
+cannot, feast their eyes on the public specimens. From a sprig in a vase
+to a park planted on purpose, there is no part of them too small or
+too great to be excluded from Far Oriental affection. And of the two
+"drawing-rooms" of the Mikado held every year, in April and November,
+both are garden-parties: the one given at the time and with the title of
+"the cherry blossoms," and the other of "the chrysanthemum."
+
+These same tree flowers deserve more than a passing notice, not simply
+because of their amazing beauty, which would arrest attention anywhere,
+but for the national attitude toward them. For no better example of the
+Japanese passion for nature could well be cited. If the anniversaries
+of people are slightingly treated in the land of the sunrise, the same
+cannot be said of plants. The yearly birthdays of the vegetable world
+are observed with more than botanic enthusiasm. The regard in which
+they are held is truly emotional, and it not actually individual in
+its object, at least personal to the species. Each kind of tree as its
+season brings it into flower is made the occasion of a festival. For the
+beauty of the blossoming receives the tribute of a national admiration.
+From peers to populace mankind turns out to witness it. Nor are these
+occasions few. Spring in the Far East is one long chain of flower fetes,
+and as spring begins by the end of January and lasts till the middle of
+June, opportunities for appreciating each in turn are not half spoiled
+by a common contemporaneousness. People have not only occasion but time
+to admire. Indeed, spring itself is suitably respected by being dated
+conformably to fact. Far Orientals begin their year when Nature begins
+hers, instead of starting anachronously as we do in the very middle of
+the dead season, much as our colleges hold their commencements, on the
+last in place at on the first day of the academic term. So previous
+has the haste of Western civilization become. The result is that our
+rejoicing partakes of the incongruity of humor. The new year exists only
+in name. In the Far East, on the other band, the calendar is made to fit
+the time. Men begin to reckon their year some three weeks later than the
+Western world, just as the plum-tree opens its pink white petals, as it
+were, in rosy reflection of the snow that lies yet upon the ground.
+But the coldness of the weather does not in the least deter people from
+thronging the spot in which the trees grow, where they spend hours in
+admiration, and end by pinning appropriate poems on the twigs for later
+comers to peruse. Fleeting as the flowers are in fact, they live forever
+in fancy. For they constitute one of the commonest motifs of both
+painting and poetry. A branch just breaking into bloom seen against the
+sunrise sky, or a bough bending its blossoms to the bosom of a stream,
+is subject enough for their greatest masters, who thus wed, as it
+were, two arts in one,--the spirit of poesy with pictorial form. This
+plum-tree is but a blossom. Precocious harbinger of a host of flowers,
+its gay heralding over, it vanishes not to be recalled, for it bears no
+edible fruit.
+
+The next event in the series might fairly be called phenomenal. Early in
+April takes place what is perhaps as superb a sight as anything in this
+world, the blossoming of the cherry-trees. Indeed, it is not easy to do
+the thing justice in description. If the plum invited admiration, the
+cherry commands it; for to see the sakura in flower for the first time
+is to experience a new sensation. Familiar as a man may be with cherry
+blossoms at home, the sight there bursts upon him with the dazzling
+effect of a revelation. Such is the profusion of flowers that the tree
+seems to have turned into a living mass of rosy light. No leaves break
+the brilliance. The snowy-pink petals drape the branches entirely, yet
+so delicately, one deems it all a veil donned for the tree's nuptials
+with the spring. For nothing could more completely personify the spirit
+of the spring-time. You can almost fancy it some dryad decked for her
+bridal, in maidenly day-dreaming too lovely to last. For like the plum
+the cherry fails in its fruit to fulfil the promise of its flower.
+
+It would be strange indeed if so much beauty received no recognition,
+but it is even more strange that recognition should be so complete and
+so universal as it is. Appreciation is not confined to the cultivated
+few; it is shown quite as enthusiastically by the masses. The popularity
+of the plants is all-embracing. The common people are as sensitive to
+their beauty as are the upper classes. Private gratification, roseate
+as it is, pales beside the public delight. Indeed, not content with what
+revelation Nature makes of herself of her own accord, man has multiplied
+her manifestations. Spots suitable to their growth have been peopled by
+him with trees. Sometimes they stand in groups like star-clusters, as in
+Oji, crowning a hill; sometimes, as at Mukojima, they line an avenue
+for miles, dividing the blue river on the one hand from the blue-green
+rice-fields on the other,--a floral milky way of light. But wherever the
+trees may be, there at their flowering season are to be found throngs
+of admirers. For in crowds people go out to see the sight, multitudes
+streaming incessantly to and fro beneath their blossoms as the time of
+day determines the turn of the human tide. To the Occidental stranger
+such a gathering suggests some social loadstone; but none exists. In the
+cherry-trees alone lies the attraction.
+
+For one week out of the fifty-two the cherry-tree stands thus glorified,
+a vision of beauty prolonged somewhat by the want of synchronousness
+of the different kinds. Then the petals fall. What was a nuptial veil
+becomes a winding-sheet, covering the sod as with winter's winding-sheet
+of snow, destined itself to disappear, and the tree is nothing but a
+common cherry-tree once more.
+
+But flowers are by no means over because the cherry blossoms are past. A
+brief space, and the same crowds that flocked to the cherry turn to the
+wistaria. Gardens are devoted to the plants, and the populace greatly
+given to the gardens. There they go to sit and gaze at the grape-like
+clusters of pale purple flowers that hang more than a cubit long over
+the wooden trellis, and grow daily down toward their own reflections in
+the pond beneath, vying with one another in Narcissus-like endeavor.
+And the people, as they sip their tea on the veranda opposite, behold a
+doubled delight, the flower itself and its mirrored image stretching to
+kiss.
+
+After the wistaria comes the tree-peony, and then the iris, with its
+trefoil flowers broader than a man may span, and at all colors under the
+sky. To one who has seen the great Japanese fleur-de-lis, France looks
+ludicrously infelicitous in her choice of emblem.
+
+But the list grows too long, limited as it is only by its own annual
+repetition. We have as yet reached but the first week in June; the
+summer and autumn are still to come, the first bringing the lotus for
+its crown, and the second the chrysanthemum. And lazily grand the lotus
+is, itself the embodiment of the spirit of the drowsy August air, the
+very essence of Buddha-like repose. The castle moats are its special
+domain, which in this its flowering season it wrests wholly from their
+more proper occupant--the water. A dense growth of leather-like leaves,
+above which rise in majestic isolation the solitary flowers, encircles
+the outer rampart, shutting the castle in as it might be the palace of
+the Sleeping Beauty. In the delightful dreaminess that creeps over one
+as he stands thus before some old daimyo's former abode in the heart of
+Japan, he forgets all his metaphysical difficulties about Nirvana, for
+he fancies he has found it, one long Lotus afternoon.
+
+And then last, but in some sort first, since it has been taken for the
+imperial insignia, comes the chrysanthemum. The symmetry of its shape
+well fits it to symbolize the completeness of perfection which the
+Mikado, the son of heaven, mundanely represents. It typifies, too, the
+fullness of the year; for it marks, as it were, the golden wedding of
+the spring, the reminiscence in November of the nuptials of the May. Its
+own color, however, is not confined to gold. It may be of almost any
+hue and within the general limits of a circle of any form. Now it is a
+chariot wheel with petals for spokes; now a ball of fire with lambent
+tongues of flame; while another kind seems the button of some natural
+legion of honor, and still another a pin-wheel in Nature's own
+day-fireworks.
+
+Admired as a thing of beauty for its own sake, it is also used merely
+as a material for artistic effects; for among the quaintest of such
+conceits are the Japanese Jarley chrysanthemum works. Every November in
+the florists' gardens that share the temple grounds at Asakusa may be
+seen groups of historical and mythological figures composed entirely
+of chrysanthemum flowers. These effigies are quite worthy of comparison
+with their London cousins, being sufficiently life-like to terrify
+children and startle anybody. To come suddenly, on turning a
+corner, upon a colossal warrior, deterrently uncouth and frightfully
+battle-clad, in the act of dispatching a fallen foe, is a sensation
+not instantly dispelled by the fact that he is made of flowers. The
+practice, at least, bears witness to an artistic ingenuity of no mean
+merit, and to a horticulture ably carried on, if somewhat eccentrically
+applied.
+
+From the passing of the chrysanthemum dates the dead season. But it is
+suitably short-lived. Sometimes as early as November, the plum-tree is
+already blossoming again.
+
+Even from so imperfectly gathered a garland it will be seen that the
+Japanese do not lack for opportunities to admire, nor do they turn
+coldly away from what they are given. Indeed, they may be said to live
+in a chronic state of flower-fever; but in spite of the vast amount of
+admiration which they bestow on plants, it is not so much the quantity
+of that admiration as the quality of it which is remarkable. The intense
+appreciation shown the subject by the Far Oriental is something whose
+very character seems strange to us, and when in addition we consider
+that it permeates the entire people from the commonest coolie to the
+most aesthetic courtier, it becomes to our comprehension a state of
+things little short of inexplicable. To call it artistic sensibility is
+to use too limited a term, for it pervades the entire people; rather
+is it a sixth sense of a natural, because national description; for the
+trait differs from our corresponding feeling in degree, and especially
+in universality enough to merit the distinction. Their care for tree
+flowers is not confined to a cultivation, it is a cult. It approaches
+to a sort of natural nature-worship, an adoration in which nothing is
+personified. For the emotion aroused in the Far Oriental is just
+as truly an emotion as it was to the Greek; but whereas the Greek
+personified its object, the Japanese admires that object for what it is.
+To think of the cherry-tree, for instance, as a woman, would be to his
+mind a conception transcending even the limits of the ludicrous.
+
+
+
+Chapter 6. Art.
+
+That nature, not man, is their beau ideal, the source of inspiration
+to them, is evident again on looking at their art. The same spirit that
+makes of them such wonderful landscape gardeners and such wonder-full
+landscape gazers shows itself unmistakably in their paintings.
+
+The current impression that Japanese pictorial ambition, and consequent
+skill, is confined to the representation of birds and flowers, though
+entirely erroneous as it stands, has a grain of truth behind it. This
+idea is due to the attitude of the foreign observers, and was in fact a
+tribute to Japanese technique rather than an appreciation of Far Eastern
+artistic feeling. The truth is, the foreigners brought to the subject
+their own Western criteria of merit, and judged everything by these
+standards. Such works naturally commended themselves most as had least
+occasion to deviate from their canons. The simplest pictures, therefore,
+were pronounced the best. Paintings of birds and flowers were thus
+admitted to be fine, because their realism spoke for itself. Of the
+exquisite poetic feeling of their landscape paintings the foreign
+critics were not at first conscious, because it was not expressed in
+terms with which they were familiar.
+
+But first impressions, here as elsewhere, are valuable. One is very apt
+to turn to them again from the reasoning of his second thoughts. Flora
+and fauna are a conspicuous feature of Far Asiatic art, because they
+enter as details of the subject-matter of the artist's thoughts and
+day-dreams. These birds and flowers are his sujets de genre. Where we
+should select a phase of human life for effective isolation, they choose
+instead a bit of nature. A spray of grass or a twig of cherry-blossoms
+is motif enough for them. To their thought its beauty is amply
+suggestive. For to the Far Oriental all nature is sympathetically
+sentient. His admiration, instead of being centred on man, embraces the
+universe. His art reflects it.
+
+Leaving out of consideration, for the moment, minor though still
+important distinctions in tone, treatment, and technique, the great
+fundamental difference between Western and Far Eastern art lies in its
+attitude toward humanity.
+
+With us, from the time of the Greeks to the present day, man has been
+the cynosure of artistic eyes; with them he has never been vouchsafed
+more than a casual, not to say a cursory glance, even woman failing
+to rivet his attention. One of our own writers has said that, without
+passing the bounds of due respect, a man is permitted two looks at
+any woman he may meet, one to recognize, one to admire. A Japanese
+ordinarily never dreams of taking but one,--if indeed he goes so far as
+that,--the first. It is the omitting to take that second look that has
+left him what he is. Not that Fortune has been unpropitious; only blind.
+Fate has offered him opportunity enough; too much, perhaps. For in Japan
+the exposure of the female form is without a parallel in latitude. Never
+nude, it is frequently naked. The result artistically is much the same,
+though the cause be different. For it is a fatal mistake to suppose the
+Japanese an immodest people. According to their own standards, they are
+exceedingly modest. No respectable Japanese woman would, for instance,
+ever for a moment turn out her toes in walking. It is considered
+immodest to do so. Their code is, however, not so whimsical as this bit
+of etiquette might suggest. The intent is with them the touchstone of
+propriety. In their eyes a state of nature is not a state of indecency.
+Whatever exposure is required for convenience is right; whatever
+unnecessary, wrong. Such an Eden-like condition of society would seem to
+be the very spot for a something like the modern French school of art to
+have developed in. And yet it is just that study of the nude which has
+from immemorial antiquity been entirely neglected in the Far East. An
+ancient Greek, to say nothing of a modern Parisian, would have shocked a
+Japanese. Yet we are shocked by them. We are astounded at the sights we
+see in their country villages, while they in their turn marvel at the
+exhibitions they witness in our city theatres. At their watering-places
+the two sexes bathe promiscuously together in all the simplicity
+of nature; but for a Japanese woman to appear on the stage in any
+character, however proper, would be deemed indecent. The difference
+between the two hemispheres may be said to consist in an artless liberty
+on the one hand, and artistic license on the other. Their unwritten code
+of propriety on the subject seems to be, "You must see, but you may not
+observe."
+
+These people live more in accordance with their code of propriety
+than we do with ours. All classes alike conform to it. The adjective
+"respectable," used above as a distinction in speaking of woman, was in
+reality superfluous, for all women there, as far as appearance goes, are
+respectable. Even the most abandoned creature does not betray her status
+by her behavior. The reason of this uniformity and its psychological
+importance I shall discuss later.
+
+This form of modesty, a sort of want of modesty of form, has no
+connection whatever with sex. It applies with equal force to the
+male figure, which is even more exposed than the female, and offers
+anatomical suggestions invaluable alike to the artistic and medical
+professions,--suggestions that are equally ignored by both. The coolies
+are frequently possessed of physiques which would have delighted Michael
+Angelo; and as for the phenomenal corpulency of the wrestlers, it would
+have made of the place a very paradise for Rubens. In regard to the
+doctors,--for to call them surgeons would be to give a name to what does
+not exist,--a lack of scientific zeal has been the cause of their not
+investigating what tempts too seductively, we should imagine, to be
+ignored. Acupuncture, or the practice of sticking long pins into any
+part of the patient's body that may happen to be paining him, pretty
+much irrespective of anatomical position, is the nearest approach to
+surgery of which they are guilty, and proclaims of itself the in corpore
+vili character of the thing operated upon.
+
+Nor does the painter owe anything to science. He represents humanity
+simply as he sees it in its every-day costume; and it betokens the
+highest powers of generalized observation that he produces the results
+he does. In his drawings, man is shown, not as he might look in the
+primitive, or privitive, simplicity of his ancestral Garden of Eden, but
+as he does look in the ordinary wear and tear of his present garments.
+Civilization has furnished him with clothes, and he prefers, when he has
+his picture taken, to keep them on.
+
+In dealing with man, the Far Oriental artist is emphatically a realist;
+it is when he turns to nature that he becomes ideal. But by ideal is not
+meant here conventional. That term of reproach is a misnomer, founded
+upon a mistake. His idealism is simply the outcome of his love, which,
+like all human love, transfigures its object. The Far Oriental has
+plenty of this, which, if sometimes a delusion, seems also second
+sight, but it is peculiarly impersonal. His color-blindness to the warm,
+blood-red end of the spectrum of life in no wise affects his perception
+of the colder beauty of the great blues and greens of nature. To their
+poetry he is ever sensitive. His appreciation of them is something
+phenomenal, and his power of presentation worthy his appreciation.
+
+A Japanese painting is a poem rather than a picture. It portrays an
+emotion called up by a scene, and not the scene itself in all its
+elaborate complexity. It undertakes to give only so much of it as is
+vital to that particular feeling, and intentionally omits all irrelevant
+details. It is the expression caught from a glimpse of the soul of
+nature by the soul of man; the mirror of a mood, passing, perhaps, in
+fact, but perpetuated thus to fancy. Being an emotion, its intensity
+is directly proportional to the singleness with which it possesses the
+thoughts. The Far Oriental fully realizes the power of simplicity. This
+principle is his fundamental canon of pictorial art. To understand his
+paintings, it is from this standpoint they must be regarded; not as
+soulless photographs of scenery, but as poetic presentations of the
+spirit of the scenes. The very charter of painting depends upon its
+not giving us charts. And if with us a long poem be a contradiction in
+terms, a full picture is with them as self-condemnatory a production.
+From the contemplation of such works of art as we call finished, one is
+apt, after he has once appreciated Far Eastern taste, to rise with an
+unpleasant feeling of satiety, as if he has eaten too much at the feast.
+
+Their paintings, by comparison, we call sketches. Is not our would-be
+slight unwittingly the reverse? Is not a sketch, after all, fuller of
+meaning, to one who knows how to read it, than a finished affair, which
+is very apt to end with itself, barren of fruit? Does not one's own
+imagination elude one's power to portray it? Is it not forever flitting
+will-o'-the-wisp-like ahead of us just beyond exact definition? For
+the soul of art lies in what art can suggest, and nothing is half so
+suggestive as the half expressed, not even a double entente. To hint
+a great deal by displaying a little is more vital to effect than the
+cleverest representation of the whole. The art of partially revealing
+is more telling, even, than the ars celare artem. Who has not suspected
+through a veil a fairer face than veil ever hid? Who has not been
+delightedly duped by the semi-disclosures of a dress? The principle
+is just as true in any one branch of art as it is of the attempted
+developments by one of the suggestions of another. Yet who but has thus
+felt its force? Who has not had a shock of day-dream desecration on
+chancing upon an illustrated edition of some book whose story he had
+lain to heart? Portraits of people, pictures of places, he does not
+know, and yet which purport to be his! And I venture to believe that to
+more than one of us the exquisite pathos of the Bride of Lammermoor is
+gone when Lucia warbles her woes, be it never so entrancingly, to an
+admiring house. It almost seems as if the garish publicity of using her
+name for operatic title were a special intervention of the Muse, that we
+might the less connect song with story,--two sensations that, like two
+lights, destroy one another by mutual interference.
+
+Against this preference shown the sketch it may be urged that to
+appreciate such suggestions presupposes as much art in the public as in
+the painter. But the ability to appreciate a thing when expressed is but
+half that necessary to express it. Some understanding must exist in
+the observer for any work to be intelligible. It is only a question of
+degree. The greater the art-sense in the person addressed, the more had
+better be left to it. Now in Japan the public is singularly artistic.
+In fact, the artistic appreciation of the masses there is something
+astonishing to us, accustomed to our immense intellectual differences
+between man and man. Sketches are thus peculiarly fitting to such a
+land.
+
+Besides, there is a quiet modesty about the sketch which is itself
+taking. To attempt the complete even in a fractional bit of the cosmos,
+like a picture, has in it a difficulty akin to the logical one
+of proving a universal negative. The possibilities of failure are
+enormously increased, and failure is less forgiven for the assumption.
+Art might perhaps not unwisely follow the example of science in such
+matters where an exhaustive work, which takes the better part of a
+lifetime to produce, is invariably entitled by its erudite author an
+Elementary Treatise on the subject in hand.
+
+To aid the effect due to simplicity of conception steps in the Far
+Oriental's wonderful technique. His brush-strokes are very few in
+number, but each one tells. They are laid on with a touch which is
+little short of marvelous, and requires heredity to explain its skill.
+For in his method there is no emending, no super-position, no change
+possible. What he does is done once and for all. The force of it
+grows on you as you gaze. Each stroke expresses surprisingly much, and
+suggests more. Even omissions are made significant. In his painting it
+is visibly true that objects can be rendered conspicuous by their very
+absence. You are quite sure you see what on scrutiny you discover to
+be only the illusion of inevitable inference. The Far Oriental artist
+understands the power of suggestion well; for imagination always fills
+in the picture better than the brush, however perfect be its skill.
+
+Even the neglect of certain general principles which we consider vital
+to effect, such as the absence of shadows and the lack of perspective,
+proves not to be of the importance we imagine. We discover in these
+paintings how immaterial, artistically, was Peter Schlimmel's sad loss,
+and how perfectly possible it is to make bits of discontinuous distance
+take the place effectively of continuous space.
+
+Far Eastern pictures are epigrams rather than descriptions. They present
+a bit of nature with the terseness of a maxim of La Rochefoucault, and
+they delight as aphorisms do by their insight and the happy conciseness
+of its expression. Few aphorisms are absolutely true, but then boldness
+more than makes up for what they lack in verity. So complex a subject is
+life that to state a truth with all its accompanying limitations is to
+weaken it at once. Exceptions, while demonstrating the rule, do not tend
+to emphasize it. And though the whole truth is essential to science,
+such exhaustiveness is by no means a canon of art.
+
+Parallels are not wanting at home. What they do with space in their
+paintings do we not with time in the case of our comedies, those acted
+pictures of life? Should we not refuse to tolerate a play that insisted
+on furnishing us with a full perspective of its characters' past? And
+yet of the two, it is far perferable, artistically, to be given too much
+in sequence than too much at once. The Chinese, who put much less into
+a painting than what we deem indispensable, delight in dramas that last
+six weeks.
+
+To give a concluding touch of life to my necessarily skeleton-like
+generalities, memory pictures me a certain painting of Okio's which I
+fell in love with at first sight. It is of a sunrise on the coast of
+Japan. A long line of surf is seen tumbling in to you from out a bank
+of mist, just piercing which shows the blood-red disk of the rising sun,
+while over the narrow strip of breaking rollers three cranes are slowly
+sailing north. And that is all you see. You do not see the shore; you do
+not see the main; you are looking but at the border-land of that great
+unknown, the heaving ocean still slumbering beneath its chilly coverlid
+of mist, out of which come the breakers, and the sun, and the cranes.
+
+So much for the more serious side of Japanese fancy; a look at the
+lighter leads to the same conclusion.
+
+Hand in hand with his keen poetic sensibility goes a vivid sense of
+humor,--two traits that commonly, indeed, are found Maying together over
+the meadows of imagination. For, as it might be put,
+
+  "The heart that is soonest awake to the flowers
+   Is also the first to be touched by the fun."
+
+The Far Oriental well exemplifies this fact. His art, wherever fun is
+possible, fairly bubbles over with laughter. From the oldest masters
+down to Hokusai, it is constantly welling up in the drollest conceits.
+It is of all descriptions, too. Now it lurks in merry ambush, like the
+faint suggestion of a smile on an otherwise serious face, so subtile
+that the observer is left wondering whether the artist could have meant
+what seems more like one's own ingenious discovery; now it breaks out
+into the broadest of grins, absurd juxtapositions of singularly happy
+incongruities. For Hokusai's caricatures and Hendschel's sketches might
+be twins. If there is a difference, it lies not so much in the artist's
+work as in the greater generality of its appreciation. Humor flits
+easily there at the sea-level of the multitude. For the Japanese
+temperament is ever on the verge of a smile which breaks out with
+catching naivete at the first provocation. The language abounds in puns
+which are not suffered to lie idle, and even poetry often hinges on
+certain consecrated plays on words. From the very constitution of the
+people there is of course nothing selfish in the national enjoyment. A
+man is quite as ready to laugh at his own expense as at his neighbor's,
+a courtesy which his neighbor cordially returns.
+
+Now the ludicrous is essentially human in its application. The principle
+of the synthesis of contradictories, popularly known by the name of
+humor, is necessarily limited in its field to man. For whether it have
+to do wholly with actions, or partly with the words that express them,
+whether it be presented in the shape of a pun or a pleasantry, it is in
+incongruous contrasts that its virtue lies. It is the unexpected that
+provokes the smile. Now no such incongruity exists in nature; man enjoys
+a monopoly of the power of making himself ridiculous. So pleasant is
+pleasantry that we do indeed cultivate it beyond its proper pale. But
+it is only by personifying Nature, and gratuitously attributing to her
+errors of which she is incapable, that we can make fun of her; as, for
+instance, when we hold the weather up to ridicule by way of impotent
+revenge. But satires upon the clown-like character of our climate,
+which, after the lamest sort of a spring, somehow manages a capital
+fall, would in the Far East be as out of keeping with fancy as with
+fact. To a Japanese, who never personifies anything, such innocent irony
+is unmeaning. Besides, it would be also untrue. For his May carries no
+suggestion of unfulfilment in its name.
+
+Those Far Eastern paintings which have to do with man fall for the
+most part under one of two heads, the facetious and the historical. The
+latter implies no particularly intimate concern for man in himself, for
+the past has very little personality for the present. As for the former,
+its attention is, if anything, derogatory to him, for we are always shy
+of making fun of what we feel to be too closely a part of ourselves.
+But impersonality has prevented the Far Oriental from having much amour
+propre. He has no particular aversion to caricaturing himself. Few
+Europeans, perhaps, would have cared to perpetrate a self-portrait
+like one painted by the potter Kinsei, which was sold me one day as an
+amusing tour de force by a facetious picture-dealer. It is a composite
+picture of a new kind, a Japanese variety of type face. The great
+potter, who was also apparently no mean painter, has combined three
+aspects of himself in a single representation. At first sight the
+portrait appears to be simply a full front view of a somewhat moon-faced
+citizen; but as you continue to gaze, it suddenly dawns on you that
+there are two other individuals, one on either side, hob-nobbing in
+profile with the first, the lines of the features being ingeniously made
+to do double duty; and when this aspect of the thing has once struck
+you, you cannot look at the picture without seeing all three citizens
+simultaneously. The result is doubtless more effective as a composition
+than flattering as a likeness.
+
+Far Eastern sculpture, by its secondary importance among Far Eastern
+arts, witnesses again to the secondary importance assigned to man at our
+mental antipodes. In this art, owing to its necessary limitations, the
+representation of nature in its broader sense is impossible. For in the
+first place, whatever the subject, it must be such as it is possible
+to present in one continuous piece; disconnected adjuncts, as, for
+instance, a flock of birds flying, which might be introduced with great
+effect in painting, being here practically beyond the artist's reach.
+Secondly, the material being of uniform appearance, as a rule, color,
+or even shading, vital points in landscape portrayal, is out of the
+question, unless the piece were subsequently painted, as in Grecian
+sculptures, a custom which is not practised in China or Japan. Lastly,
+another fact fatal to the representation of landscape is the size. The
+reduced scale of the reproduction suggests falsity at once, a falsity
+whose belittlement the mind can neither forget nor forgive. Plain
+sculpture is therefore practically limited to statuary, either of men or
+animals. The result is that in their art, where landscape counts for
+so much, sculpture plays a very minor part. In what little there is,
+Nature's place is taken by Buddha. For there are two classes of statues,
+divided the one from the other by that step which separates the sublime
+from the ridiculous, namely, the colossal and the diminutive. There is
+no happy human mean. Of the first kind are the beautiful bronze
+figures of the Buddha, like the Kamakura Buddha, fifty feet high and
+ninety-seven feet round, in whose face all that is grand and noble lies
+sleeping, the living representation of Nirvana; and of the second, those
+odd little ornaments known as netsuke, comical carvings for the most
+part, grotesque figures of men and monkeys, saints and sinners, gods and
+devils. Appealing bits of ivory, bone, or wood they are, in which the
+dumb animals are as speaking likenesses as their human fellows.
+
+The other arts show the same motif in their decorations. Pottery and
+lacquer alike witness the respective positions assigned to the serious
+and the comic in Far Eastern feeling.
+
+The Far Oriental makes fun of man and makes love to Nature; and it
+almost seems as if Nature heard his silent prayer, and smiled upon him
+in acceptance; as if the love-light lent her face the added beauty
+that it lends the maid's. For nowhere in this world, probably, is
+she lovelier than in Japan: a climate of long, happy means and short
+extremes, months of spring and months of autumn, with but a few weeks
+of winter in between; a land of flowers, where the lotus and the cherry,
+the plum and wistaria, grow wantonly side by side; a land where
+the bamboo embosoms the maple, where the pine at last has found its
+palm-tree, and the tropic and the temperate zones forget their separate
+identity in one long self-obliterating kiss.
+
+
+
+Chapter 7. Religion.
+
+In regard to their religion, nations, like individuals, seem singularly
+averse to practising what they have preached. Whether it be that his
+self-constructed idols prove to the maker too suggestive of his own
+intellectual chisel to deceive him for long, or whether sacred soil,
+like less hallowed ground, becomes after a time incapable of responding
+to repeated sowings of the same seed, certain it is that in spiritual
+matters most peoples have grown out of conceit with their own
+conceptions. An individual may cling with a certain sentiment to the
+religion of his mother, but nations have shown anything but a foolish
+fondness for the sacred superstitions of their great-grandfathers. To
+the charm of creation succeeds invariably the bitter-sweet after-taste
+of criticism, and man would not be the progressive animal he is if he
+long remained in love with his own productions.
+
+What his future will be is too engrossing a subject, and one too deeply
+shrouded in mystery, not to be constantly pictured anew. No wonder that
+the consideration at that country toward which mankind is ever being
+hastened should prove as absorbing to fancy as contemplated earthly
+journeys proverbially are. Few people but have laid out skeleton tours
+through its ideal regions, and perhaps, as in the mapping beforehand of
+merely mundane travels, one element of attraction has always consisted
+in the possible revision of one's routes.
+
+Besides, there is a fascination about the foreign merely because it is
+such. Distance lends enchantment to the views of others, and never
+more so than when those views are religious visions. An enthusiast has
+certainly a greater chance of being taken for a god among a people who
+do not know him intimately as a man. So with his doctrines. The imported
+is apt to seem more important than the home-made; as the far-off
+bewitches more easily than the near. But just as castles in the air do
+not commonly become the property of their builders, so mansions in the
+skies almost as frequently have failed of direct inheritance. Rather
+strikingly has this proved the case with what are to-day the two most
+powerful religions of the world,--Buddhism and Christianity. Neither is
+now the belief of its founder's people. What was Aryan-born has become
+Turanian-bred, and what was Semitic by conception is at present Aryan by
+adoption. The possibilities of another's hereafter look so much rosier
+than the limitations of one's own present!
+
+Few pastimes are more delightful than tossing pebbles into some still,
+dark pool, and watching the ripples that rise responsive, as they run in
+ever widening circles to the shore. Most of us have felt its fascination
+second only to that of the dotted spiral of the skipping-stone, a
+fascination not outgrown with years. There is something singularly
+attractive in the subtle force that for a moment sways each particle
+only to pass on to the next, a motion mysterious in its immateriality.
+Some such pleasure must be theirs who have thrown their thoughts into
+the hearts of men, and seen them spread in waves of feeling, whose
+sphere time widens through the world. For like the mobile water is the
+mind of man,--quick to catch emotions, quick to transmit them. Of all
+waves of feeling, this is not the least true of religious ones, that,
+starting from their birthplace, pass out to stir others, who have but
+humanity in common with those who professed them first. Like the ripples
+in the pool, they leave their initial converts to sink back again into
+comparative quiescence, as they advance to throw into sudden tremors
+hordes of outer barbarians. In both of the great religions in question
+this wave propagation has been most marked, only the direction it
+took differed. Christianity went westward; Buddhism travelled east.
+Proselytes in Asia Minor, Greece, and Italy find counterparts in
+Eastern India, Burmah, and Thibet. Eventually the taught surpassed their
+teachers both in zeal and numbers. Jerusalem and Benares at last gave
+place to Rome and Lassa as sacerdotal centres. Still the movement
+journeyed on. Popes and Lhamas remained where their predecessors
+had founded sees, but the tide of belief surged past them in its
+irresistible advance. Farther yet from where each faith began are to
+be found to-day the greater part of its adherents. The home that the
+Western hemisphere seems to promise to the one, the extreme Orient
+affords the other. As Roman Catholicism now looks to America for its
+strength, so Buddhism to-day finds its worshippers chiefly in China and
+Japan.
+
+But though the Japanese may be said to be all Buddhists, Buddhist is by
+no means all that they are. At the time of their adoption of the great
+Indian faith, the Japanese were already in possession of a system of
+superstition which has held its own to this day. In fact, as the state
+religion of the land, it has just experienced a revival, a
+regalvanizing of its old-time energy, at the hands of some of the native
+archaeologists. Its sacred mirror, held up to Nature, has been burnished
+anew. Formerly this body of belief was the national faith, the Mikado,
+the direct descendant of the early gods, being its head on earth. His
+reinstatement to temporal power formed a very fitting first step toward
+reinvesting the cult with its former prestige; a curious instance,
+indeed, of a religious revival due to archaeological, not to religious
+zeal.
+
+This cult is the mythological inheritance of the whole eastern seaboard
+of Asia, from Siam to Kamtchatka. In Japan it is called Shintoism. The
+word "Shinto" means literally "the way of the gods," and the letter
+of its name is a true exponent of the spirit of the belief. For its
+scriptures are rather an itinerary of the gods' lives than a guide to
+that road by which man himself may attain to immortality. Thus with a
+certain fitness pilgrimages are its most noticeable rites. One cannot
+journey anywhere in the heart of Japan without meeting multitudes of
+these pilgrims, with their neat white leggings and their mushroom-like
+hats, nor rest at night at any inn that is not hung with countless
+little banners of the pilgrim associations, of which they all are
+members. Being a pilgrim there is equivalent to being a tourist here,
+only that to the excitement of doing the country is added a sustaining
+sense of the meritoriousness of the deed. Oftener than not the objective
+point of the devout is the summit of some noted mountain. For peaks
+are peculiarly sacred spots in the Shinto faith. The fact is perhaps an
+expression of man's instinctive desire to rise, as if the bodily act
+in some wise betokened the mental action. The shrine in so exalted
+a position is of the simplest: a rude hut, with or without the only
+distinctive emblems of the cult, a mirror typical of the god and the
+pendent gohei, or zigzag strips of paper, permanent votive offerings
+of man. As for the belief itself, it is but the deification of those
+natural elements which aboriginal man instinctively wonders at or fears,
+the sun, the moon, the thunder, the lightning, and the wind; all, in
+short, that he sees, hears, and feels, yet cannot comprehend. He clothes
+his terrors with forms which resemble the human, because he can conceive
+of nothing else that could cause the unexpected. But the awful shapes he
+conjures up have naught in common with himself. They are far too fearful
+to be followed. Their way is the "highway of the gods," but no Jacob's
+ladder for wayward man.
+
+In this externality to the human lies the reason that Shintoism and
+Buddhism can agree so well, and can both join with Confucianism in
+helping to form that happy family of faith which is so singular a
+feature of Far Eastern religious capability. It is not simply that the
+two contrive to live peaceably together; they are actually both of them
+implicitly believed by the same individual. Millions of Japanese
+are good Buddhists and good Shintoists at the same time. That such a
+combination should be possible is due to the essential difference in the
+character of the two beliefs. The one is extrinsic, the other intrinsic,
+in its relations to the human soul. Shintoism tells man but little about
+himself and his hereafter; Buddhism, little but about himself and
+what he may become. In examining Far Eastern religion, therefore, for
+personality, or the reverse, we may dismiss Shintoism as having no
+particular bearing upon the subject. The only effect it has is indirect
+in furthering the natural propensity of these people to an adoration of
+nature.
+
+In Korea and in China, again, Confucianism is the great moral law, as by
+reflection it is to a certain extent in Japan. But that in its turn
+may be omitted in the present argument; inasmuch as Confucius taught
+confessedly and designedly only a system of morals, and religiously
+abstained from pronouncing any opinion whatever upon the character or
+the career of the human soul.
+
+Taouism, the third great religion of China, resembles Shintoism to this
+extent, that it is a body of superstition, and not a form of philosophy.
+It undertakes to provide nostrums for spiritual ills, but is dumb as to
+the constitution of the soul for which it professes to prescribe.
+Its pills are to be swallowed unquestioningly by the patient, and are
+warranted to cure; and owing to the two great human frailties, fear
+and credulity, its practice is very large. Possessing, however, no
+philosophic diploma, it is without the pale of the present discussion.
+
+The demon-worship of Korea is a mild form of the same thing with the
+hierarchy left out, every man there being his own spiritual adviser.
+An ordinary Korean is born with an innate belief in malevolent spirits,
+whom he accordingly propitiates from time to time. One of nobler birth
+propitiates only the spirits of his own ancestors.
+
+We come, then, by a process of elimination to a consideration of
+Buddhism, the great philosophic faith of the whole Far East.
+
+Not uncommonly in the courtyard of a Japanese temple, in the solemn
+half-light of the sombre firs, there stands a large stone basin, cut
+from a single block, and filled to the brim with water. The trees, the
+basin, and a few stone lanterns--so called from their form, and not
+their function, for they have votive pebbles where we should look for
+wicks--are the sole occupants of the place. Sheltered from the
+wind, withdrawn from sound, and only piously approached by man, this
+antechamber of the god seems the very abode of silence and rest. It
+might be Nirvana itself, human entrance to an immortality like the god's
+within, so peaceful, so pervasive is its calm; and in its midst is the
+moss-covered monolith, holding in its embrace the little imprisoned pool
+of water. So still is the spot and so clear the liquid that you know the
+one only as the reflection of the other. Mirrored in its glassy surface
+appears everything around it. As you peer in, far down you see a tiny
+bit of sky, as deep as the blue is high above, across which slowly sail
+the passing clouds; then nearer stand the trees, arching overhead, as if
+bending to catch glimpses of themselves in that other world below; and
+then, nearer yet--yourself.
+
+Emblem of the spirit of man is this little pool to Far Oriental eyes.
+Subtile as the soul is the incomprehensible water; so responsive to
+light that it remains itself invisible; so clear that it seems illusion!
+Though portrayer so perfect of forms about it, all we know of the thing
+itself is that it is. Through none of the five senses do we perceive it.
+Neither sight, nor hearing, nor taste, nor smell, nor touch can tell us
+it exists; we feel it to be by the muscular sense alone, that blind and
+dumb analogue for the body of what consciousness is for the soul. Only
+when disturbed, troubled, does the water itself become visible, and then
+it is but the surface that we see. So to the Far Oriental this still
+little lake typifies the soul, the eventual purification of his own; a
+something lost in reflection, self-effaced, only the alter ego of the
+outer world.
+
+For contemplation, not action, is the Far Oriental's ideal of life. The
+repose of self-adjustment like that to which our whole solar system
+is slowly tending as its death,--this to him appears, though from no
+scientific deduction, the end of all existence. So he sits and ponders,
+abstractly, vaguely, upon everything in general,--synonym, alas, to
+man's finite mind, for nothing in particular,--till even the sense
+of self seems to vanish, and through the mist-like portal of
+unconsciousness he floats out into the vast indistinguishable sameness
+of Nirvana's sea.
+
+At first sight Buddhism is much more like Christianity than those of us
+who stay at home and speculate upon it commonly appreciate. As a system
+of philosophy it sounds exceedingly foreign, but it looks unexpectedly
+familiar as a faith. Indeed, the one religion might well pass for the
+counterfeit presentment of the other. The resemblance so struck the
+early Catholic missionaries that they felt obliged to explain the
+remarkable similarity between the two. With them ingenuous surprise
+instantly begot ingenious sophistry. Externally, the likeness was so
+exact that at first they could not bring themselves to believe that the
+Buddhist ceremonials had not been filched bodily from the practices of
+the true faith. Finding, however, that no known human agency had acted
+in the matter, they bethought them of introducing, to account for
+things, a deus ex machina in the shape of the devil. They were so
+pleased with this solution of the difficulty that they imparted it
+at once with much pride to the natives. You have indeed got, they
+graciously if somewhat gratuitously informed them, the outward semblance
+of the true faith, but you are in fact the miserable victims of an
+impious fraud. Satan has stolen the insignia of divinity, and is now
+masquerading before you as the deity; your god is really our devil,--a
+recognition of antipodal inversion truly worthy the Jesuitical mind!
+
+Perhaps it is not matter for great surprise that they converted but few
+of their hearers. The suggestion was hardly so diplomatic as might have
+been expected from so generally astute a body; for it could not make
+much difference what the all-presiding deity was called, if his actions
+were the same, since his motives were beyond human observation. Besides,
+the bare idea of a foreign bogus was not very terrifying. The Chinese
+possessed too many familiar devils of their own. But there was another
+and a much deeper reason, which we shall come to later, why Christianity
+made but little headway in the Far East.
+
+But it is by no means in externals only that the two religions are
+alike. If the first glance at them awakens that peculiar sensation which
+most of us have felt at some time or other, a sense of having seen all
+this before, further scrutiny reveals a deeper agreement than merely in
+appearances.
+
+In passing from the surface into the substance, it may be mentioned
+incidentally that the codes of morality of the two are about on a level.
+I say incidentally, for so far as its practice, certainly, is concerned,
+it not its preaching, morality has no more intimate connection with
+religion than it has with art or politics. If we doubt this, we have but
+to examine the facts. Are the most religious peoples the most moral? It
+needs no prolonged investigation to convince us that they are not. If
+proof of the want of a bond were required, the matter of truth-telling
+might be adduced in point. As this is a subject upon which a slight
+misconception exists in the minds of some evangelically persuaded
+persons, and because, what is more generally relevant, the presence of
+this quality, honesty in word and deed, has more than almost any other
+one characteristic helped to put us in the van of the world's advance
+to-day, it may not unfittingly be cited here.
+
+The argument in the case may be put thus. Have specially religious races
+been proportionally truth-telling ones? If not, has there been any
+other cause at work in the development of mankind tending to increase
+veracity? The answer to the first question has all the simplicity of
+a plain negative. No such pleasing concomitance of characteristics
+is observable to-day, or has been presented in the past. Permitting,
+however, the dead past to bury its shortcomings in oblivion, let us look
+at the world as we find it. We observe, then, that the religious spirit
+is quite as strong in Asia as it is in Europe; if anything, that at the
+present time it is rather stronger. The average Brahman, Mahometan,
+or Buddhist is quite as devout as the ordinary Roman Catholic or
+Presbyterian. If he is somewhat less given to propagandism, he is not
+a whit less regardful of his own salvation. Yet throughout the Orient
+truth is a thing unknown, lies of courtesy being de rigueur and lies
+of convenience de raison; while with us, fortunately, mendacity is
+generally discredited. But we need not travel so far for proof. The same
+is evident in less antipodal relations. Have the least religious nations
+of Europe been any less truthful than the most bigoted? Was fanatic
+Spain remarkable for veracity? Was Loyola a gentleman whose assertions
+carried conviction other than to the stake? Were the eminently mundane
+burghers whom he persecuted noted for a pious superiority to fact? Or,
+to narrow the field still further, and scan the circle of one's own
+acquaintance, are the most believing individuals among them worthy of
+the most belief? Assuredly not.
+
+We come, then, to the second point. Has there been any influence at work
+to differentiate us in this respect from Far Orientals? There has. Two
+separate causes, in fact, have conduced to the same result. The one is
+the development of physical science; the other, the extension of trade.
+The sole object of science being to discover truth, truth-telling is a
+necessity of its existence. Professionally, scientists are obliged to be
+truthful. Aliter of a Jesuit.
+
+So long as science was of the closet, its influence upon mankind
+generally was indirect and slight; but so soon as it proceeded to stalk
+into the street and earn its own living, its veracious character began
+to tell. When out of its theories sprang inventions and discoveries that
+revolutionized every-day affairs and changed the very face of things,
+society insensibly caught its spirit. Man awoke to the inestimable value
+of exactness. From scientists proper, the spirit filtered down through
+every stratum of education, till to-day the average man is born exact to
+a degree which his forefathers never dreamed of becoming. To-day, as
+a rule, the more intelligent the individual, the more truthful he is,
+because the more innately exact in thought, and thence in word and
+action. With us, to lie is a sign of a want of cleverness, not of an
+excess of it.
+
+The second cause, the extension of trade, has inculcated the same regard
+for veracity through the pocket. For with the increase of business
+transactions in both time and space, the telling of the truth has become
+a financial necessity. Without it, trade would come to a standstill at
+once. Our whole mercantile system, a modern piece of mechanism unknown
+to the East till we imported it thither, turns on an implicit belief
+in the word of one's neighbor. Our legal safeguards would snap like
+red tape were the great bond of mutual trust once broken. Western
+civilization has to be truthful, or perish.
+
+And now for the spirits of the two beliefs.
+
+The soul of any religion realizes in one respect the Brahman idea of the
+individual soul of man, namely, that it exists much after the manner of
+an onion, in many concentric envelopes. Man, they tell us, is composed
+not of a single body simply, but of several layers of body, each shell
+as it were respectively inclosing another. The outermost is the merely
+material body, of which we are so directly cognizant. This encases a
+second, more spiritual, but yet not wholly free from earthly affinities.
+This contains another, still more refined; till finally, inside of all
+is that immaterial something which they conceive to constitute the
+soul. This eventual residuum exemplifies the Franciscan notion of pure
+substance, for it is a thing delightfully devoid of any attributes
+whatever.
+
+We may, perhaps, not be aware of the existence of such an elaborate
+set of encasings to our own heart of hearts, nor of a something so
+very indefinite within, but the most casual glance at any religion will
+reveal its truth as regards the soul of a belief. We recognize the fact
+outwardly in the buildings erected to celebrate its worship. Not among
+the Jews alone was the holy of holies kept veiled, to temper the divine
+radiance to man's benighted understanding. Nor is the chancel-rail of
+Christianity the sole survivor of the more exclusive barriers of olden
+times, even in the Western world. In the Far East, where difficulty of
+access is deemed indispensable to dignity, the material approaches
+are still manifold and imposing. Court within court, building after
+building, isolate the shrine itself from the profane familiarity of
+the passers-by. But though the material encasings vary in number and
+in exclusiveness, according to the temperament of the particular
+race concerned, the mental envelopes exist, and must exist, in both
+hemispheres alike, so long as society resembles the crust of the earth
+on which it dwells,--a crust composed of strata that grow denser as one
+descends. What is clear to those on top seems obscure to those below;
+what are weighty arguments to the second have no force at all upon
+the first. There must necessarily be grades of elevation in individual
+beliefs, suited to the needs and cravings of each individual soul. A
+creed that fills the shallow with satisfaction leaves but an aching
+void in the deep. It is not of the slightest consequence how the belief
+starts; differentiated it is bound to become. The higher minds alone
+can rest content with abstract imaginings; the lower must have concrete
+realities on which to pin their faith. With them, inevitably, ideals
+degenerate into idols. In all religions this unavoidable debasement has
+taken place. The Roman Catholic who prays to a wooden image of Christ
+is not one whit less idolatrous than the Buddhist who worships a bronze
+statue of Amida Butzu. All that the common people are capable of seeing
+is the soul-envelope, for the soul itself they are unable to appreciate.
+Spiritually they are undiscerning, because imaginatively they are blind.
+
+Now the grosser soul-envelopes of the two great European and Asiatic
+faiths, though differing in detail, are in general parallel in
+structure. Each boasts its full complement of saints, whose congruent
+catalogues are equally wearisome in length. Each tells its circle of
+beads to help it keep count of similarly endless prayers. For in both,
+in the popular estimation, quantity is more effective to salvation
+than quality. In both the believer practically pictures his heaven for
+himself, while in each his hell, with a vividness that does like credit
+to its religious imagination, is painted for him by those of the cult
+who are themselves confident of escaping it. Into the lap of each mother
+church the pious believer drops his little votive offering with the same
+affectionate zeal, and in Asia, as in Europe, the mites of the many make
+the might of the mass.
+
+But behind all this is the religion of the few,--of those to whom
+sensuous forms cannot suffice to represent super-sensuous cravings;
+whose god is something more than an anthropomorphic creation; to whom
+worship means not the cramping of the body, but the expansion of the
+soul.
+
+The rays of the truth, like the rays of the sun, which universally seems
+to have been man's first adoration, have two properties equally inherent
+in their essence, warmth and light. And as for the life of all things
+on this globe both attributes of sunshine are necessary, so to the
+development of that something which constitutes the ego both qualities
+of the truth are vital. We sometimes speak of character as if it were
+a thing wholly apart from mind; but, in fact, the two things are so
+interwoven that to perceive the right course is the strongest possible
+of incentives to pursue it. In the end the two are one. Now, while
+clearness of head is all-important, kindness of heart is none the less
+so. The first, perhaps, is more needed in our communings with ourselves,
+the second in our commerce with others. For, dark and dense bodies
+that we are, we can radiate affection much more effectively than we can
+reflect views.
+
+That Christianity is a religion of love needs no mention; that Buddhism
+is equally such is perhaps not so generally appreciated. But just as the
+gospel of the disciple who loved and was loved the most begins its story
+by telling us of the Light that came into the world, so none the less
+surely could the Light of Asia but be also its warmth. Half of the
+teachings of Buddhism are spent in inculcating charity. Not only to men
+is man enjoined to show kindliness, but to all other animals as well.
+The people practise what their scriptures preach. The effect indirectly
+on the condition of the brutes is almost as marked as its more direct
+effect on the character of mankind. In heart, at least, Buddhism and
+Christianity are very close.
+
+But here the two paths to a something beyond an earthly life diverge. Up
+to this point the two religions are alike, but from this point on they
+are so utterly unlike that the very similarity of all that went before
+only suffices to make of the second the weird, life-counterfeiting
+shadow of the first. As in a silhouette, externally the contours are all
+there, but within is one vast blank. In relation to one's neighbor the
+two beliefs are kin, but as regards one's self, as far apart as the West
+is from the East. For here, at this idea of self, we are suddenly aware
+of standing on the brink of a fathomless abyss, gazing giddily down into
+that great gulf which divides Buddhism from Christianity. We cannot see
+the bottom. It is a separation more profound than death; it seems to
+necessitate annihilation. To cross it we must bury in its depths all we
+know as ourselves.
+
+Christianity is a personal religion; Buddhism, an impersonal one. In
+this fundamental difference lies the world-wide opposition of the two
+beliefs. Christianity tells us to purify ourselves that we may enjoy
+countless aeons of that bettered self hereafter; Buddhism would have us
+purify ourselves that we may lose all sense of self for evermore.
+
+For all that it preaches the essential vileness of the natural man,
+Christianity is a gospel of optimism. While it affirms that at present
+you are bad, it also affirms that this depravity is no intrinsic part
+of yourself. It unquestioningly asserts that it is something foreign
+to your true being. It even believes that in a more or less spiritual
+manner your very body will survive. It essentially clings to the ego.
+What it inculcates is really present endeavor sanctioned by the prospect
+of future bliss. It tacitly takes for granted the desirability
+of personal existence, and promises the certainty of personal
+immortality,--a terror to evildoers, and a sustaining sense of coming
+unalloyed happiness to the good. Through and through its teachings runs
+the feeling of the fullness of life, that desire which will not die,
+that wish of the soul which beats its wings against its earthly casement
+in its longing for expansion beyond the narrow confines of threescore
+years and ten.
+
+Buddhism, on the contrary, is the cri du coeur of pessimism. This life,
+it says, is but a chain of sorrows. To multiply days is only to multiply
+evil. These desires that urge us on are really cause of all our woe. We
+think they are ourselves. We are mistaken. They are all illusion, and
+we are victims of a mirage. This personality, this sense of self, is
+a cruel deception and a snare. Realize once the true soul behind it,
+devoid of attributes, therefore without this capacity for suffering, an
+indivisible part of the great impersonal soul of nature: then, and
+then only, will you have found happiness in the blissful quiescence of
+Nirvana.
+
+With a certain poetic fitness, misery and impersonality were both
+present in the occasion that gave the belief birth. Many have turned
+to the consolations of religion by reason of their own wretchedness;
+Gautama sought its help touched by the woes of others whom, in his own
+happy life journey, he chanced one day to come across. Shocked by the
+sight of human disease, old age, and death, sad facts to which hitherto
+he had been sedulously kept a stranger, he renounced the world that he
+might find for it an escape from its ills. But bliss, as he conceived
+it, lay not in wanting to be something he was not, but in actual want of
+being. His quest for mankind was immunity from suffering, not the active
+enjoyment of life. In this negative way of looking at happiness,
+he acted in strict conformity with the spirit of his world. For the
+doctrine of pessimism had already been preached. It underlay the whole
+Brahman philosophy, and everybody believed it implicitly. Already the
+East looked at this life as an evil, and had affirmed for the individual
+spirit extinction to be happier than existence. The wish for an end
+to the ego, the hope to be eventually nothing, Gautama accepted for a
+truism as undeniably as the Brahmans did. What he pronounced false was
+the Brahman prospectus of the way to reach this desirable impersonal
+state. Their road, be said, could not possibly land the traveller where
+it professed, since it began wrong, and ended nowhere. The way, he
+asserted, is within a man. He has but to realize the truth, and from
+that moment he will see his goal and the road that leads there. There
+is no panacea for human ills, of external application. The Brahman
+homoeopathic treatment of sin is folly. The slaughtering of men and
+bulls cannot possibly bring life to the soul. To mortify the body for
+the sins of the flesh is palpably futile, for in desire alone lies all
+the ill. Quench the desire, and the deeds will die of inanition. Man
+himself is sole cause of his own misery. Get rid, then, said the Buddha,
+of these passions, these strivings for the sake of self, that hold the
+true soul a prisoner. They have to do with things which we know are
+transitory: how can they be immortal themselves? We recognize them as
+subject to our will; they are, then, not the I.
+
+As a man, he taught, becomes conscious that he himself is something
+distinct from his body, so, if he reflect and ponder, he will come to
+see that in like manner his appetites, ambitions, hopes, are really
+extrinsic to the spirit proper. Neither heart nor head is truly the man,
+for he is conscious of something that stands behind both. Behind desire,
+behind even the will, lies the soul, the same for all men, one with the
+soul of the universe. When he has once realized this eternal truth,
+the man has entered Nirvana. For Nirvana is not an absorption of the
+individual soul into the soul of all things, since the one has always
+been a part of the other. Still less is it utter annihilation. It is
+simply the recognition of the eternal oneness of the two, back through
+an everlasting past on through an everlasting future.
+
+Such is the belief which the Japanese adopted, and which they profess
+to-day. Such to them is to be the dawn of death's to-morrow; a blessed
+impersonal immortality, in which all sense of self, illusion that it
+is, shall itself have ceased to be; a long dreamless sleep, a beatified
+rest, which no awakening shall ever disturb.
+
+Among such a people personal Christianity converts but few. They accept
+our material civilization, but they reject our creeds. To preach a
+prolongation of life appears to them like preaching an extension of
+sorrow. At most, Christianity succeeds only in making them doubters of
+what lies beyond this life. But though professing agnosticism while they
+live, they turn, when the shadows of death's night come on, to the bosom
+of that faith which teaches that, whatever may have been one's earthly
+share of happiness, "'tis something better not to be."
+
+Strange it seems at first that those who have looked so long to the
+rising sun for inspiration should be they who live only in a sort of
+lethargy of life, while those who for so many centuries have turned
+their faces steadily to the fading glory of the sunset should be the
+ones who have embodied the spirit of progress of the world. Perhaps the
+light, by its very rising, checks the desire to pursue; in its setting
+it lures one on to follow.
+
+Though this religion of impersonality is not their child, it is their
+choice. They embraced it with the rest that India taught them, centuries
+ago. But though just as eager to learn of us now as of India then,
+Christianity fails to commend itself. This is not due to the fact that
+the Buddhist missionaries came by invitation, and ours do not. Nor is it
+due to any want of personal character in these latter, but simply to an
+excess of it in their doctrines.
+
+For to-day the Far East is even more impersonal in its religion than are
+those from whom that religion originally came. India has returned again
+to its worship of Brahma, which, though impersonal enough, is less so
+than is the gospel of Gautama. For it is passively instead of actively
+impersonal.
+
+Buddhism bears to Brahmanism something like the relation that
+Protestantism does to Roman Catholicism. Both bishops and Brahmans
+undertake to save all who shall blindly commit themselves to
+professional guidance, while Buddhists and Protestants alike believe
+that a man's salvation must be brought about by the action of the man
+himself. The result is, that in the matter of individuality the two
+reformed beliefs are further apart than those against which they
+severally protested. For by the change the personal became more
+personal, and the impersonal more impersonal than before. The
+Protestant, from having tamely allowed himself to be led, began to take
+a lively interest in his own self-improvement; while the Buddhist,
+from a former apathetic acquiescence in the doctrine of the universally
+illusive, set to work energetically towards self-extinction. Curious
+labor for a mind, that of devoting all its strength to the thinking
+itself out of existence! Not content with being born impersonal, a Far
+Oriental is constantly striving to make himself more so.
+
+We have seen, then, how in trying to understand these peoples we
+are brought face to face with impersonality in each of those three
+expressions of the human soul, speech, thought, yearning. We have looked
+at them first from a social standpoint. We have seen how singularly
+little regard is paid the individual from his birth to his death. How
+he lives his life long the slave of patriarchal customs of so puerile
+a tendency as to be practically impossible to a people really grown up.
+How he practises a wholesale system of adoption sufficient of itself to
+destroy any surviving regard for the ego his other relations might
+have left. How in his daily life he gives the minimum of thought to
+the bettering himself in any worldly sense, and the maximum of polite
+consideration to his neighbor. How, in short, he acts toward himself as
+much as possible as if he were another, and to that other as if he
+were himself. Then, not content with standing stranger like upon the
+threshold, we have sought to see the soul of their civilization in its
+intrinsic manifestations. We have pushed our inquiry, as it were,
+one step nearer its home. And the same trait that was apparent
+sociologically has been exposed in this our antipodal phase of psychical
+research. We have seen how impersonal is his language, the principal
+medium of communication between one soul and another; how impersonal
+are the communings of his soul with itself. How the man turns to
+nature instead of to his fellowman in silent sympathy. And how, when he
+speculates upon his coming castles in the air, his most roseate desire
+is to be but an indistinguishable particle of the sunset clouds and
+vanish invisible as they into the starry stillness of all-embracing
+space.
+
+Now what does this strange impersonality betoken? Why are these peoples
+so different from us in this most fundamental of considerations to
+any people, the consideration of themselves? The answer leads to some
+interesting conclusions.
+
+
+
+Chapter 8. Imagination.
+
+If, as is the case with the moon, the earth, as she travelled round
+her orbit turned always the same face inward, we might expect to find,
+between the thoughts of that hemisphere which looked continually to the
+sun, and those of the other peering eternally out at the stars,
+some such difference as actually exists between ourselves and our
+longitudinal antipodes. For our conception of the cosmos is of a
+sunlit world throbbing with life, while their Nirvana finds not unfit
+expression in the still, cold, fathomless awe of the midnight sky. That
+we cannot thus directly account for the difference in local coloring
+serves but to make that difference of more human interest. The
+dissimilarity between the Western and the Far Eastern attitude of mind
+has in it something beyond the effect of environment. For it points to
+the importance of the part which the principle of individuality plays
+in the great drama daily enacting before our eyes, and which we know as
+evolution. It shows, as I shall hope to prove, that individuality bears
+the same relation to the development of mind that the differentiation
+of species does to the evolution of organic life: that the degree of
+individualization of a people is the self-recorded measure of its place
+in the great march of mind.
+
+All life, whether organic or inorganic, consists, as we know, in
+a change from a state of simple homogeneity to one of complex
+heterogeneity. The process is apparently the same in a nebula or a
+brachiopod, although much more intricate in the latter. The immediate
+force which works this change, the life principle of things, is, in the
+case of organic beings, a subtle something which we call spontaneous
+variation. What this mysterious impulse may be is beyond our present
+powers of recognition. As yet, the ultimates of all things lie hidden
+in the womb of the vast unknown. But just as in the case of a man we can
+tell what organs are vital, though we are ignorant what the vital spark
+may be, so in our great cosmical laws we can say in what their power
+resides, though we know not really what they are. Whether mind be but a
+sublimated form of matter, or, what amounts to the same thing, matter
+a menial kind of mind, or whether, which seems less likely, it be a
+something incomparable with substance, of one thing we are sure, the
+same laws of heredity govern both. In each a like chain of continuity
+leads from the present to the dim past, a connecting clue which we can
+follow backward in imagination. Now what spontaneous variation is to the
+material organism, imagination, apparently, is to the mental one. Just
+as spontaneous variation is constantly pushing the animal or the plant
+to push out, as a vine its tendrils, in all directions, while natural
+conditions are as constantly exercising over it a sort of unconscious
+pruning power, so imagination is ever at work urging man's mind out and
+on, while the sentiment of the community, commonly called common sense,
+which simply means the point already reached by the average, is as
+steadily tending to keep it at its own level. The environment helps, in
+the one case as in the other, to the shaping of the development. Purely
+physical in the first, it is both physical and psychical in the
+second, the two reacting on each other. But in either case it is only a
+constraining condition, not the divine impulse itself. Precisely, then,
+as in the organism, this subtle spirit checked in one direction finds
+a way to advance in another, and produces in consequence among an
+originally similar set of bodies a gradual separation into species
+which grow wider with time, so in brain evolution a like force for like
+reasons tends inevitably to an ever-increasing individualization.
+
+Now what evidence have we that this analogy holds? Let us look at the
+facts, first as they present themselves subjectively.
+
+The instinct of self-preservation, that guardian angel so persistent to
+appear when needed, owes its summons to another instinct no less strong,
+which we may call the instinct of individuality; for with the same
+innate tenacity with which we severally cling to life do we hold to
+the idea of our own identity. It is not for the philosophic desire of
+preserving a very small fraction of humanity at large that we take such
+pains to avoid destruction; it is that we insensibly regard death as
+threatening to the continuance of the ego, in spite of the theories of
+a future life which we have so elaborately developed. Indeed, the
+psychical shrinking is really the quintessence of the physical fear. We
+cleave to the abstract idea closer even than to its concrete embodiment.
+Sooner would we forego this earthly existence than surrender that
+something we know as self. For sufficient cause we can imagine courting
+death; we cannot conceive of so much as exchanging our individuality for
+another's, still less of abandoning it altogether; for gradually a man,
+as he grows older, comes to regard his body as, after all, separable
+from himself. It is the soul's covering, rendered indispensable by the
+climatic conditions of our present existence, one without which we
+could no longer continue to live here. To forego it does not necessarily
+negative, so far as we yet know, the possibility of living elsewhere.
+Some more congenial tropic may be the wandering spirit's fate. But to
+part with the sense of self seems to be like taking an eternal farewell
+of the soul. The Western mind shrinks before the bare idea of such a
+thought.
+
+The clinging to one's own identity, then, is now an instinct, whatever
+it may originally have been. It is a something we inherited from our
+ancestors and which we shall transmit more or less modified to our
+descendants. How far back this consciousness has been felt passes
+the possibilities of history to determine, since the recording of it
+necessarily followed the fact. All we know is that its mention is coeval
+with chronicle, and its origin lost in allegory. The Bible, one of the
+oldest written records in the world, begins with a bit of mythology of
+a very significant kind. When the Jews undertook to trace back their
+family tree to an idyllic garden of Eden, they mentioned as growing
+there beside the tree of life, another tree called the tree of
+knowledge. Of what character this knowledge was is inferable from the
+sudden self-consciousness that followed the partaking of it. So that if
+we please we may attribute directly to Eve's indiscretion the many
+evils of our morbid self-consciousness of the present day. But without
+indulging in unchivalrous reflections we may draw certain morals from it
+of both immediate and ultimate applicability.
+
+To begin with, it is a most salutary warning to the introspective, and
+in the second place it is a striking instance of a myth which is not
+a sun myth; for it is essentially of human regard, an attempt on man's
+part to explain that most peculiar attribute of his constitution,
+the all-possessing sense of self. It looks certainly as if he was not
+over-proud of his person that he should have deemed its recognition
+occasion for the primal curse, and among early races the person is for
+a good deal of the personality. What he lamented was not life but the
+unavoidable exertion necessary to getting his daily bread, for the
+question whether life were worth while was as futile then as now, and as
+inconceivable really as 4-dimensional space.
+
+We are then conscious of individuality as a force within ourselves. But
+our knowledge by no means ends there; for we are aware of it in the case
+of others as well.
+
+About certain people there exists a subtle something which leaves its
+impress indelibly upon the consciousness of all who come in contact
+with them. This something is a power, but a power of so indefinable a
+description that we beg definition by calling it simply the personality
+of the man. It is not a matter of subsequent reasoning, but of direct
+perception. We feel it. Sometimes it charms us; sometimes it repels. But
+we can no more be oblivious to it than we can to the temperature of
+the air. Its possessor has but to enter the room, and insensibly we are
+conscious of a presence. It is as if we had suddenly been placed in the
+field of a magnetic force.
+
+On the other hand there are people who produce no effect upon us
+whatever. They come and go with a like indifference. They are as
+unimportant psychically as if they were any other portion of the
+furniture. They never stir us. We might live with them for fifty years
+and be hardly able to tell, for any influence upon ourselves, whether
+they existed or not. They remind us of that neutral drab which certain
+religious sects assume to show their own irrelevancy to the world. They
+are often most estimable folk, but they are no more capable of inspiring
+a strong emotion than the other kind are incapable of doing so. And we
+say the difference is due to the personality or want of personality of
+the man. Now, in what does this so-called personality consist? Not in
+bodily presence simply, for men quite destitute of it possess the
+force in question; not in character only, for we often disapprove of a
+character whose attraction we are powerless to resist; not in intellect
+alone, for men more rational fail of stirring us as these unconsciously
+do. In what, then? In life itself; not that modicum of it, indeed, which
+suffices simply to keep the machine moving, but in the life principle,
+the power which causes psychical change; which makes the individual
+something distinct from all other individuals, a being capable of
+proving sufficient, if need be, unto himself; which shows itself, in
+short, as individuality. This is not a mere restatement of the case, for
+individuality is an objective fact capable of being treated by physical
+science. And as we know much more at present about physical facts than
+we do of psychological problems, we may be able to arrive the sooner at
+solution.
+
+Individuality, personality, and the sense of self are only three
+different aspects of one and the same thing. They are so many various
+views of the soul according as we regard it from an intrinsic, an
+altruistic, or an egoistic standpoint. For by individuality is not meant
+simply the isolation in a corporeal casing of a small portion of the
+universal soul of mankind. So far as mind goes, this would not be
+individuality at all, but the reverse. By individuality we mean that
+bundle of ideas, thoughts, and daydreams which constitute our separate
+identity, and by virtue of which we feel each one of us at home within
+himself. Now man in his mind-development is bound to become more and
+more distinct from his neighbor. We can hardly conceive a progress so
+uniform as not to necessitate this. It would be contrary to all we
+know of natural law, besides contradicting daily experience. For each
+successive generation bears unmistakable testimony to the fact. Children
+of the same parents are never exactly like either their parents or one
+another, and they often differ amazingly from both. In such instances
+they revert to type, as we say; but inasmuch as the race is steadily
+advancing in development, such reversion must resemble that of an estate
+which has been greatly improved since its previous possession. The
+appearance of the quality is really the sprouting of a seed whose
+original germ was in some sense coeval with the beginning of things.
+This mind-seed takes root in some cases and not in others, according to
+the soil it finds. And as certain traits develop and others do not,
+one man turns out very differently from his neighbor. Such inevitable
+distinction implies furthermore that the man shall be sensible of it.
+Consciousness is the necessary attribute of mental action. Not only is
+it the sole way we have of knowing mind; without it there would be no
+mind to know. Not to be conscious of one's self is, mentally speaking,
+not to be. This complex entity, this little cosmos of a world, the "I,"
+has for its very law of existence self-consciousness, while personality
+is the effect it produces upon the consciousness of others.
+
+But we may push our inquiry a step further, and find in imagination
+the cause of this strange force. For imagination, or the image-making
+faculty, may in a certain sense be said to be the creator of the world
+within. The separate senses furnish it with material, but to it alone is
+due the building of our castles, on premises of fact or in the air. For
+there is no impassable gulf between the two. Coleridge's distinction
+that imagination drew possible pictures and fancy impossible ones, is
+itself, except as a classification, an impossible distinction to draw;
+for it is only the inconceivable that can never be. All else is purely a
+matter of relation. We may instance dreams which are usually considered
+to rank among the most fanciful creations of the mind. Who has not in
+his dreams fallen repeatedly from giddy heights and invariably escaped
+unhurt? If he had attempted the feat in his waking moments he would
+assuredly have been dashed to pieces at the bottom. And so we say the
+thing is impossible. But is it? Only under the relative conditions of
+his mass and the earth's. If the world he happens to inhabit were not
+its present size, but the size of one of the tinier asteroids, no such
+disastrous results would follow a chance misstep. He could there walk
+off precipices when too closely pursued by bears--if I remember rightly
+the usual childish cause of the same--with perfect impunity. The
+bear could do likewise, unfortunately. We should have arrived at our
+conclusion even quicker had we decreased the size both of the man and
+his world. He would not then have had to tumble actually so far, and
+would therefore have arrived yet more gently at the foot. This turns
+out, then, to be a mere question of size. Decrease the scale of the
+picture, and the impossible becomes possible at once. All fancies are
+not so easily reducible to actual facts as the one we have taken, but
+all, perhaps, eventually may be explicable in the same general way.
+At present we certainly cannot affirm that anything may not be thus
+explained. For the actual is widening its field every day. Even in this
+little world of our own we are daily discovering to be fact what we
+should have thought fiction, like the sailor's mother the tale of
+the flying fish. Beyond it our ken is widening still more. Gulliver's
+travels may turn out truer than we think. Could we traverse the
+inter-planetary ocean of ether, we might eventually find in Jupiter
+the land of Lilliput or in Ceres some old-time country of the
+Brobdignagians. For men constituted muscularly like ourselves would have
+to be proportionately small in the big planet and big in the small
+one. Still stranger things may exist around other suns. In those bright
+particular stars--which the little girl thought pinholes in the dark
+canopy of the sky to let the glory beyond shine through--we are finding
+conditions of existence like yet unlike those we already know. To our
+groping speculations of the night they almost seem, as we gaze on them
+in their twinkling, to be winking us a sort of comprehension. Conditions
+may exist there under which our wildest fancies may be commonplace
+facts. There may be
+
+   "Some Xanadu where Kublai can
+    a stately pleasure dome decree,"
+
+and carry out his conceptions to his own disillusionment, perhaps. For
+if the embodiment of a fancy, however complete, left nothing further
+to be wished, imagination would have no incentive to work. Coleridge's
+distinction does very well to separate, empirically, certain kinds of
+imaginative concepts from certain others; but it has no real foundation
+in fact. Nor presumably did he mean it to have. But it serves, not
+inaptly, as a text to point out an important scientific truth, namely,
+that there are not two such qualities of the mind, but only one. For
+otherwise we might have supposed the fact too evident to need mention.
+Imagination is the single source of the new, the one mainspring of
+psychical advance; reason, like a balance-wheel, only keeping the
+action regular. For reason is but the touchstone of experience, our own,
+inherited, or acquired from others. It compares what we imagine with
+what we know, and gives us answer in terms of the here and the now,
+which we call the actual. But the actual is really nothing but the
+local. It does not mark the limits of the possible.
+
+That imagination has been the moving spirit of the psychical world is
+evident, whatever branch of human thought we are pleased to examine. We
+are in the habit, in common parlance, of making a distinction between
+the search after truth and the search after beauty, calling the
+one science and the other art. Now while we are not slow to impute
+imagination to art, we are by no means so ready to appreciate its
+connection with science. Yet contrary, perhaps, to exogeric ideas on the
+subject, it is science rather than art that demands imagination of her
+votaries. Not that art may not involve the quality to a high degree, but
+that a high degree of art is quite compatible with a very small amount
+of imagination. On the one side we may instance painting. Now painting
+begins its career in the humble capacity of copyist, a pretty poor
+copyist at that. At first so slight was its skill that the rudest
+symbols sufficed. "This is a man" was conventionally implied by a
+few scratches bearing a very distant relationship to the real thing.
+Gradually, owing to human vanity and a growing taste, pictures improved.
+Combinations were tried, a bit from one place with a piece from another;
+a sort of mosaic requiring but a slight amount of imagination. Not that
+imagination of a higher order has not been called into play, although
+even now pictures are often happy adaptations rather than creations
+proper. Some masters have been imaginative; others, unfortunately for
+themselves and still more for the public, have not. For that the art may
+attain a high degree of excellence for itself and much distinction for
+its professors, without calling in the aid of imagination, is evident
+enough on this side of the globe, without travelling to the other.
+
+Take, on the other hand, a branch of science which, to the average
+layman, seems peculiarly unimaginative, the science of mathematics.
+Yet at the risk of appearing to cast doubts upon the validity of its
+conclusions, it might be called the most imaginative product of
+human thought; for it is simply one vast imagination based upon a few
+so-called axioms, which are nothing more nor less than the results of
+experience. It is none the less imaginative because its discoveries
+always accord subsequently with fact, since man was not aware of them
+beforehand. Nor are its inevitable conclusions inevitable to any save
+those possessed of the mathematician's prophetic sight. Once discovered,
+it requires much less imagination to understand them. With the light
+coming from in front, it is an easy matter to see what lies behind one.
+
+So with other fabrics of human thought, imagination has been spinning
+and weaving them all. From the most concrete of inventions to the most
+abstract of conceptions the same force reveals itself upon examination;
+for there is no gulf between what we call practical and what we consider
+theoretical. Everything abstract is ultimately of practical use, and
+even the most immediately utilitarian has an abstract principle at
+its core. We are too prone to regard the present age of the world as
+preeminently practical, much as a middle-aged man laments the witching
+fancies of his boyhood. But, and there is more in the parallel than
+analogy, if the man be truly imaginative he is none the less so at
+forty-five than he was at twenty, if his imagination have taken on a
+more critical form; for this latter half of the nineteenth century is
+perhaps the most imaginative period the world's history has ever known.
+While with one hand we are contriving means of transit for our ideas,
+and even our very voices, compared to which Puck's girdle is anything
+but talismanic, with the other we are stretching out to grasp the action
+of mind on mind, pushing our way into the very realm of mind itself.
+
+History tells the same story in detail; for the history of mankind,
+imperfectly as we know it, discloses the fact that imagination, and not
+the power of observation nor the kindred capability of perception, has
+been the cause of soul-evolution.
+
+The savage is but little of an imaginative being. We are tempted, at
+times, to imagine him more so than he is, for his fanciful folk-lore.
+The proof of which overestimation is that we find no difficulty in
+imagining what he does, and even of imagining what he probably imagined,
+and finding our suppositions verified by discovery. Yet his powers of
+observation may be marvellously developed. The North American Indian
+tracks his foe through the forest by signs unrecognizable to a white
+man, and he reasons most astutely upon them, and still that very man
+turns out to be a mere child when put before problems a trifle out of
+his beaten path. And all because his forefathers had not the power to
+imagine something beyond what they actually saw. The very essence of the
+force of imagination lies in its ability to change a man's habitat for
+him. Without it, man would forever have remained, not a mollusk, to be
+sure, but an animal simply. A plant cannot change its place, an animal
+cannot alter its conditions of existence except within very narrow
+bounds; man is free in the sense nothing else in the world is.
+
+What is true of individuals has been true of races. The most imaginative
+races have proved the greatest factors in the world's advance.
+
+Now after this look at our own side of the world, let us turn to the
+other; for it is this very psychological fact that mental progression
+implies an ever-increasing individualization, and that imagination is
+the force at work in the process which Far Eastern civilization,
+taken in connection with our own, reveals. In doing this, it explains
+incidentally its own seeming anomalies, the most unaccountable of which,
+apparently, is its existence.
+
+We have seen how impressively impersonal the Far East is. Now if
+individuality be the natural measure of the height of civilization which
+a nation has reached, impersonality should betoken a relatively laggard
+position in the race. We ought, therefore, to find among these people
+certain other characteristics corroborative of a less advanced state of
+development. In the first place, if imagination be the impulse of which
+increase in individuality is the resulting motion, that quality should
+be at a minimum there. The Far Orientals ought to be a particularly
+unimaginative set of people. Such is precisely what they are. Their lack
+of imagination is a well-recognized fact. All who have been brought in
+contact with them have observed it, merchants as strikingly as students.
+Indeed, the slightest intercourse with them could not fail to make
+it evident. Their matter-of-fact way of looking at things is truly
+distressing, coming as it does from so artistic a people. One notices
+it all the more for the shock. To get a prosaic answer from a man whose
+appearance and surroundings betoken better things is not calculated to
+dull that answer's effect. Aston, in a pamphlet on the Altaic tongues,
+cites an instance which is so much to the point that I venture to repeat
+it here. He was a true Chinaman, he says, who, when his English master
+asked him what he thought of
+
+   "That orbed maiden
+    With white fires laden
+    Whom mortals call the moon,"
+
+replied, "My thinkee all same lamp pidgin" (pidgin meaning thing in the
+mongrel speech, Chinese in form and English in diction, which goes by
+the name of pidgin English).
+
+Their own tongues show the same prosaic character, picturesque as they
+appear to us at first sight. That effect is due simply to the novelty
+to us of their expressions. To talk of a pass as an "up-down" has a
+refreshing turn to our unused ear, but it is a much more descriptive
+than imaginative figure of speech. Nor is the phrase "the being (so)
+is difficult," in place of "thank you," a surprisingly beautiful bit of
+imagery, delightful as it sounds for a change. Our own tongue has, in
+its daily vocabulary, far more suggestive expressions, only familiarity
+has rendered us callous to their use. We employ at every instant words
+which, could we but stop to think of them, would strike us as poetic
+in the ideas they call up. As has been well said, they were once happy
+thoughts of some bright particular genius bequeathed to posterity
+without so much as an accompanying name, and which proved so popular
+that they soon became but symbols themselves.
+
+Their languages are paralleled by their whole life. A lack of any
+fanciful ideas is one of the most salient traits of all Far Eastern
+races, if indeed a sad dearth of anything can properly be spoken of as
+salient. Indirectly their want of imagination betrays itself in their
+every-day sayings and doings, and more directly in every branch of
+thought. Originality is not their strong point. Their utter ignorance of
+science shows this, and paradoxical as it may seem, their art, in
+spite of its merit and its universality, does the same. That art and
+imagination are necessarily bound together receives no very forcible
+confirmation from a land where, nationally speaking, at any rate, the
+first is easily first and the last easily last, as nations go. It is to
+quite another quality that their artistic excellence must be ascribed.
+That the Chinese and later the Japanese have accomplished results
+at which the rest of the world will yet live to marvel, is due to
+their--taste. But taste or delicacy of perception has absolutely nothing
+to do with imagination. That certain of the senses of Far Orientals are
+wonderfully keen, as also those parts of the brain that directly respond
+to them, is beyond question; but such sensitiveness does not in the
+least involve the less earth-tied portions of the intellect. A peculiar
+responsiveness to natural beauty, a sort of mental agreement with its
+earthly environment, is a marked feature of the Japanese mind.
+But appreciation, however intimate, is a very different thing from
+originality. The one is commonly the handmaid of the other, but the
+other by no means always accompanies the one.
+
+So much for the cause; now for the effect which we might expect to find
+if our diagnosis be correct.
+
+If the evolving force be less active in one race than in another, three
+relative results should follow. In the first place, the race in question
+will at any given moment be less advanced than its fellow; secondly, its
+rate of progress will be less rapid; and lastly, its individual members
+will all be nearer together, just as a stream, in falling from a cliff,
+starts one compact mass, then gradually increasing in speed, divides
+into drops, which, growing finer and finer and farther and farther
+apart, descend at last as spray. All three of these consequences are
+visible in the career of the Far Eastern peoples. The first result
+scarcely needs to be proved to us, who are only too ready to believe it
+without proof. It is, nevertheless, a fact. Viewed unprejudicedly, their
+civilization is not so advanced a one as our own. Although they are
+certainly our superiors in some very desirable particulars, their whole
+scheme is distinctly more aboriginal fundamentally. It is more finished,
+as far as it goes, but it does not go so far. Less rude, it is more
+rudimentary. Indeed, as we have seen, its surface-perfection really
+shows that nature has given less thought to its substance. One may say
+of it that it is the adult form of a lower type of mind-specification.
+
+The second effect is scarcely less patent. How slow their progress
+has been, if for centuries now it can be called progress at all,
+is world-known. Chinese conservatism has passed into a proverb. The
+pendulum of pulsation in the Middle Kingdom long since came to a stop
+at the medial point of rest. Centre of civilization, as they call
+themselves, one would imagine that their mind-machinery had got caught
+on their own dead centre, and now could not be made to move. Life, which
+elsewhere is a condition of unstable equilibrium, there is of a fatally
+stable kind. For the Chinaman's disinclination to progress is something
+more than vis inertiae; it has become an ardent devotion to the status
+quo. Jostled, he at once settles back to his previous condition again;
+much as more materially, after a lifetime spent in California, at his
+death his body is punctiliously embalmed and sent home across five
+thousand miles of sea for burial. With the Japanese the condition of
+affairs is somewhat different. Their tendency to stand still is of a
+purely passive kind. It is a state of neutral equilibrium, stationary
+of itself but perfectly responsive to an impulse from without. Left to
+their own devices, they are conservative enough, but they instantly
+copy a more advanced civilization the moment they get a chance. This
+proclivity on their part is not out of keeping with our theory. On the
+contrary, it is precisely what was to have been expected; for we see the
+very same apparent contradiction in characters we are thrown with every
+day. Imitation is the natural substitute for originality. The less
+strong a man's personality the more prone is he to adopt the ideas of
+others, on the same principle that a void more easily admits a foreign
+body than does space that is already occupied; or as a blank piece of
+paper takes a dye more brilliantly for not being already tinted itself.
+
+The third result, the remarkable homogeneity of the people, is not,
+perhaps, so universally appreciated, but it is equally evident on
+inspection, and no less weighty in proof. Indeed, the Far Eastern
+state of things is a kind of charade on the word; for humanity there
+is singularly uniform. The distance between the extremes of
+mind-development in Japan is much less than with us. This lack of
+divergence exists not simply in certain lines of thought, but in
+all those characteristics by which man is parted from the brutes. In
+reasoning power, in artistic sensibility, in delicacy of perception, it
+is the same story. If this were simply the impression at first sight,
+no deductions could be drawn from it, for an impression of racial
+similarity invariably marks the first stage of acquaintance of one
+people by another. Even in outward appearance it is so. We find it
+at first impossible to tell the Japanese apart; they find it equally
+impossible to differentiate us. But the present resemblance is not a
+matter of first impressions. The fact is patent historically. The men
+whom Japan reveres are much less removed from the common herd than is
+the case in any Western land. And this has been so from the earliest
+times. Shakspeares and Newtons have never existed there. Japanese
+humanity is not the soil to grow them. The comparative absence of genius
+is fully paralleled by the want of its opposite. Not only are the paths
+of preeminence untrodden; the purlieus of brutish ignorance are likewise
+unfrequented. On neither side of the great medial line is the departure
+of individuals far or frequent. All men there are more alike;--so much
+alike, indeed, that the place would seem to offer a sort of forlorn hope
+for disappointed socialists. Although religious missionaries have not
+met with any marked success among the natives, this less deserving class
+of enthusiastic disseminators of an all-possessing belief might do
+well to attempt it. They would find there a very virgin field of a most
+promisingly dead level. It is true, human opposition would undoubtedly
+prevent their tilling it, but Nature, at least, would not present quite
+such constitutional obstacles as she wisely does with us.
+
+The individual's mind is, as it were, an isolated bit of the race mind.
+The same set of traits will be found in each. Mental characteristics
+there are a sort of common property, of which a certain undifferentiated
+portion is indiscriminately allotted to every man at birth. One soul
+resembles another so much, that in view of the patriarchal system
+under which they all exist, there seems to the stranger a peculiar
+appropriateness in so strong a family likeness of mind. An idea of how
+little one man's brain differs from his neighbor's may be gathered from
+the fact, that while a common coolie in Japan spends his spare time
+in playing a chess twice as complicated as ours, the most advanced
+philosopher is still on the blissfully ignorant side of the pons
+asinorum.
+
+We find, then, that in all three points the Far East fulfils what our
+theory demanded.
+
+There is one more consideration worthy of notice. We said that the
+environment had not been the deus ex materia in the matter; but that the
+soul itself possessed the germ of its own evolution. This fact does
+not, however, preclude another, that the environment has helped in the
+process. Change of scene is beneficial to others besides invalids.
+How stimulating to growth a different habitat can prove, when at all
+favorable, is perhaps sufficiently shown in the case of the marguerite,
+which, as an emigrant called white-weed, has usurped our fields. The
+same has been no less true of peoples. Now these Far Eastern peoples, in
+comparison with our own forefathers, have travelled very little. A race
+in its travels gains two things: first it acquires directly a great
+deal from both places and peoples that it meets, and secondly it is
+constantly put to its own resources in its struggle for existence,
+and becomes more personal as the outcome of such strife. The changed
+conditions, the hostile forces it finds, necessitate mental ingenuity
+to adapt them and influence it unconsciously. To see how potent these
+influences prove we have but to look at the two great branches of the
+Aryan family, the one that for so long now has stayed at home, and the
+one that went abroad. Destitute of stimulus from without, the Indo-Aryan
+mind turned upon itself and consumed in dreamy metaphysics the
+imagination which has made its cousins the leaders in the world's
+progress to-day. The inevitable numbness of monotony crept over the
+stay-at-homes. The deadly sameness of their surroundings produced its
+unavoidable effect. The torpor of the East, like some paralyzing poison,
+stole into their souls, and they fell into a drowsy slumber only to
+dream in the land they had formerly wrested from its possessors. Their
+birthright passed with their cousins into the West.
+
+In the case of the Altaic races which we are considering, cause and
+effect mutually strengthened each other. That they did not travel more
+is due primarily to a lack of enterprise consequent upon a lack of
+imagination, and then their want of travel told upon their imagination.
+They were also unfortunate in their journeying. Their travels were
+prematurely brought to an end by that vast geographical Nirvana the
+Pacific Ocean, the great peaceful sea as they call it themselves. That
+they would have journeyed further is shown by the way their dreams went
+eastward still. They themselves could not for the preventing ocean, and
+the lapping of its waters proved a nation's lullaby.
+
+One thing, I think, then, our glance at Far Eastern civilization has
+more than suggested. The soul, in its progress through the world, tends
+inevitably to individualization. Yet the more we perceive of the cosmos
+the more do we recognize an all-pervading unity in it. Its soul must
+be one, not many. The divine power that made all things is not itself
+multifold. How to reconcile the ever-increasing divergence with
+an eventual similarity is a problem at present transcending our
+generalizations. What we know would seem to be opposed to what we
+must infer. But perception of how we shall merge the personal in the
+universal, though at present hidden from sight, may sometime come to
+us, and the seemingly irreconcilable will then turn out to involve no
+contradiction at all. For this much is certain: grand as is the great
+conception of Buddhism, majestic as is the idea of the stately rest it
+would lead us to, the road here below is not one the life of the world
+can follow. If earthly existence be an evil, then Buddhism will help us
+ignore it; but if by an impulse we cannot explain we instinctively crave
+activity of mind, then the great gospel of Gautama touches us not; for
+to abandon self--egoism, that is, not selfishness is the true vacuum
+which nature abhors. As for Far Orientals, they themselves furnish proof
+against themselves. That impersonality is not man's earthly goal they
+unwittingly bear witness; for they are not of those who will survive.
+Artistic attractive people that they are, their civilization is like
+their own tree flowers, beautiful blossoms destined never to bear fruit;
+for whatever we may conceive the far future of another life to be, the
+immediate effect of impersonality cannot but be annihilating. If these
+people continue in their old course, their earthly career is closed.
+Just as surely as morning passes into afternoon, so surely are these
+races of the Far East, if unchanged, destined to disappear before the
+advancing nations of the West. Vanish they will off the face of the
+earth and leave our planet the eventual possession of the dwellers where
+the day declines. Unless their newly imported ideas really take root, it
+is from this whole world that Japanese and Koreans, as well as Chinese,
+will inevitably be excluded. Their Nirvana is already being realized;
+already it has wrapped Far Eastern Asia in its winding-sheet, the shroud
+of those whose day was but a dawn, as if in prophetic keeping with the
+names they gave their homes,--the Land of the Day's Beginning, and the
+Land of the Morning Calm.
+
+
+
+
+
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+Project Gutenberg's Etext of The Soul of the Far East, by Lowell
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+
+
+
+
+
+For project Gutenburg, produced by Eric Hutton
+bookman@rmplc.co.uk
+
+
+
+
+
+The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell
+
+
+Contents
+
+Chapter 1. Individuality
+
+Chapter 2. Family
+
+Chapter 3. Adoption
+
+Chapter 4. Language
+
+Chapter 5. Nature and Art
+
+Chapter 6. Art
+
+Chapter 7. Religion
+
+Chapter 8. Imagination
+
+
+
+Chapter 1.  Individuality.
+
+The boyish belief that on the other side of our globe all things are
+of necessity upside down is startlingly brought back to the man when
+he first sets foot at Yokohama.  If his initial glance does not,
+to be sure, disclose the natives in the every-day feat of standing
+calmly on their heads, an attitude which his youthful imagination
+conceived to be a necessary consequence of their geographical position,
+it does at least reveal them looking at the world as if from the
+standpoint of that eccentric posture.  For they seem to him to see
+everything topsy-turvy.  Whether it be that their antipodal situation
+has affected their brains, or whether it is the mind of the observer
+himself that has hitherto been wrong in undertaking to rectify the
+inverted pictures presented by his retina, the result, at all events,
+is undeniable.  The world stands reversed, and, taking for granted
+his own uprightness, the stranger unhesitatingly imputes to them an
+obliquity of vision, a state of mind outwardly typified by the
+cat-like obliqueness of their eyes.
+
+If the inversion be not precisely of the kind he expected, it is
+none the less striking, and impressibly more real.  If personal
+experience has definitely convinced him that the inhabitants of that
+under side of our planet do not adhere to it head downwards, like
+flies on a ceiling,--his early a priori deduction,--they still
+appear quite as antipodal, mentally considered.  Intellectually,
+at least, their attitude sets gravity at defiance.  For to the mind's
+eye their world is one huge, comical antithesis of our own.  What we
+regard intuitively in one way from our standpoint, they as
+intuitively observe in a diametrically opposite manner from theirs.
+To speak backwards, write backwards, read backwards, is but the a b c
+of their contrariety.  The inversion extends deeper than mere modes
+of expression, down into the very matter of thought.  Ideas of ours
+which we deemed innate find in them no home, while methods which
+strike us as preposterously unnatural appear to be their birthright.
+From the standing of a wet umbrella on its handle instead of its
+head to dry to the striking of a match away in place of toward one,
+there seems to be no action of our daily lives, however trivial,
+but finds with them its appropriate reaction--equal but opposite.
+Indeed, to one anxious of conforming to the manners and customs of
+the country, the only road to right lies in following unswervingly
+that course which his inherited instincts assure him to be wrong.
+
+Yet these people are human beings; with all their eccentricities
+they are men.  Physically we cannot but be cognizant of the fact, nor
+mentally but be conscious of it.  Like us, indeed, and yet so unlike
+are they that we seem, as we gaze at them, to be viewing our own
+humanity in some mirth-provoking mirror of the mind,--a mirror that
+shows us our own familiar thoughts, but all turned wrong side out.
+Humor holds the glass, and we become the sport of our own reflections.
+But is it otherwise at home?  Do not our personal presentments mock
+each of us individually our lives long?  Who but is the daily dupe of
+his dressing-glass, and complacently conceives himself to be a very
+different appearing person from what he is, forgetting that his
+right side has become his left, and vice versa?  Yet who, when by
+chance he catches sight in like manner of the face of a friend,
+can keep from smiling at the caricatures which the mirror's
+left-for-right reversal makes of the asymmetry of that friend's
+features,--caricatures all the more grotesque for being utterly
+unsuspected by their innocent original?  Perhaps, could we once see
+ourselves as others see us, our surprise in the case of foreign
+peoples might be less pronounced.
+
+Regarding, then, the Far Oriental as a man, and not simply as a
+phenomenon, we discover in his peculiar point of view a new
+importance,--the possibility of using it stereoptically.  For his
+mind-photograph of the world can be placed side by side with ours,
+and the two pictures combined will yield results beyond what either
+alone could possibly have afforded.  Thus harmonized, they will help
+us to realize humanity.  Indeed it is only by such a combination of
+two different aspects that we ever perceive substance and distinguish
+reality from illusion.  What our two eyes make possible for material
+objects, the earth's two hemispheres may enable us to do for mental
+traits.  Only the superficial never changes its expression;
+the appearance of the solid varies with the standpoint of the observer. 
+In dreamland alone does everything seem plain, and there all is
+unsubstantial.
+
+To say that the Japanese are not a savage tribe is of course
+unnecessary; to repeat the remark, anything but superfluous, on the
+principle that what is a matter of common notoriety is very apt to
+prove a matter about which uncommonly little is known.  At present
+we go halfway in recognition of these people by bestowing upon them
+a demi-diploma of mental development called semi-civilization,
+neglecting, however, to specify in what the fractional qualification
+consists.  If the suggestion of a second moiety, as of something
+directly complementary to them, were not indirectly complimentary to
+ourselves, the expression might pass; but, as it is, the self-praise
+is rather too obvious to carry conviction.  For Japan's claim to
+culture is not based solely upon the exports with which she
+supplements our art, nor upon the paper, china, and bric-a-brac with
+which she adorns our rooms; any more than Western science is
+adequately represented in Japan by our popular imports there of
+kerosene oil, matches, and beer.  Only half civilized the Far East
+presumably is, but it is so rather in an absolute than a relative
+sense; in the sense of what might have been, not of what is.  It is
+so as compared, not with us, but with the eventual possibilities of
+humanity.  As yet, neither system, Western nor Eastern, is perfect
+enough to serve in all things as standard for the other.  The light
+of truth has reached each hemisphere through the medium of its own
+mental crystallization, and this has polarized it in opposite ways,
+so that now the rays that are normal to the eyes of the one only
+produce darkness to those of the other.  For the Japanese civilization
+in the sense of not being savagery is the equal of our own.  It is
+not in the polish that the real difference lies; it is in the
+substance polished.  In politeness, in delicacy, they have as a
+people no peers.  Art has been their mistress, though science has
+never been their master.  Perhaps for this very reason that art,
+not science, has been the Muse they courted, the result has been all
+the more widespread.  For culture there is not the attainment of the
+few, but the common property of the people.  If the peaks of intellect
+rise less eminent, the plateau of general elevation stands higher.
+But little need be said to prove the civilization of a land where
+ordinary tea-house girls are models of refinement, and common
+coolies, when not at work, play chess for pastime.
+
+If Japanese ways look odd at first sight, they but look more odd on
+closer acquaintance.  In a land where, to allow one's understanding
+the freer play of indoor life, one begins, not by taking off his
+hat, but by removing his boots, he gets at the very threshold a hint
+that humanity is to be approached the wrong end to.  When, after thus
+entering a house, he tries next to gain admittance to the mind of
+its occupant, the suspicion becomes a certainty.  He discovers that
+this people talk, so to speak, backwards; that before he can hope to
+comprehend them, or make himself understood in return, he must learn
+to present his thoughts arranged in inverse order from the one in
+which they naturally suggest themselves to his mind.  His sentences
+must all be turned inside out.  He finds himself lost in a labyrinth
+of language.  The same seems to be true of the thoughts it embodies.
+The further he goes the more obscure the whole process becomes,
+until, after long groping about for some means of orienting himself,
+he lights at last upon the clue.  This clue consists in "the survival
+of the unfittest."
+
+In the civilization of Japan we have presented to us a most
+interesting case of partially arrested development; or, to speak
+esoterically, we find ourselves placed face to face with a singular
+example of a completed race-life.  For though from our standpoint the
+evolution of these people seems suddenly to have come to an end in
+mid-career, looked at more intimately it shows all the signs of
+having fully run its course.  Development ceased, not because of
+outward obstruction, but from purely intrinsic inability to go on.
+The intellectual machine was not shattered; it simply ran down.
+To this fact the phenomenon owes its peculiar interest.  For we
+behold here in the case of man the same spectacle that we see
+cosmically in the case of the moon, the spectacle of a world that
+has died of old age.  No weak spot in their social organism
+destroyed them from within; no epidemic, in the shape of foreign
+hordes, fell upon them from without.  For in spite of the fact that
+China offers the unique example of a country that has simply lived
+to be conquered, mentally her masters have invariably become her
+pupils.  Having ousted her from her throne as ruler, they proceeded
+to sit at her feet as disciples.  Thus they have rather helped than
+hindered her civilization.
+
+Whatever portion of the Far East we examine we find its mental
+history to be the same story with variations.  However unlike China,
+Korea, and Japan are in some respects, through the careers of all
+three we can trace the same life-spirit.  It is the career of the
+river Jordan rising like any other stream from the springs among the
+mountains only to fall after a brief existence into the Dead Sea.
+For their vital force had spent itself more than a millennium ago.
+Already, then, their civilization had in its deeper developments
+attained its stature, and has simply been perfecting itself since.
+We may liken it to some stunted tree, that, finding itself prevented
+from growth, bastes the more luxuriantly to put forth flowers and
+fruit.  For not the final but the medial processes were skipped.
+In those superficial amenities with which we more particularly link
+our idea of civilization, these peoples continued to grow.  Their
+refinement, if failing to reach our standard in certain respects,
+surpasses ours considering the bare barbaric basis upon which it
+rests. For it is as true of the Japanese as of the proverbial Russian,
+though in a more scientific sense, that if you scratch him you will
+find the ancestral Tartar.  But it is no less true that the descendants
+of this rude forefather have now taken on a polish of which their
+own exquisite lacquer gives but a faint reflection.  The surface was
+perfected after the substance was formed.  Our word finish, with its
+double meaning, expresses both the process and the result.
+
+There entered, to heighten the bizarre effect, a spirit common in
+minds that lack originality--the spirit of imitation.  Though
+consequent enough upon a want of initiative, the results of this trait
+appear anything but natural to people of a more progressive past. 
+The proverbial collar and pair of spurs look none the less odd to
+the stranger for being a mental instead of a bodily habit. Something
+akin to such a case of unnatural selection has there taken place. 
+The orderly procedure of natural evolution was disastrously
+supplemented by man.  For the fact that in the growth of their tree
+of knowledge the branches developed out of all proportion to the
+trunk is due to a practice of culture-grafting.
+
+From before the time when they began to leave records of their
+actions the Japanese have been a nation of importers, not of
+merchandise, but of ideas.  They have invariably shown the most
+advanced free-trade spirit in preferring to take somebody else's
+ready-made articles rather than to try to produce any brand-new
+conceptions themselves.  They continue to follow the same line of life.
+A hearty appreciation of the things of others is still one of their
+most winning traits.  What they took they grafted bodily upon their
+ancestral tree, which in consequence came to present a most
+unnaturally diversified appearance.  For though not unlike other
+nations in wishing to borrow, if their zeal in the matter was
+slightly excessive, they were peculiar in that they never assimilated
+what they took.  They simply inserted it upon the already existing
+growth.  There it remained, and throve, and blossomed, nourished by
+that indigenous Japanese sap, taste.  But like grafts generally,
+the foreign boughs were not much modified by their new life-blood,
+nor was the tree in its turn at all affected by them. Connected with
+it only as separable parts of its structure, the cuttings might have
+been lopped off again without influencing perceptibly the condition
+of the foster-parent stem.  The grafts in time grew to be great
+branches, but the trunk remained through it all the trunk of a
+sapling. In other words, the nation grew up to man's estate, keeping
+the mind of its childhood.
+
+What is thus true of the Japanese is true likewise of the Koreans
+and of the Chinese.  The three peoples, indeed, form so many links in
+one long chain of borrowing.  China took from India, then Korea
+copied China, and lastly Japan imitated Korea.  In this simple manner
+they successively became possessed of a civilization which originally
+was not the property of any one of them.  In the eagerness they all
+evinced in purloining what was not theirs, and in the perfect
+content with which they then proceeded to enjoy what they had taken,
+they remind us forcibly of that happy-go-lucky class in the
+community which prefers to live on questionable loans rather than
+work itself for a living.  Like those same individuals, whatever
+interest the Far Eastern people may succeed in raising now, Nature
+will in the end make them pay dearly for their lack of principal.
+
+The Far Eastern civilization resembles, in fact, more a mechanical
+mixture of social elements than a well differentiated chemical
+compound. For in spite of the great variety of ingredients thrown
+into its caldron of destiny, as no affinity existed between them, no
+combination resulted.  The power to fuse was wanting.  Capability to
+evolve anything is not one of the marked characteristics of the Far
+East.  Indeed, the tendency to spontaneous variation, Nature's mode
+of making experiments, would seem there to have been an enterprising
+faculty that was exhausted early.  Sleepy, no doubt, from having got
+up betimes with the dawn, these dwellers in the far lands of the
+morning began to look upon their day as already well spent before
+they had reached its noon.  They grew old young, and have remained
+much the same age ever since.  What they were centuries ago, that at
+bottom they are to-day.  Take away the European influence of the
+last twenty years, and each man might almost be his own
+great-grandfather.  In race characteristics he is yet essentially
+the same.  The traits that distinguished these peoples in the past
+have been gradually extinguishing them ever since.  Of these traits,
+stagnating influences upon their career, perhaps the most important
+is the great quality of impersonality.
+
+If we take, through the earth's temperate zone, a belt of country
+whose northern and southern edges are determined by certain limiting
+isotherms, not more than half the width of the zone apart, we shall
+find that we have included in a relatively small extent of surface
+almost all the nations of note in the world, past or present.
+Now if we examine this belt, and compare the different parts of it
+with one another, we shall be struck by a remarkable fact.
+The peoples inhabiting it grow steadily more personal as we go west.
+So unmistakable is this gradation of spirit, that one is tempted to
+ascribe it to cosmic rather than to human causes.  It is as marked
+as the change in color of the human complexion observable along any
+meridian, which ranges from black at the equator to blonde toward
+the pole.  In like manner, the sense of self grows more intense as
+we follow in the wake of the setting sun, and fades steadily as we
+advance into the dawn.  America, Europe, the Levant, India, Japan,
+each is less personal than the one before.  We stand at the nearer
+end of the scale, the Far Orientals at the other.  If with us the I
+seems to be of the very essence of the soul, then the soul of the
+Far East may be said to be Impersonality.
+
+Curious as this characteristic is as a fact, it is even more
+interesting as a factor.  For what it betokens of these peoples in
+particular may suggest much about man generally.  It may mark a
+stride in theory, if a standstill in practice.  Possibly it may help
+us to some understanding of ourselves.  Not that it promises much aid
+to vexed metaphysical questions, but as a study in sociology it may
+not prove so vain.
+
+And for a thing which is always with us, its discussion may be said
+to be peculiarly opportune just now.  For it lies at the bottom of
+the most pressing questions of the day.  Of the two great problems
+that stare the Western world in the face at the present moment, both
+turn to it for solution.  Agnosticism, the foreboding silence of
+those who think, socialism, communism, and nihilism, the petulant
+cry of those who do not, alike depend ultimately for the right to be
+upon the truth or the falsity of the sense of self.
+
+For if there be no such actual thing as individuality, if the
+feeling we call by that name be naught but the transient illusion
+the Buddhists would have us believe it, any faith founded upon it as
+basis vanishes as does the picture in a revolving kaleidoscope,--
+less enduring even than the flitting phantasmagoria of a dream.
+If the ego be but the passing shadow of the material brain, at the
+disintegration of the gray matter what will become of us?  Shall we
+simply lapse into an indistinguishable part of the vast universe
+that compasses us round?  At the thought we seem to stand straining
+our gaze, on the shore of the great sea of knowledge, only to watch
+the fog roll in, and hide from our view even those headlands of hope
+that, like beseeching hands, stretch out into the deep.
+
+So more materially.  If individuality be a delusion of the mind, what
+motive potent enough to excite endeavor in the breast of an ordinary
+mortal remains?  Philosophers, indeed, might still work for the
+advancement of mankind, but mankind itself would not continue long
+to labor energetically for what should profit only the common weal.
+Take away the stimulus of individuality, and action is paralyzed at
+once.  For with most men the promptings of personal advantage only
+afford sufficient incentive to effort.  Destroy this force, then any
+consideration due it lapses, and socialism is not only justified,
+it is raised instantly into an axiom of life.  The community, in that
+case, becomes itself the unit, the indivisible atom of existence.
+Socialism, then communism, then nihilism, follow in inevitable
+sequence.  That even the Far Oriental, with all his numbing
+impersonality, has not touched this goal may at least suggest that
+individuality is a fact.
+
+But first, what do we know about its existence ourselves?
+
+Very early in the course of every thoughtful childhood an event
+takes place, by the side of which, to the child himself, all other
+events sink into insignificance.  It is not one that is recognized
+and chronicled by the world, for it is wholly unconnected with
+action.  No one but the child is aware of its occurrence, and he
+never speaks of it to others.  Yet to that child it marks an epoch.
+So intensely individual does it seem that the boy is afraid to avow
+it, while in reality so universal is it that probably no human being
+has escaped its influence.  Though subjective purely, it has more
+vividness than any external event; and though strictly intrinsic to
+life, it is more startling than any accident of fate or fortune.
+This experience of the boy's, at once so singular and yet so general,
+is nothing less than the sudden revelation to him one day of the
+fact of his own personality.
+
+Somewhere about the time when sensation is giving place to
+sensitiveness as the great self-educator, and the knowledge gained
+by the five bodily senses is being fused into the wisdom of that
+mental one we call common sense, the boy makes a discovery akin to
+the act of waking up.  All at once he becomes conscious of himself;
+and the consciousness has about it a touch of the uncanny.  Hitherto
+he has been aware only of matter; he now first realizes mind. 
+Unwarned, unprepared, he is suddenly ushered before being, and
+stands awe-struck in the presence of--himself.
+
+If the introduction to his own identity was startling, there is
+nothing reassuring in the feeling that this strange acquaintanceship
+must last.  For continue it does.  It becomes an unsought intimacy he
+cannot shake off.  Like to his own shadow he cannot escape it.
+To himself a man cannot but be at home.  For years this alter ego
+haunts him, for he imagines it an idiosyncrasy of his own, a morbid
+peculiarity he dare not confide to any one, for fear of being
+thought a fool.  Not till long afterwards, when he has learned to
+live as a matter of course with his ever-present ghost, does he
+discover that others have had like familiars themselves.
+
+Sometimes this dawn of consciousness is preceded by a long twilight
+of soul-awakening; but sometimes, upon more sensitive and subtler
+natures, the light breaks with all the suddenness of a sunrise at
+the equator, revealing to the mind's eye an unsuspected world of
+self within.  But in whatever way we may awake to it, the sense of
+personality, when first realized, appears already, like the fabled
+Goddess of Wisdom, full grown in the brain.  From the moment when we
+first remember ourselves we seem to be as old as we ever seem to
+others afterwards to become.  We grow, indeed, in knowledge, in
+wisdom, in experience, as our years increase, but deep down in our
+heart of hearts we are still essentially the same.  To be sure,
+people pay us more deference than they did, which suggests a doubt
+at times whether we may not have changed; small boys of a succeeding
+generation treat us with a respect that causes us inwardly to smile,
+as we think how little we differ from them, if they but knew it.
+For at bottom we are not conscious of change from that morning, long
+ago, when first we realized ourselves.  We feel just as young now as
+we felt old then.  We are but amused at the world's discrimination
+where we can detect no difference.
+
+Every human being has been thus "twice born": once as matter, once
+as mind.  Nor is this second birth the birthright only of mankind.
+All the higher animals probably, possibly even the lower too, have
+experienced some such realization of individual identity.  However
+that may be, certainly to all races of men has come this revelation;
+only the degree in which they have felt its force has differed
+immensely.  It is one thing to the apathetic, fatalistic Turk, and
+quite another matter to an energetic, nervous American.  Facts,
+fancies, faiths, all show how wide is the variance in feelings. 
+With them no introspective [greek]cnzhi seauton overexcites the
+consciousness of self.  But with us; as with those of old possessed
+of devils, it comes to startle and stays to distress.  Too apt is it
+to prove an ever-present, undesirable double.  Too often does it
+play the part of uninvited spectre at the feast, whose presence no
+one save its unfortunate victim suspects.  The haunting horror of
+his own identity is to natures far less eccentric than Kenelm
+Chillingly's only too common a curse.  To this companionship,
+paradoxical though it sound, is principally due the peculiar
+loneliness of childhood.  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 modem science is hinting to-day.  With us the idea seems the
+bitter fruit of material philosophy; by them it was looked upon as
+the fairest flower of their faith.  What is dreaded now as the
+impious suggestion of the godless four thousand years ago was
+reverenced as a sacred tenet of religion.
+
+Shorter even than his short threescore years and ten is that soul's
+life of which man is directly cognizant.  Bounded by two seemingly
+impersonal states is the personal consciousness of which he is made
+aware: the one the infantile existence that precedes his boyish
+discovery, the other the gloom that grows with years,--two twilights
+that fringe the two borders of his day.  But with the Far Oriental,
+life is all twilight.  For in Japan and China both states are found
+together.  There, side by side with the present unconsciousness of
+the babe exists the belief in a coming unconsciousness for the man. 
+So inseparably blended are the two that the known truth of the one
+seems, for that very bond, to carry with it the credentials of the
+other.  Can it be that the personal, progressive West is wrong, and
+the impersonal, impassive East right?  Surely not.  Is the other side
+of the world in advance of us in mind-development, even as it
+precedes us in the time of day; or just as our noon is its night,
+may it not be far in our rear?  Is not its seeming wisdom rather the
+precociousness of what is destined never to go far?
+
+Brought suddenly upon such a civilization, after the blankness of a
+long ocean voyage, one is reminded instinctively of the feelings of
+that bewildered individual who, after a dinner at which he had
+eventually ceased to be himself, was by way of pleasantry left out
+overnight in a graveyard, on their way home, by his humorously
+inclined companions; and who, on awaking alone, in a still dubious
+condition, looked around him in surprise, rubbed his eyes two or
+three times to no purpose, and finally muttered in a tone of
+awe-struck conviction, "Well, either I'm the first to rise, or I'm a
+long way behind time!"
+
+Whether their failure to follow the natural course of evolution
+results in bringing them in at the death just the same or not, these
+people are now, at any rate, stationary not very far from the point
+at which we all set out.  They are still in that childish state of
+development before self-consciousness has spoiled the sweet
+simplicity of nature.  An impersonal race seems never to have fully
+grown up.
+
+Partly for its own sake, partly for ours, this most distinctive
+feature of the Far East, its marked impersonality, is well worthy
+particular attention; for while it collaterally suggests pregnant
+thoughts about ourselves, it directly underlies the deeper oddities
+of a civilization which is the modern eighth wonder of the world. 
+We shall see this as we look at what these people are, at what they
+were, and at what they hope to become; not historically, but
+psychologically, as one might perceive, were he but wise enough, in
+an acorn, besides the nut itself, two oaks, that one from which it
+fell, and that other which from it will rise.  These three states,
+which we may call its potential past, present, and future, may be
+observed and studied in three special outgrowths of a race's
+character: in its language, in its every-day thoughts, and in its
+religion.  For in the language of a people we find embalmed the
+spirit of its past; in its every-day thoughts, be they of arts or
+sciences, is wrapped up its present life; in its religion lie
+enfolded its dreamings of a future.  From out each of these three
+subjects in the Far East impersonality stares us in the face.
+Upon this quality as a foundation rests the Far Oriental character. 
+It is individually rather than nationally that I propose to scan it
+now. It is the action of a particle in the wave of world-development
+I would watch, rather than the propagation of the wave itself.
+Inferences about the movement of the whole will follow of themselves
+a knowledge of the motion of its parts.
+
+But before we attack the subject esoterically, let us look a moment
+at the man as he appears in his relation to the community.  Such a
+glance will suggest the peculiar atmosphere of impersonality that
+pervades the people.
+
+However lacking in cleverness, in merit, or in imagination a man may
+be, there are in our Western world, if his existence there be so
+much as noticed at all, three occasions on which he appears in print.
+His birth, his marriage, and his death are all duly chronicled in
+type, perhaps as sufficiently typical of the general unimportance of
+his life.  Mention of one's birth, it is true, is an aristocratic
+privilege, confined to the world of English society.  In democratic
+America, no doubt because all men there are supposed to be born free
+and equal, we ignore the first event, and mention only the last two
+episodes, about which our national astuteness asserts no such
+effacing equality.
+
+Accepting our newspaper record as a fair enough summary of the
+biography of an average man, let us look at these three momentous
+occasions in the career of a Far Oriental.
+
+
+Chapter 2.  Family.
+
+In the first place, then, the poor little Japanese baby is ushered
+into this world in a sadly impersonal manner, for he is not even
+accorded the distinction of a birthday.  He is permitted instead
+only the much less special honor of a birth-year.  Not that he
+begins his separate existence otherwise than is the custom of
+mortals generally, at a definite instant of time, but that very
+little subsequent notice is ever taken of the fact.  On the contrary,
+from the moment he makes his appearance he is spoken of as a year
+old, and this same age he continues to be considered in most simple
+ease of calculation, till the beginning of the next calendar year. 
+When that epoch of general rejoicing arrives, he is credited with
+another year himself.  So is everybody else.  New Year's day is a
+common birthday for the community, a sort of impersonal anniversary
+for his whole world.  A like reckoning is followed in China and
+Korea.  Upon the disadvantages of being considered from one's birth
+up at least one year and possibly two older than one really is,
+it lies beyond our present purpose to expatiate.  It is quite evident
+that woman has had no voice in the framing of such a chronology. 
+One would hardly imagine that man had either, so astronomic is the
+system.  A communistic age is however but an unavoidable detail of
+the general scheme whose most suggestive feature consists in the
+subordination of the actual birthday of the individual to the
+fictitious birthday of the community.  For it is not so much the
+want of commemoration shown the subject as the character of the
+commemoration which is significant.  Some slight notice is indeed
+paid to birthdays during early childhood, but even then their
+observance is quite secondary in importance to that of the great
+impersonal anniversaries of the third day of the third moon and the
+fifth day of the fifth moon. These two occasions celebrated the
+coming of humanity into the world with an impersonality worthy of
+the French revolutionary calendar. The first of them is called the
+festival of girls, and commemorates the birth of girls generally,
+the advent of the universal feminine, as one may say.  The second is
+a corresponding anniversary for boys. Owing to its sex, the latter
+is the greater event of the two, and in consequence of its most
+conspicuous feature is styled the festival of fishes.  The fishes
+are hollow paper images of the "tai" from four to six feet in length,
+tied to the top of a long pole planted in the ground and tipped with
+a gilded ball.  Holes in the paper at the mouth and the tail enable
+the wind to inflate the body so that it floats about horizontally,
+swaying hither and thither, and tugging at the line after the manner
+of a living thing.  The fish are emblems of good luck, and are set
+up in the courtyard of every house where a son has been born during
+the year.  On this auspicious day Tokio is suddenly transformed into
+eighty square miles of aquarium.
+
+For any more personal purpose New Year's day eclipses all particular
+anniversaries.  Then everybody congratulates everybody else upon
+everything in general, and incidentally upon being alive.  Such
+substitution of an abstract for a concrete birthday, although
+exceedingly convenient for others, must at least conduce to
+self-forgetfulness on the part of its proper possessor, and tend
+inevitably to merge the identity of the individual in that of the
+community.
+
+It fares hardly better with the Far Oriental in the matter of marriage.
+Although he is, as we might think, the person most interested in the
+result, he is permitted no say in the affair whatever.  In fact,
+it is not his affair at all, but his father's. His hand is simply
+made a cat's-paw of.  The matter is entirely a business transaction,
+entered into by the parent and conducted through regular marriage
+brokers.  In it he plays only the part of a marionette.  His revenge
+for being thus bartered out of what might be the better half of his
+life, he takes eventually on the next succeeding generation.
+
+His death may be said to be the most important act of his whole life.
+For then only can his personal existence be properly considered to
+begin.  By it he joins the great company of ancestors who are to
+these people of almost more consequence than living folk, and of
+much more individual distinction.  Particularly is this the case in
+China and Korea, but the same respect, though in a somewhat less
+rigid form, is paid the dead in Japan.  Then at last the individual
+receives that recognition which was denied him in the flesh.
+In Japan a mortuary tablet is set up to him in the house and duly
+worshipped; on the continent the ancestors are given a dwelling of
+their own, and even more devotedly reverenced.  But in both places
+the cult is anything but funereal.  For the ancestral tombs are
+temples and pleasure pavilions at the same time, consecrated not
+simply to rites and ceremonies, but to family gatherings and general
+jollification.  And the fortunate defunct must feel, if he is still
+half as sentient as his dutiful descendants suppose, that his
+earthly life, like other approved comedies, has ended well.
+
+Important, however, as these critical points in his career may be
+reckoned by his relatives, they are scarcely calculated to prove
+equally epochal to the man himself.  In a community where next to no
+note is ever taken of the anniversary of his birth, some doubt as to
+the special significance of that red-letter day may not unnaturally
+creep into his own mind.  While in regard to his death, although it
+may be highly flattering for him to know that he will certainly
+become somebody when he shall have ceased, practically, to be anybody,
+such tardy recognition is scarcely timely enough to be properly
+appreciated.  Human nature is so earth-tied, after all, that a
+post-mundane existence is very apt to seem immaterial as well as be so.
+
+With the old familiar landmarks of life obliterated in this
+wholesale manner, it is to be doubted whether one of us, placed in
+the midst of such a civilization, would know himself.  He certainly
+would derive but scanty satisfaction from the recognition if he did.
+Even Nirvana might seem a happy limbo by comparison.  With a communal,
+not to say a cosmic, birthday, and a conventional wife, he might
+well deem his separate existence the shadow of a shade and embrace
+Buddhism from mere force of circumstances.
+
+Further investigation would not shake his opinion.  For a far-oriental
+career is thoroughly in keeping with these, its typical turning-points.
+From one end of its course to the other it is painfully impersonal. 
+In its regular routine as in its more salient junctures, life
+presents itself to these races a totally different affair from what
+it seems to us.  The cause lies in what is taken to be the basis of
+socio-biology, if one may so express it.
+
+In the Far East the social unit, the ultimate molecule of existence,
+is not the individual, but the family.
+
+We occidentals think we value family.  We even parade our
+pretensions so prominently as sometimes to tread on other people's
+prejudices of a like nature.  Yet we scarcely seem to appreciate the
+inheritance. For with a logic which does us questionable credit, we
+are proud of our ancestors in direct proportion to their remoteness
+from ourselves, thus permitting Democracy to revenge its
+insignificance by smiling at our self-imposed satire.  To esteem a
+man in inverse ratio to the amount of remarkable blood he has
+inherited is, to say the least, bathetic.  Others, again, make
+themselves objectionable by preferring their immediate relatives to
+all less connected companions, and cling to their cousins so closely
+that affection often culminates in matrimony, nature's remonstrances
+notwithstanding.  But with all the pride or pleasure which we take
+in the members of our particular clan, our satisfaction really
+springs from viewing them on an autocentric theory of the social
+system.  In our own eyes we are the star about which, as in Joseph's
+dream, our relatives revolve and upon which they help to shed an
+added lustre. Our Ptolemaic theory of society is necessitated by our
+tenacity to the personal standpoint.  This fixed idea of ours causes
+all else seemingly to rotate about it.  Such an egoistic conception
+is quite foreign to our longitudinal antipodes.  However much
+appearances may agree, the fundamental principles upon which family
+consideration is based are widely different in the two hemispheres. 
+For the far-eastern social universe turns on a patricentric pivot.
+
+Upon the conception of the family as the social and political unit
+depends the whole constitution of China.  The same theory somewhat
+modified constitutes the life-principle of Korea, of Japan, and of
+their less advanced cousins who fill the vast centre of the Asiatic
+continent.  From the emperor on his throne to the common coolie in
+his hovel it is the idea of kinship that knits the entire body
+politic together.  The Empire is one great family; the family is a
+little empire.
+
+The one developed out of the other.  The patriarchal is, as is well
+known, probably the oldest political system in the world. All
+nations may be said to have experienced such a paternal government,
+but most nations outgrew it.
+
+Now the interesting fact about the yellow branch of the human race is,
+not that they had so juvenile a constitution, but that they have it;
+that it has persisted practically unchanged from prehistoric ages. 
+It is certainly surprising in this kaleidoscopic world whose pattern
+is constantly changing as time merges one combination of its
+elements into another, that on the other side of the globe this set
+should have remained the same.  Yet in spite of the lapse of years,
+in spite of the altered conditions of existence, in spite of an
+immense advance in civilization, such a primitive state of society
+has continued there to the present day, in all its essentials what
+it was when as nomads the race forefathers wandered peacefully or
+otherwise over the plains of Central Asia.  The principle helped
+them to expand; it has simply cramped them ever since.  For, instead
+of dissolving like other antiquated views, it has become, what it
+was bound to become if it continued to last, crystallized into an
+institution.  It had practically reached this condition when it
+received a theoretical, not to say a theological recognition which
+gave it mundane immortality.  A couple of millenniums ago Confucius
+consecrated filial duty by making it the basis of the Chinese moral
+code.  His hand was the finishing touch of fossilification.
+For since the sage set his seal upon the system no one has so much
+as dreamt of changing it.  The idea of confuting Confucius would be
+an act of impiety such as no Chinaman could possibly commit.  Not
+that the inadmissibility of argument is due really to the authority
+of the philosopher, but that it lies ingrained in the character of
+the people.  Indeed the genius of the one may be said to have
+consisted in divining the genius of the other.  Confucius formulated
+the prevailing practice, and in so doing helped to make it perpetual. 
+He gave expression to the national feeling, and like expressions,
+generally his, served to stamp the idea all the more indelibly upon
+the national consciousness.
+
+In this manner the family from a natural relation grew into a highly
+unnatural social anachronism.  The loose ties of a roving life
+became fetters of a fixed conventionality.  Bonds originally of
+mutual advantage hardened into restrictions by which the young were
+hopelessly tethered to the old.  Midway in its course the race
+undertook to turn round and face backwards, as it journeyed on.
+Its subsequent advance could be nothing but slow.
+
+The head of a family is so now in something of a corporeal sense.
+From him emanate all its actions; to him are responsible all its parts.
+Any other member of it is as incapable of individual expression as
+is the hand, or the foot, or the eye of man.  Indeed, Confucian
+doctors of divinity might appropriately administer psychically to
+the egoistic the rebuke of the Western physician to the too
+self-analytic youth who, finding that, after eating, his digestion
+failed to give him what he considered its proper sensations, had
+come to consult the doctor as to how it ought to feel.  "Feel! young
+man," he was answered, "you ought not to be aware that you have a
+digestion." So with them, a normally constituted son knows not what
+it is to possess a spontaneity of his own.  Indeed, this very word
+"own," which so long ago in our own tongue took to itself the symbol
+of possession, well exemplifies his dependent state.  China furnishes
+the most conspicuous instance of the want of individual rights.
+A Chinese son cannot properly be said to own anything.  The title to
+the land he tills is vested absolutely in the family, of which he is
+an undivided thirtieth, or what-not.  Even the administration of the
+property is not his, but resides in the family, represented by its
+head.  The outward symbols of ownership testify to the fact.
+The bourns that mark the boundaries of the fields bear the names of
+families, not of individuals.  The family, as such, is the proprietor,
+and its lands are cultivated and enjoyed in common by all the
+constituents of the clan.  In the tenure of its real estate, the
+Chinese family much resembles the Russian Mir.  But so far as his
+personal state is concerned, the Chinese son outslaves the Slav. 
+For he lives at home, under the immediate control of the paternal
+will--in the most complete of serfdoms, a filial one. Even existence
+becomes a communal affair.  From the family mansion, or set of
+mansions, in which all its members dwell, to the family mausoleum,
+to which they will all eventually be borne, a man makes his life
+journey in strict company with his kin.
+
+A man's life is thus but an undivisible fraction of the family life.
+How essentially so will appear from the following slight sketch of it.
+
+To begin at the beginning, his birth is a very important event--for
+the household, at which no one fails to rejoice except the new-comer.
+He cries.  The general joy, however, depends somewhat upon his sex. 
+If the baby chances to be a boy, everybody is immensely pleased; if
+a girl, there is considerably less effusion shown.  In the latter
+case the more impulsive relatives are unmistakably sorry; the more
+philosophic evidently hope for better luck next time.  Both kinds
+make very pretty speeches, which not even the speakers believe, for
+in the babe lottery the family is considered to have drawn a blank. 
+A delight so engendered proves how little of the personal, even in
+prospective, attaches to its object.  The reason for the invidious
+distinction in the matter of sex lies of course in an inordinate
+desire for the perpetuation of the family line.  The unfortunate
+infant is regarded merely in the light of a possible progenitor.
+A boy is already potentially a father; whereas a girl, if she marry
+at all, is bound to marry out of her own family into another, and is
+relatively lost.  The full force of the deprivation is, however,
+to some degree tempered by the almost infinite possibilities of
+adoption.  Daughters are, therefore, not utterly unmitigable evils.
+
+From the privacy of the domestic circle, the infant's entrance into
+public life is performed pick-a-back.  Strapped securely to the
+shoulders of a slightly older sister, out he goes, consigned to the
+tender mercies of a being who is scarcely more than a baby herself.
+The diminutiveness of the nurse-perambulators is the most surprising
+part of the performance.  The tiniest of tots may be seen thus
+toddling round with burdens half their own size.  Like the dot upon
+the little i, the baby's head seems a natural part of their childish
+ego.
+
+An economy of the kind in the matter of nurses is highly suggestive.
+That it should be practicable thus to entrust one infant to another
+proves the precociousness of children.  But this surprising maturity
+of the young implies by a law too well known to need explanation,
+the consequent immaturity of the race.  That which has less to grow
+up to, naturally grows up to its limit sooner.  It may even be
+questioned whether it does not do so with the more haste; on the
+same principle that a runner who has less distance to travel not
+only accomplishes his course quicker, but moves with relatively
+greater speed, or as a small planet grows old not simply sooner, but
+comparatively faster than a larger one.  Jupiter is still in his
+fiery youth, while the moon is senile in decrepid old age, and yet
+his separate existence began long before hers.  Either hypothesis
+will explain the abnormally early development of the Chinese race,
+and its subsequent career of inactivity.  Meanwhile the youthful
+nurse, in blissful ignorance of the evidence which her present
+precocity affords against her future possibilities, pursues her
+sports with intermittent attention to her charge, whose poor little
+head lolls about, now on one side and now on the other, in a most
+distressingly loose manner, an uninterested spectator of the
+proceedings.
+
+As soon as the babe gets a trifle bigger he ceases to be ministered
+to and begins his long course of ministering to others.  His home
+life consists of attentive subordination.  The relation his
+obedience bears to that of children elsewhere is paralleled perhaps
+sufficiently by the comparative importance attached to precepts on
+the subject in the respective moral codes.  The commandment "honor
+thy father" forms a tithe of the Mosaic law, while the same
+injunction constitutes at least one half of the Confucian precepts.
+To the Chinese child all the parental commands are not simply law to
+the letter, they are to be anticipated in the spirit.  To do what he
+is told is but the merest fraction of his duty; theoretically his
+only thought is how to serve his sire.  The pious Aeneas escaping
+from Troy exemplifies his conduct when it comes to a question of
+domestic precedence,--whose first care, it will be remembered, was
+for his father, his next for his son, and his last for his wife.
+He lost his wife, it may be noted in passing.  Filial piety is the
+greatest of Chinese virtues.  Indeed, an undutiful son is a
+monstrosity, a case of moral deformity.  It could now hardly be
+otherwise.  For a father sums up in propria persona a whole pedigree
+of patriarchs whose superimposed weight of authority is practically
+divine.  This condition of servitude is never outgrown by the
+individual, as it has never been outgrown by the race.
+
+Our boy now begins to go to school; to a day school, it need hardly
+be specified, for a boarding school would be entirely out of keeping
+with the family life.  Here, he is given the "Trimetrical Classic"
+to start on, that he may learn the characters by heart, picking up
+incidentally what ideas he may.  This book is followed by the
+"Century of Surnames," a catalogue of all the clan names in China,
+studied like the last for the sake of the characters, although the
+suggestion of the importance of the family contained in it is
+probably not lost upon his youthful mind.  Next comes the "Thousand
+Character Classic," a wonderful epic as a feat of skill, for of the
+thousand characters which it contains not a single one is repeated,
+an absence of tautology not properly appreciated by the enforced
+reader.  Reminiscences of our own school days vividly depict the
+consequent disgust, instead of admiration, of the boy.  Three more
+books succeed these first volumes, differing from one another in
+form, but in substance singularly alike, treating, as they all do,
+of history and ethics combined.  For tales and morals are
+inseparably associated by pious antiquity. Indeed, the past would
+seem to have lived with special reference to the edification of the
+future.  Chinamen were abnormally virtuous in those golden days,
+barring the few unfortunates whom fate needed as warning examples of
+depravity for succeeding ages.  Except for the fact that instruction
+as to a future life forms no part of the curriculum, a far-eastern
+education may be said to consist of Sunday-school every day in the
+week.  For no occasion is lost by the erudite authors, even in the
+most worldly portions of their work, for preaching a slight homily
+on the subject in hand.  The dictum of Dionysius of Halicarnassus
+that "history is philosophy teaching by example" would seem there to
+have become modified into "history is filiosophy teaching by
+example." For in the instructive anecdotes every other form of merit
+is depicted as second to that of being a dutiful son.  To the
+practice of that supreme virtue all other considerations are
+sacrificed.  The student's aim is thus kept single.  At every turn
+of the leaves, paragons of filial piety shame the youthful reader to
+the pitch of emulation by the epitaphic records of their deeds. 
+Portraits of the past, possibly colored, present that estimable
+trait in so exalted a type that to any less filial a people they
+would simply deter competition.  Yet the boy implicitly believes and
+no doubt resolves to rival what he reads.  A specimen or two will
+amply suggest the rest.  In one tale the hero is held up to the
+unqualified admiration of posterity for having starved to death his
+son, in an extreme case of family destitution, for the sake of
+providing food enough for his aged father.  In another he
+unhesitatingly divorces his wife for having dared to poke fun, in
+the shape of bodkins, at some wooden effigies of his parents which
+he had had set up in the house for daily devotional contemplation. 
+Finally another paragon actually sells himself in perpetuity as a
+slave that he may thus procure the wherewithal to bury with due
+honor his anything but worthy progenitor, who had first cheated his
+neighbors and then squandered his ill-gotten gains in riotous living.
+Of these tales, as of certain questionable novels in a slightly
+different line, the eventual moral is considered quite competent to
+redeem the general immorality of the plot.  
+
+Along such a curriculum the youthful Chinaman is made to run.
+A very similar system prevails in Japan, the difference between the
+two consisting in quantity rather than quality.  The books in the
+two cases are much the same, and the amount read differs surprisingly
+little when we consider that in the one case it is his own classics
+the student is reading, in the other the Chinaman's.
+
+If he belong to the middle class, as soon as his schooling is over
+he is set to learn his father's trade.  To undertake to learn any
+trade but his father's would strike the family as simply preposterous.
+Why should he adopt another line of business?  And, if he did, what
+other business should he adopt?  Is his father's occupation not
+already there, a part of the existing order of things; and is he not
+the son of his father and heir therefore of the paternal skill?
+Not that such inherited aptness is recognized scientifically; it is
+simply taken for granted instinctively.  It is but a halfhearted
+intuition, however, for the possibility of an inheritance from the
+mother's side is as out of the question as if her severance from her
+own family had an ex post facto effect.  As for his individual
+predilection in the matter, nature has considerately conformed to
+custom by giving him none.  He becomes a cabinet-maker, for instance,
+because his ancestors always have been cabinet-makers.  He inherits
+the family business as a necessary part of the family name.  He is
+born to his trade, not naturally selected because of his fitness for it.
+But he usually is amply qualified for the position, for generations
+of practice, if only on one side of the house, accumulate a vast
+deal of technical skill.  The result of this system of clan guilds
+in all branches of industry is sufficiently noticeable.  The almost
+infinite superiority of Japanese artisans over their European
+fellow-craftsmen is world-known.  On the other hand the tendency of
+the occupation in the abstract to swallow up the individual in the
+concrete is as evident to theory as it is patent in practice. 
+Eventually the man is lost in the manner.  The very names of trades
+express the fact.  The Japanese word for cabinet-maker, for example,
+means literally cutting-thing-house, and is now applied as
+distinctively to the man as to his shop.  Nominally as well as
+practically the youthful Japanese artisan makes his introduction to
+the world, much after the manner of the hero of Lecocq's comic
+opera, the son of the house of Marasquin et Cie.
+
+If instead of belonging to the lower middle class our typical youth
+be born of bluer blood, or if he be filled with the same desires as
+if he were so descended, he becomes a student.  Having failed to
+discover in the school-room the futility of his country's
+self-vaunted learning, he proceeds to devote his life to its
+pursuit.  With an application which is eminently praiseworthy, even
+if its object be not, he sets to work to steep himself in the
+classics till he can perceive no merit in anything else.  As might
+be suspected, he ends by discovering in the sayings of the past more
+meaning than the simple past ever dreamed of putting there.
+He becomes more Confucian than Confucius.  Indeed, it is fortunate
+for the reputation of the sage that he cannot return to earth, for
+he might disagree to his detriment with his own commentators.
+
+Such is the state of things in China and Korea.  Learning, however,
+is not dependent solely on individual interest for its wonderfully
+flourishing condition in the Middle Kingdom, for the government
+abets the practice to its utmost.  It is itself the supreme sanction,
+for its posts are the prizes of proficiency.  Through the study of
+the classics lies the only entrance to political power.  To become a
+mandarin one must have passed a series of competitive examinations
+on these very subjects, and competition in this impersonal field is
+most keen.  For while popular enthusiasm for philosophy for
+philosophy's sake might, among any people, eventually show symptoms
+of fatigue, it is not likely to flag where the outcome of it is so
+substantial.  Erudition carries there all earthly emoluments in its
+train.  For the man who can write the most scholastic essay on the
+classics is forthwith permitted to amass much honor and more wealth
+by wronging his less accomplished fellow-citizens.  China is a
+student's paradise where the possession of learning is instantly
+convertible into unlimited pelf.
+
+In Japan the study of the classics was never pursued professionally.
+It was, however, prosecuted with much zeal en amateur.  The Chinese
+bureaucratic system has been wanting.  For in spite of her students,
+until within thirty years Japan slumbered still in the Knight-time
+of the Middle Ages, and so long as a man carried about with him
+continually two beautiful swords he felt it incumbent upon him to
+use them.  The happy days of knight-errantry have passed.  These
+same cavaliers of Samurai are now thankful to police the streets in
+spectacles necessitated by the too diligent study of German text,
+and arrest chance disturbers of the public peace for a miserably
+small salary per month.
+
+Our youth has now reached the flowering season of life, that brief
+May time when the whole world takes on the rose-tint, and when by
+all dramatic laws he ought to fall in love.  He does nothing of the
+kind.  Sad to say, he is a stranger to the feeling.  Love, as we
+understand the word, is a thing unknown to the Far East;
+fortunately, indeed, for the possession there of the tender passion
+would be worse than useless.  Its indulgence would work no end of
+disturbance to the community at large, beside entailing much misery
+upon its individual victim.  Its exercise would probably be classed
+with kleptomania and other like excesses of purely personal
+consideration.  The community could never permit the practice, for
+it strikes at the very root of their whole social system.
+
+The immense loss in happiness to these people in consequence of the
+omission by the too parsimonious Fates of that thread, which, with
+us, spins the whole of woman's web of life, and at least weaves the
+warp of man's, is but incidental to the present subject; the effect
+of the loss upon the individuality of the person himself is what
+concerns us now.
+
+If there is one moment in a man's life when his interest for the
+world at large pales before the engrossing character of his own
+emotions, it is assuredly when that man first falls in love.
+Then, if never before, the world within excludes the world without. 
+For of all our human passions none is so isolating as the tenderest. 
+To shut that one other being in, we must of necessity shut all the
+rest of mankind out; and we do so with a reckless trust in our own
+self-sufficiency which has about it a touch of the sublime.
+The other millions are as though they were not, and we two are alone
+in the earth, which suddenly seems to have grown unprecedentedly
+beautiful.  Indeed, it only needs such judicious depopulation to
+make of any spot an Eden.  Perhaps the early Jewish myth-makers had
+some such thought in mind when they wrote their idyl of the cosmogony.
+The human traits are true to-day.  Then at last our souls throw
+aside their conventional wrappings to stand revealed as they really
+are. Certain of comprehension, the thoughts we have never dared
+breathe to any one before, find a tongue for her who seems
+fore-destined to understand.  The long-closed floodgates of feeling
+are thrown wide, and our personality, pent up from the time of its
+inception for very mistrust, sweeps forth in one uncontrollable
+rush.  For then the most reticent becomes confiding; the most
+self-contained expands.  Then every detail of our past lives assumes
+an importance which even we had not divined.  To her we tell them
+all,--our boyish beliefs, our youthful fancies, the foolish with
+the fine, the witty with the wise, the little with the great. 
+Nothing then seems quite unworthy, as nothing seems quite worthy
+enough.  Flowers and weeds that we plucked upon our pathway, we heap
+them in her lap, certain that even the poorest will not be tossed
+aside.  Small wonder that we bring as many as we may when she bends
+her head so lovingly to each.
+
+As our past rises in reminiscence with all its oldtime reality, no
+less clearly does our future stand out to us in mirage.  What we
+would be seems as realizable as what we were.  Seen by another
+beside ourselves, our castles in the air take on something of the
+substance of stereoscopic sight.  Our airiest fancies seem solid
+facts for their reality to her, and gilded by lovelight, they
+glitter and sparkle like a true palace of the East.  For once all is
+possible; nothing lies beyond our reach.  And as we talk, and she
+listens, we two seem to be floating off into an empyrean of our own
+like the summer clouds above our heads, as they sail dreamily on
+into the far-away depths of the unfathomable sky.
+
+It would be more than mortal not to believe in ourselves when
+another believes so absolutely in us.  Our most secret thoughts are
+no longer things to be ashamed of, for she has sanctioned them.
+Whatever doubt may have shadowed us as to our own imaginings
+disappears before the smile of her appreciation.  That her
+appreciation may be prejudiced is not a possibility we think of
+then.  She understands us, or seems to do so to our own better
+understanding of ourselves.  Happy the man who is thus understood!
+Happy even he who imagines that he is, because of her eager wish to
+comprehend; fortunate, indeed, if in this one respect he never comes
+to see too clearly.
+
+No such blissful infatuation falls to the lot of the Far Oriental. 
+He never is the dupe of his own desire, the willing victim of his
+self-illusion.  He is never tempted to reveal himself, and by thus
+revealing, realize.  No loving appreciation urges him on toward the
+attainment of his own ideal.  That incitement to be what he would
+seem to be, to become what she deems becoming, he fails to feel.
+Custom has so far fettered fancy that even the wish to communicate
+has vanished.  He has now nothing to tell; she needs no ear to hear.
+For she is not his love; she is only his wife,--what is left of a
+romance when the romance is left out.  Worse still, she never was
+anything else.  He has not so much as a memory of her, for he did
+not marry her for love; he may not love of his own accord, nor for
+the matter of that does he wish to do so.  If by some mischance he
+should so far forget to forget himself, it were much better for him
+had he not done so, for the choice of a bride is not his, nor of a
+bridegroom hers.  Marriage to a Far Oriental is the most important
+mercantile transaction of his whole life.  It is, therefore, far too
+weighty a matter to be entrusted to his youthful indiscretion; for
+although the person herself is of lamentably little account in the
+bargain, the character of her worldly circumstances is most material
+to it.  So she is contracted for with the same care one would
+exercise in the choice of any staple business commodity.
+The particular sample is not vital to the trade, but the grade of
+goods is.  She is selected much as the bride of the Vicar of Wakefield
+chose her wedding-gown, only that the one was at least cut to suit,
+while the other is not.  It is certainly easier, if less fitting,
+to get a wife as some people do clothes, not to their own order,
+but ready made; all the more reason when the bargain is for one's son,
+not one's self.  So the Far East, which looks at the thing from a
+strictly paternal standpoint and ignores such trifles as personal
+preferences, takes its boy to the broker's and fits him out.
+That the object of such parental care does not end by murdering his
+unfortunate spouse or making way with himself suggests how dead
+already is that individuality which we deem to be of the very essence
+of the thing.
+
+Marriage is thus a species of investment contracted by the existing
+family for the sake of the prospective one, the actual participants
+being only lay figures in the affair.  Sometimes the father decides
+the matter himself; sometimes he or the relative who stands in loco
+parentis calls for a plebiscit on the subject; for such an extension
+of the suffrage has gradually crept even into patriarchal
+institutions.  The family then assemble, sit in solemn conclave on
+the question, and decide it by vote.  Of course the interested
+parties are not asked their opinion, as it might be prejudiced.
+The result of the conference must be highly gratifying.  To have
+one's wife chosen for one by vote of one's relatives cannot but be
+satisfactory--to the electors.  The outcome of this ballot, like
+that of universal suffrage elsewhere, is at the best unobjectionable
+mediocrity.  Somehow such a result does not seem quite to fulfil
+one's ideal of a wife.  It is true that the upper classes of
+impersonal France practise this method of marital selection, their
+conseils de famille furnishing in some sort a parallel.  But, as is
+well known, matrimony among these same upper classes is largely form
+devoid of substance.  It begins impressively with a dual ceremony,
+the civil contract, which amounts to a contract of civility between
+the parties, and a religious rite to render the same perpetual,
+and there it is too apt to end.
+
+So much for the immediate influence on the man; the eventual effect
+on the race remains to be considered.  Now, if the first result be
+anything, the second must in the end be everything.  For however
+trifling it be in the individual instance, it goes on accumulating
+with each successive generation, like compound interest.
+The choosing of a wife by family suffrage is not simply an exponent
+of the impersonal state of things, it is a power toward bringing
+such a state of things about.  A hermit seldom develops to his full
+possibilities, and the domestic variety is no exception to the rule.
+A man who is linked to some one that toward him remains a cipher
+lacks surroundings inciting to psychological growth, nor is he more
+favorably circumstanced because all his ancestors have been
+similarly circumscribed.
+
+As if to make assurance doubly sure, natural selection here steps in
+to further the process.  To prove this with all the rigidity of
+demonstration desirable is in the present state of erotics beyond
+our power.  Until our family trees give us something more than mere
+skeletons of dead branches, we must perforce continue ignorant of
+the science of grafts.  For the nonce we must be content to
+generalize from our own premises, only rising above them
+sufficiently to get a bird's-eye view of our neighbor's estates.
+Such a survey has at least one advantage: the whole field of view
+appears perfectly plain.
+
+Surveying the subject, then, from this ego-altruistic position,
+we can perceive why matrimony, as we practise it, should result in
+increasing the personality of our race: for the reason namely that
+psychical similarity determines the selection.  At first sight,
+indeed, such a natural affinity would seem to have little or nothing
+to do with marriage.  As far as outsiders are capable of judging,
+unlikes appear to fancy one another quite as gratuitously as do
+likes.  Connubial couples are often anything but twin souls.  Yet our
+own dual use of the word "like" bears historic witness to the
+contrary.  For in this expression we have a record from early Gothic
+times that men liked others for being like themselves. Since then,
+our feelings have not changed materially, although our mode of
+showing them is slightly less intense.  In those simple days
+stranger and enemy were synonymous terms, and their objects were
+received in a corresponding spirit.  In our present refined
+civilization we hurl epithets instead of spears, and content
+ourselves with branding as heterodox the opinions of another which
+do not happen to coincide with our own.  The instinct of
+self-development naturally begets this self-sided view.  We
+insensibly find those persons congenial whose ideas resemble ours,
+and gravitate to them, as leaves on a pond do to one another, nearer
+and nearer till they touch.  Is it likely, then, that in the most
+important case of all the rule should suddenly cease to hold?  Is it
+to be presumed that even Socrates chose Xantippe for her remarkable
+contrariety to himself?
+
+Mere physical attraction is another matter.  Corporeally considered,
+men not infrequently fall in love with their opposites, the
+phenomenally tall with the painfully short, the unnecessarily stout
+with the distressingly slender.  But even such inartistic
+juxtapositions are much less common than we are apt at times to
+think.  For it must never be forgotten that the exceptional
+character of the phenomena renders them conspicuous, the customary
+more consorted combinations failing to excite attention.
+
+Besides, there exists a reason for physical incongruity which does
+not hold psychically.  Nature sanctions the one while she
+discountenances the other.  Instead of the forethought she once
+bestowed upon the body, it receives at her hands now but the
+scantiest attention.  Its development has ceased to be an object
+with her.  For some time past almost all her care has been devoted
+to the evolution of the soul.  The consequence is that physically
+man is much less specialized than many other animals.  In other
+words, he is bodily less advanced in the race for competitive
+extermination.  He belongs to an antiquated, inefficient type of
+mammal.  His organism is still of the jack-of-all-trades pattern,
+such as prevailed generally in the more youthful stages of organic
+life--one not specially suited to any particular pursuit.  Were it
+not for his cerebral convolutions he could not compete for an
+instant in the struggle for existence, and even the monkey would
+reign in his stead.  But brain is more effective than biceps, and a
+being who can kill his opponent farther off than he can see him
+evidently needs no great excellence of body to survive his foe.
+
+The field of competition has thus been transferred from matter to
+mind, but the fight has lost none of its keenness in consequence.
+With the same zeal with which advantageous anatomical variations
+were seized upon and perpetuated, psychical ones are now grasped and
+rendered hereditary.  Now if opposites were to fancy and wed one
+another, such fortunate improvements would soon be lost.  They would
+be scattered over the community at large even it they escaped entire
+neutralization.  To prevent so disastrous a result nature implants a
+desire for resemblance, which desire man instinctively acts upon.
+
+Complete compatibility of temperament is of course a thing not to be
+expected nor indeed to be desired, since it would defeat its own end
+by allowing no room for variation.  A fairly broad basis of agreement,
+however, exists even when least suspected.  This common ground of
+content consists of those qualities held to be most essential by the
+individuals concerned, although not necessarily so appearing to
+other people.  Sometimes, indeed, these qualities are still in the
+larvae state of desires.  They are none the less potent upon the
+man's personality on that account, for the wish is always father to
+its own fulfilment.
+
+The want of conjugal resemblance not only works mediately on the
+child, it works mutually on the parents; for companionship, as is
+well recognized, tends to similarity.  Now companionship is the last
+thing to be looked for in a far-eastern couple.  Where custom
+requires a wife to follow dutifully in the wake of her husband,
+whenever the two go out together, there is small opportunity for
+intercourse by the way, even were there the slightest inclination to
+it, which there is not.  The appearance of the pair on an excursion
+is a walking satire on sociability, for the comicality of the
+connection is quite unperceived by the performers.  In the privacy
+of the domestic circle the separation, if less humorous, is no less
+complete.  Each lives in a world of his own, largely separate in
+fact in China and Korea, and none the less in fancy in Japan.
+On the continent a friend of the husband would see little or nothing
+of the wife, and even in Japan he would meet her much as we meet an
+upper servant in a friend's house.  Such a semi-attached
+relationship does not conduce to much mutual understanding.
+
+The remainder of our hero's uneventful existence calls for no
+particular comment.  As soon as he has children borne him he is
+raised ipso facto from the position of a common soldier to that of
+a subordinate officer in the family ranks.  But his opportunities
+for the expression of individuality are not one whit increased.
+He has simply advanced a peg in a regular hierarchy of subjection. 
+From being looked after himself he proceeds to look after others. 
+Such is the extent of the change.  Even should he chance to be the
+eldest son of the eldest son, and thus eventually end by becoming
+the head of the family, he cannot consistently consider himself. 
+There is absolutely no place in his social cosmos for so particular
+a thing as the ego.
+
+With a certain grim humor suggestive of metaphysics, it may be said
+of his whole life that it is nothing but a relative affair after
+all.
+
+
+Chapter 3.  Adoption.
+
+But one may go a step farther in this matter of the family, and by
+so doing fare still worse with respect to individuality.  There are
+certain customs in vogue among these peoples which would seem to
+indicate that even so generic a thing as the family is too personal
+to serve them for ultimate social atom, and that in fact it is only
+the idea of the family that is really important, a case of
+abstraction of an abstract.  These suggestive customs are the
+far-eastern practices of adoption and abdication.
+
+Adoption, with us, is a kind of domestic luxury, akin to the keeping
+of any other pets, such as lap-dogs and canaries.  It is a species
+of self-indulgence which those who can afford it give themselves
+when fortune has proved unpropitious, an artificial method of
+counteracting the inequalities of fate.  That such is the plain
+unglamoured view of the procedure is shown by the age at which the
+object is adopted.  Usually the future son or daughter enters the
+adoptive household as an infant, intentionally so on the part of the
+would-be parents.  His ignorance of a previous relationship largely
+increases his relative value; for the possibility of his making
+comparisons in his own mind between a former state of existence and
+the present one unfavorable to the latter is not pleasant for the
+adopters to contemplate.  He is therefore acquired young.  The
+amusement derived from his company is thus seen to be distinctly
+paramount to all other considerations.  No one cares so heartily to
+own a dog which has been the property of another; a fortiori of a
+child.  It is clearly, then, not as a necessity that the babe is
+adopted.  If such were the case, if like the ancient Romans all a
+man wanted was the continuance of the family line, he would
+naturally wait until the last practicable moment; for he would thus
+save both care and expense.  In the Far East adoption is quite a
+different affair.  There it is a genealogical necessity--like having
+a father or mother.  It is, indeed, of almost more importance.
+For the great desideratum to these peoples is not ancestors but
+descendants. Pedigrees in the land of the universal opposite are not
+matters of bequest but of posthumous reversion.  A man is not
+beholden to the past, he looks forward to the future for inherited
+honors.  No fame attaches to him for having had an illustrious
+grandfather.  On the contrary, it is the illustrious grandson who
+reflects some of his own greatness back upon his grandfather.  If a
+man therefore fail to attain eminence himself, he always has another
+chance in his descendants; for he will of necessity be ennobled
+through the merits of those who succeed him.  Such is the immemorial
+law of the land. Fame is retroactive.  This admirable system has
+only one objection: it is posthumous in its effect.  An ambitious
+man who unfortunately lacks ability himself has to wait too long for
+vicarious recognition.  The objection is like that incident to the
+making of a country seat out of a treeless plain by planting the
+same with saplings.  About the time the trees begin to be worth
+having the proprietary landscape-gardener dies of old age.  However,
+as custom permits a Far Oriental no ancestral growth of timber,
+he is obliged to lay the seeds of his own family trees.  Natural
+offspring are on the whole easier to get, and more satisfactory when
+got.  Hence the haste with which these peoples rush into matrimony. 
+If in despite of his precipitation fate perversely refuse to grant
+him children, he must endeavor to make good the omission by
+artificial means.  He proceeds to adopt somebody.  True to instinct,
+he chooses from preference a collateral relative.  In some far-eastern
+lands he must so restrict himself by law.  In Korea, for instance,
+he can only adopt an agnate and one of a lower generation than his own.
+But in Japan his choice is not so limited.  In so praiseworthy an
+act as the perpetuation of his unimportant family line, it is deemed
+unwise in that progressive land to hinder him from unconsciously
+bettering it by the way.  He is consequently permitted to adopt
+anybody.  As people are by no means averse to being adopted, the
+power to adopt whom he will gives him more voice in the matter of
+his unnatural offspring than he ever had in the selection of a more
+natural one.  
+
+The adopted changes his name, of course, to take that of the family
+he enters.  As he is very frequently grown up and extensively known
+at the time the adoption takes place, his change of cognomen
+occasions at first some slight confusion among his acquaintance. 
+This would be no worse, however, than the change with us from the
+maid to the matron, and intercourse would soon proceed smoothly
+again if people would only rest content with one such domestic
+migration.  But they do not.  The fatal facility of the process
+tempts them to repeat it.  The result is bewildering: a people as
+nomadic now in the property of their persons as their forefathers
+were in their real estate.  A man adopts another to-day to unadopt
+him to-morrow and replace him by somebody else the day after.
+So profoundly unimportant to them is their social identity, that they
+bandy it about with almost farcical freedom.  Perhaps it is fitting
+that there should be some slight preparation in this world for a
+future transmigration of souls.  Still one fails to conceive that
+the practice can be devoid of disadvantages even to its beneficiaries.
+To foreigners it proves disastrously perplexing.  For if you chance
+upon a man whom you have not met for some time, you can never be
+quite sure how to accost him. If you begin, "Well met, Green, how
+goes it?" as likely as not he replies, "Finely.  But I am no longer
+Green; I have become Brown.  I was adopted last month by my maternal
+grandfather." You of course apologize for your unfortunate mistake,
+carefully note his change of hue for a future occasion, and behold,
+on meeting him the next time you find he has turned Black.  Such a
+chameleon-like cognomen is very unsettling to your idea of his
+identity, and can hardly prove reassuring to his own.  The only
+persons who reap any benefit from the doubt are those, with us
+unhappy, individuals who possess the futile faculty of remembering
+faces without recalling their accompanying names.
+
+Girls, as a rule, are not adopted, being valueless genealogically. 
+A niece or grandniece to whom one has taken a great fancy might of
+course be adopted there as elsewhere, but it would be distinctly out
+of the every-day run, as she could never be included in the
+household on strict business principles.
+
+The practice of adopting is not confined to childless couples. 
+Others may find themselves in quite as unfortunate a predicament.
+A man may be the father of a large and thriving family and yet be as
+destitute patriarchally as if he had not a child to his name.
+His offspring may be of the wrong sex; they may all be girls.
+In this untoward event the father has something more on his hands
+than merely a houseful of daughters to dispose of. In addition to
+securing sons-in-law, he must, unless he would have his ancestral
+line become extinct, provide himself with a son.  The simplest
+procedure in such a case is to combine relationships in a single
+individual, and the most self-evident person to select for the dual
+capacity is the husband of the eldest daughter.  This is the course
+pursued.  Some worthy young man is secured as spouse for the senior
+sister; he is at the same time formally taken in as a son by the
+family whose cognomen he assumes, and eventually becomes the head of
+the house.  Strange to say, this vista of gradually unfolding honors
+does not seem to prove inviting.  Perhaps the new-comer objects to
+marrying the whole family, a prejudice not without parallel
+elsewhere.  Certainly the opportunity is not appreciated. Indeed,
+to "go out as a son-in-law," as the Japanese idiom hath it, is
+considered demeaning to the matrimonial domestic.  Like other
+household help he wears too patently the badge of servitude.
+"If you have three koku of rice to your name, don't do it," is the
+advice of the local proverb--a proverb whose warning against
+marrying for money is the more suggestive for being launched in a
+land where marrying for love is beyond the pale of respectability. 
+To barter one's name in this mercenary manner is looked upon as
+derogatory to one's self-respect, although, as we have seen, to part
+with it for any less direct remuneration is not attended with the
+slightest loss of personal prestige.  As practically the unfortunate
+had none to lose in either event, it would seem to be a case of
+taking away from a man that which he hath not.  So contumacious a
+thing is custom.  It is indeed lucky that popular prejudice
+interposes some limit to this fictitious method of acquiring
+children.  A trifling predilection for the real thing in sonships is
+absolutely vital, even to the continuance of the artificial variety. 
+For if one generation ever went in exclusively for adoption, there
+would be no subsequent generation to adopt.
+
+As it to give the finishing touch to so conventional a system of
+society, a man can leave it under certain circumstances with even
+greater ease than he entered it.  He can become as good as dead
+without the necessity of making way with himself.  Theoretically, he
+can cease to live while still practically existing; for it is always
+open to the head of a family to abdicate.
+
+The word abdicate has to our ears a certain regal sound.
+We instinctively associate the act with a king.  Even the more
+democratic expression resign suggests at once an office of public or
+quasi public character.  To talk of abdicating one's private
+relationships sounds absurd; one might as well talk of electing his
+parents, it would seem to us.  Such misunderstanding of far-eastern
+social possibilities comes from our having indulged in digressions
+from our more simple nomadic habits.  If in imagination we will
+return to our ancestral muttons and the then existing order of
+things, the idea will not strike us as so strange; for in those
+early bucolic days every father was a king.  Family economics were
+the only political questions in existence then.  The clan was the
+unit.  Domestic disputes were state disturbances, and clan-claims
+the only kind of international quarrels.  The patriarch was both
+father to his people and king.
+
+As time widened the family circle it eventually reached a point
+where cohesion ceased to be possible.  The centrifugal tendency
+could no longer be controlled by the centripetal force.  It split up
+into separate bodies, each of them a family by itself.  In their
+turn these again divided, and so the process went on.  This
+principle has worked universally, the only difference in its action
+among different races being the greater or less degree of the
+evolving motion.  With us the social system has been turning more
+and more rapidly with time.  In the Far East its force, instead of
+increasing, would seem to have decreased, enabling the nebula of its
+original condition to keep together as a single mass, so that to-day
+a whole nation, resembling a nebula indeed in homogeneity, is swayed
+by a single patriarchal principle.  Here, on the contrary, so rapid
+has the motion become that even brethren find themselves scattered
+to the four winds.
+
+An Occidental father and an Oriental head of a family are no longer
+really correlative terms.  The latter more closely resembles a king
+in his duties, responsibilities, and functions generally.  Now, in
+the Middle Ages in Europe, when a king grew tired of affairs of
+state, he abdicated.  So in the Far East, when the head of a family
+has had enough of active life, he abdicates, and his eldest son
+reigns in his stead.
+
+From that moment he ceases to belong to the body politic in any
+active sense.  Not that he is no longer a member of society nor
+unamenable to its general laws, but that he has become a respectable
+declasse, as it were.  He has entered, so to speak, the social
+nirvana, a not unfitting first step, as he regards it, toward
+entering the eventual nirvana beyond.  Such abdication now takes
+place without particular cause.  After a certain time of life, and
+long before a man grows old, it is the fashion thus to make one's bow.
+
+
+Chapter 4. Language.
+
+A man's personal equation, as astronomers call the effect of his
+individuality, is kin, for all its complexity, to those simple
+algebraical problems which so puzzled us at school.  To solve either
+we must begin by knowing the values of the constants that enter into
+its expression.  Upon the a b c's of the one, as upon those of the
+other, depend the possibilities of the individual x.
+
+Now the constants in any man's equation are the qualities that he
+has inherited from the past.  What a man does follows from what he
+is, which in turn is mostly dependent upon what his ancestors have
+been; and of all the links in the long chain of mind-evolution, few
+are more important and more suggestive than language.  Actions may
+at the moment speak louder than words, but methods of expression
+have as tell-tale a tongue for bygone times as ways of doing things.
+
+If it should ever fall to my lot to have to settle that exceedingly
+vexed Eastern question,--not the emancipation of ancient Greece from
+the bondage of the modern Turk, but the emancipation of the modern
+college student from the bond of ancient Greek,--I should propose,
+as a solution of the dilemma, the addition of a course in Japanese
+to the college list of required studies.  It might look, I admit,
+like begging the question for the sake of giving its answer, but the
+answer, I think, would justify itself.
+
+It is from no desire to parade a fresh hobby-horse upon the
+university curriculum that I offer the suggestion, but because I
+believe that a study of the Japanese language would prove the most
+valuable of ponies in the academic pursuit of philology.  In the
+matter of literature, indeed, we should not be adding very much to
+our existing store, but we should gain an insight into the genesis
+of speech that would put us at least one step nearer to being
+present at the beginnings of human conversation.  As it is now, our
+linguistic learning is with most of us limited to a knowledge of
+Aryan tongues, and in consequence we not only fall into the mistake
+of thinking our way the only way, which is bad enough, but, what is
+far worse, by not perceiving the other possible paths we quite fail
+to appreciate the advantages or disadvantages of following our own.
+We are the blind votaries of a species of ancestral language-worship,
+which, with all its erudition, tends to narrow our linguistic scope. 
+A study of Japanese would free us from the fetters of any such
+family infatuation.  The inviolable rules and regulations of our
+mother-tongue would be found to be of relative application only. 
+For we should discover that speech is a much less categorical matter
+than we had been led to suppose.  We should actually come to doubt
+the fundamental necessity of some of our most sacred grammatical
+constructions; and even our reverenced Latin grammars would lose
+that air of awful absoluteness which so impressed us in boyhood.
+
+An encouraging estimate of a certain missionary puts the amount of
+study needed by the Western student for the learning of Japanese as
+sufficient, if expended nearer home, to equip him with any three
+modern European languages.  It is certainly true that a completely
+strange vocabulary, an utter inversion of grammar, and an elaborate
+system of honorifics combine to render its acquisition anything but
+easy.  In its fundamental principles, however, it is alluringly
+simple.
+
+In the first place, the Japanese language is pleasingly destitute of
+personal pronouns.  Not only is the obnoxious "I" conspicuous only
+by its absence; the objectionable antagonistic "you" is also
+entirely suppressed, while the intrusive "he" is evidently too much
+of a third person to be wanted.  Such invidious distinctions of
+identity apparently never thrust their presence upon the simple
+early Tartar minds.  I, you, and he, not being differences due to
+nature, demanded, to their thinking, no recognition of man.
+
+There is about this vagueness of expression a freedom not without its
+charm.  It is certainly delightful to be able to speak of yourself
+as if you were somebody else, choosing mentally for the occasion any
+one you may happen to fancy, or, it you prefer, the possibility of
+soaring boldly forth into the realms of the unconditioned.
+
+To us, at first sight, however, such a lack of specification appears
+wofully incompatible with any intelligible transmission of ideas. 
+So communistic a want of discrimination between the meum and the
+tuum--to say nothing of the claims of a possible third party--would
+seem to be as fatal to the interchange of thoughts as it proves
+destructive to the trafficking in commodities.  Such, nevertheless,
+is not the result.  On the contrary, Japanese is as easy and as
+certain of comprehension as is English.  On ninety occasions out of
+a hundred, the context at once makes clear the person meant.
+
+In the very few really ambiguous cases, or those in which, for the
+sake of emphasis, a pronoun is wanted, certain consecrated
+expressions are introduced for the purpose.  For eventually the more
+complex social relations of increasing civilization compelled some
+sort of distant recognition.  Accordingly, compromises with
+objectionable personality were effected by circumlocutions promoted
+to a pronoun's office, becoming thus pro-pronouns, as it were.
+Very noncommittal expressions they are, most of them, such as:
+"the augustness," meaning you; "that honorable side," or
+"that corner," denoting some third person, the exact term employed
+in any given instance scrupulously betokening the relative respect
+in which the individual spoken of is held; while with a candor, an
+indefiniteness, or a humility worthy so polite a people, the I is
+known as "selfishness," or "a certain person," or "the clumsy one."
+
+Pronominal adjectives are manufactured in the same way.
+"The stupid father," "the awkward son," "the broken-down firm," are
+"mine." Were they "yours," they would instantly become "the august,
+venerable father," "the honorable son," "the exalted firm." [1]
+
+Even these lame substitutes for pronouns are paraded as sparingly as
+possible.  To the Western student, who brings to the subject a brain
+throbbing with personality, hunting in a Japanese sentence for
+personal references is dishearteningly like "searching in the dark
+for a black hat which is n't there;" for the brevet pronouns are
+commonly not on duty.  To employ them with the reckless prodigality
+that characterizes our conversation would strike the Tartar mind
+like interspersing his talk with unmeaning italics.  He would regard
+such discourse much as we do those effusive epistles of a certain
+type of young woman to her most intimate girl friends, in which
+every other word is emphatically underlined.
+
+For the most part, the absolutely necessary personal references are
+introduced by honorifics; that is, by honorary or humble expressions.
+Such is a portion of the latter's duty.  They do a great deal of
+unnecessary work besides.
+
+These honorifics are, taken as a whole, one of the most interesting
+peculiarities of Japanese, as also of Korean, just as, taken in
+detail, they are one of its most dangerous pitfalls.  For silence is
+indeed golden compared with the chagrin of discovering that a speech
+which you had meant for a compliment was, in fact, an insult, or the
+vexation of learning that you have been industriously treating your
+servant with the deference due a superior,--two catastrophes sure to
+follow the attempts of even the most cautious of beginners.
+The language is so thoroughly imbued with the honorific spirit that
+the exposure of truth in all its naked simplicity is highly improper.
+Every idea requires to be more or less clothed in courtesy before it
+is presentable; and the garb demanded by etiquette is complex beyond
+conception.  To begin with, there are certain preliminary particles
+which are simply honorific, serving no other purpose whatsoever.
+In addition to these there are for every action a small infinity of
+verbs, each sacred to a different degree of respect.  For instance,
+to our verb "to give" corresponds a complete social scale of
+Japanese verbs, each conveying the idea a shade more politely than
+its predecessor; only the very lowest meaning anything so plebeian as
+simply "to give." Sets of laudatory or depreciatory adjectives are
+employed in the same way.  Lastly, the word for "is," which strictly
+means "exists," expresses this existence under three different
+forms,--in a matter-of-fact, a flowing, or an inflated style;
+the solid, liquid, and gaseous states of conversation, so to speak,
+to suit the person addressed.  But three forms being far too few for
+the needs of so elaborate a politeness, these are supplemented by
+many interpolated grades.
+
+Terms of respect are applied not only to those mortals who are held
+in estimation higher than their fellows, but to all men
+indiscriminately as well.  The grammatical attitude of the
+individual toward the speaker is of as much importance as his social
+standing, I being beneath contempt, and you above criticism.
+
+Honorifics are used not only on all possible occasions for courtesy,
+but at times, it would seem, upon impossible ones; for in some
+instances the most subtle diagnosis fails to reveal in them a
+relevancy to anybody.  That the commonest objects should bear titles
+because of their connection with some particular person is
+comprehensible, but what excuse can be made for a phrase like the
+following, "It respectfully does that the august seat exists," all
+of which simply means "is," and may be applied to anything, being
+the common word--in Japanese it is all one word now--for that
+apparently simple idea.  It would seem a sad waste of valuable
+material.  The real reason why so much distinguished consideration
+is shown the article in question lies in the fact that it is treated
+as existing with reference to the person addressed, and therefore
+becomes ipso facto august.
+
+Here is a still subtler example.  You are, we will suppose, at a
+tea-house, and you wish for sugar.  The following almost stereotyped
+conversation is pretty sure to take place.  I translate it literally,
+simply prefacing that every tea-house girl, usually in the first
+blush of youth, is generically addressed as "elder sister,"--
+another honorific, at least so considered in Japan.
+
+ You clap your hands.  (Enter tea-house maiden.)
+
+ You.  Hai, elder sister, augustly exists there sugar?
+
+ The T. H. M.  The honorable sugar, augustly is it?
+
+ You.  So, augustly.
+
+ The T. H. M. He (indescribable expression of assent).
+ (Exit tea-house maiden to fetch the sugar.)
+
+Now, the "augustlies" go almost without saying, but why is the sugar
+honorable?  Simply because it is eventually going to be offered to
+you.  But she would have spoken of it by precisely the same
+respectful title, if she had been obliged to inform you that there
+was none, in which case it never could have become yours.  Such is
+politeness.  We may note, in passing, that all her remarks and all
+yours, barring your initial question, meant absolutely nothing.
+She understood you perfectly from the first, and you knew she did;
+but then, if all of us were to say only what were necessary, the
+delightful art of conversation would soon be nothing but a science.
+
+The average Far Oriental, indeed, talks as much to no purpose as his
+Western cousin, only in his chit-chat politeness replaces
+personalities.  With him, self is suppressed, and an ever-present
+regard for others is substituted in its stead.
+
+A lack of personality is, as we have seen, the occasion of this
+courtesy; it is also its cause.
+
+That politeness should be one of the most marked results of
+impersonality may appear surprising, yet a slight examination will
+show it to be a fact.  Looked at a posteriori, we find that where
+the one trait exists the other is most developed, while an absence
+of the second seems to prevent the full growth of the first.
+This is true both in general and in detail.  Courtesy increases, as
+we travel eastward round the world, coincidently with a decrease in
+the sense of self.  Asia is more courteous than Europe, Europe than
+America. Particular races show the same concomitance of
+characteristics. France, the most impersonal nation of Europe, is at
+the same time the most polite.
+
+Considered a priori, the connection between the two is not far to
+seek.  Impersonality, by lessening the interest in one's self,
+induces one to take an interest in others.  Introspection tends to
+make of man a solitary animal, the absence of it a social one.
+The more impersonal the people, the more will the community supplant
+the individual in the popular estimation.  The type becomes the
+interesting thing to man, as it always is to nature.  Then, as the
+social desires develop, politeness, being the means to their
+enjoyment, develops also.
+
+A second omission in Japanese etymology is that of gender.  That
+words should be credited with sex is a verbal anthropomorphism that
+would seem to a Japanese exquisitely grotesque, if so be that it did
+not strike him as actually immodest.  For the absence of gender is
+simply symptomatic of a much more vital failing, a disregard of sex.
+Originally, as their language bears witness, the Japanese showed a
+childish reluctance to recognizing sex at all.  Usually a single
+sexless term was held sufficient for a given species, and did duty
+collectively for both sexes.  Only where a consideration of sex
+thrust itself upon them, beyond the possibility of evasion, did they
+employ for the male and the female distinctive expressions.  The
+more intimate the relation of the object to man, the more imperative
+the discriminating name.  Hence human beings possessed a fair number
+of such special appellatives; for a man is a palpably different sort
+of person from his grandmother, and a mother-in-law from a wife. 
+But it is noteworthy that the artificial affinities of society were
+as carefully differentiated as the distinctions due to sex, while
+ancestral relationships were deemed more important than either.
+
+Animals, though treated individually most humanely, are vouchsafed
+but scant recognition on the score of sex.  With them, both sexes
+share one common name, and commonly, indeed, this answers quite well
+enough.  In those few instances where sex enters into the question
+in a manner not to be ignored, particles denoting "male" or "female"
+are prefixed to the general term.  How comparatively rare is the need
+of such specification can be seen from the way in which, with us,
+in many species, the name of one sex alone does duty indifferently
+for both.  That of the male is the one usually selected, as in the
+case of the dog or horse.  If, however, it be the female with which
+man has most to do, she is allowed to bestow her name upon her male
+partner.  Examples of the latter description occur in the use of
+"cows" for "cattle," and "hens" for "fowls." A Japanese can say only
+"fowl," defined, if absolutely necessary, as "he-fowl" or "she-fowl."
+
+Now such a slighting of one of the most potent springs of human
+action, sex, with all that the idea involves, is not due to a
+pronounced misogynism on the part of these people, but to a much
+more effective neglect, a great underlying impersonality.
+Indifference to woman is but included in a much more general
+indifference to mankind.  The fact becomes all the more evident when
+we descend from sex to gender.  That Father Ocean does not, in their
+verbal imagery, embrace Mother Earth, with that subtle suggestion of
+humanity which in Aryan speech the gender of the nouns hints without
+expressing, is not due to any lack of poesy in the Far Oriental
+speaker, but to the essential impersonality of his mind, embodied
+now in the very character of the words he uses.  A Japanese noun is
+a crystallized concept, handed down unchanged from the childhood of
+the Japanese race.  So primitive a conception does it represent that
+it is neither a total nor a partial symbol, but rather the outcome
+of a first vague generality.  The word "man," for instance, means to
+them not one man, still less mankind, but that indefinite idea which
+struggles for embodiment in the utterance of the infant.
+It represents not a person, but a thing, a material fact quite
+innocent of gender.  This early state of semi-consciousness the
+Japanese never outgrew.  The world continued to present itself to
+their minds as a collection of things.  Nor did their subsequent
+Chinese education change their view.  Buddhism simply infused all
+things with the one universal spirit.
+
+As to inanimate objects, the idea of supposing sex where there is
+not even life is altogether too fanciful a notion for the Far
+Eastern mind.
+
+Impersonality first fashioned the nouns, and then the nouns, by
+their very impersonality, helped keep impersonal the thought and
+fettered fancy.  All those temptings to poesy which to the Aryan
+imagination lie latent in the sex with which his forefathers
+humanized their words, never stir the Tartar nor the Chinese soul.
+They feel the poetry of nature as much as, indeed much more than,
+we; but it is a poetry unassociated with man.  And this, too,
+curiously enough, in spite of the fact that to explain the cosmos
+the Chinamen invented, or perhaps only adapted, a singularly sexual
+philosophy.  For possibly, like some other portions of their
+intellectual wealth, they stole it from India.  The Chinese
+conception of the origin of the world is based on the idea of sex.
+According to their notions the earth was begotten.  It is true that
+with them the cosmos started in an abstract something, which
+self-produced two great principles; but this pair once obtained,
+matters proceeded after the analogy of mankind.  The two principles
+at work were themselves abstract enough to have satisfied the most
+unimpassioned of philosophers.  They were simply a positive essence
+and a negative one, correlated to sunshine and shadow, but also
+correlated to male and female forces.  Through their mutual action
+were born the earth and the air and the water; from these, in turn,
+was begotten man.  The cosmical modus operandi was not creative nor
+evolutionary, but sexual.  The whole scheme suggests an attempt to
+wed abstract philosophy with primitive concrete mythology.
+
+The same sexuality distinguishes the Japanese demonology.  Here the
+physical replaces the philosophical; instead of principles we find
+allegorical personages, but they show just the same pleasing
+propensity to appear in pairs.
+
+This attributing of sexes to the cosmos is not in the least
+incompatible with an uninterested disregard of sex where it really
+exists.  It is one thing to admit the fact as a general law of the
+universe, and quite another to dwell upon it as an important factor
+in every-day affairs.
+
+How slight is the Tartar tendency to personification can be seen
+from a glance at these same Japanese gods.  They are a combination
+of defunct ancestors and deified natural phenomena.  The evolving of
+the first half required little imagination, for fate furnished the
+material ready made; while in conjuring up the second moiety, the
+spirit-evokers showed even less originality.  Their results were
+neither winsome nor sublime.  The gods whom they created they
+invested with very ordinary humanity, the usual endowment of
+aboriginal deity, together with the customary superhuman strength.
+If these demigods differed from others of their class, it was only
+in being more commonplace, and in not meddling much with man.
+Even such personification of natural forces, simple enough to be
+self-suggested, quickly disappeared.  The various awe-compelling
+phenomena soon ceased to have any connection with the
+anthropomorphic noumena they had begotten.  For instance, the
+sun-goddess, we are informed, was one day lured out of a cavern,
+where she was sulking in consequence of the provoking behavior of
+her younger brother, by her curiosity at the sight of her own face
+in a mirror, ingeniously placed before the entrance for the purpose.
+But no Japanese would dream now of casting any such reflections,
+however flattering, upon the face of the orb of day.  The sun has
+become not only quite sexless to him, but as devoid of personality
+as it is to any Western materialist.  Lesser deities suffered a like
+unsubstantial transformation.  The thunder-god, with his belt of
+drums, upon which he beats a devil's tattoo until he is black in the
+face, is no longer even indirectly associated with the storm.
+As for dryads and nymphs, the beautiful creatures never inhabited
+Eastern Asia.  Anthropoid foxes and raccoons, wholly lacking in
+those engaging qualities that beget love, and through love
+remembrance, take their place.  Even Benten, the naturalized Venus,
+who, like her Hellenic sister, is said to have risen from the sea,
+is a person quite incapable of inspiring a reckless infatuation.
+
+Utterly unlike was this pantheon to the pantheon of the Greeks,
+the personifying tendency of whose Aryan mind was forever peopling
+nature with half-human inhabitants.  Under its quickening fancy the
+very clods grew sentient.  Dumb earth awoke at the call of its
+desire, and the beings its own poesy had begotten made merry
+companionship for man.  Then a change crept over the face of things.
+Faith began to flicker, for want of facts to feed its flame.  Little
+by little the fires of devotion burnt themselves out.  At last great
+Pan died.  The body of the old belief was consumed.  But though it
+perished, its ashes preserved its form, an unsubstantial presentment
+of the past, to crumble in a twinkling at the touch of science, but
+keeping yet to the poet's eye the lifelike semblance of what once
+had been.  The dead gods still live in our language and our art. 
+Even to-day the earth about us seems semiconscious to the soul,
+for the memories they have left.
+
+But with the Far Oriental the exorcising feeling was fear.  He never
+fell in love with his own mythological creations, and so he never
+embalmed their memories.  They were to him but explanations of
+facts, and had no claims upon his fancy.  His ideal world remained
+as utterly impersonal as if it had never been born.
+
+The same impersonality reappears in the matter of number.
+Grammatically, number with them is unrecognized.  There exist no
+such things as plural forms.  This singularity would be only too
+welcome to the foreign student, were it not that in avoiding the
+frying-pan the Tartars fell into the fire.  For what they invented
+in place of a plural was quite as difficult to memorize, and even
+more cumbrous to express.  Instead of inflecting the noun and then
+prefixing a number, they keep the noun unchanged and add two
+numerals; thus at times actually employing more words to express the
+objects than there are objects to express.  One of these numerals is
+a simple number; the other is what is known as an auxiliary numeral,
+a word as singular in form as in function.  Thus, for instance,
+"two men" become amplified verbally into "man two individual," or,
+as the Chinaman puts it, in pidgin English, "two piecey man."  For in
+this respect Chinese resembles Japanese, though in very little else,
+and pidgin English is nothing but the literal translation of the
+Chinese idiom into Anglo-Saxon words.  The necessity for such
+elaborate qualification arises from the excessive simplicity of the
+Japanese nouns.  As we have seen, the noun is so indefinite a
+generality that simply to multiply it by a number cannot possibly
+produce any definite result.  No exact counterpart of these nouns
+exists in English, but some idea of the impossibility of the process
+may be got from our word "cattle," which, prolific though it may
+prove in fact, remains obstinately incapable of verbal multiplication.
+All Japanese nouns being of this indefinite description, all require
+auxiliary numerals.  But as each one has its own appropriate numeral,
+about which a mistake is unpardonable, it takes some little study
+merely to master the etiquette of these handles to the names of
+things.
+
+Nouns are not inflected, their cases being expressed by postpositions,
+which, as the name implies, follow, in becoming Japanese inversion,
+instead of preceding the word they affect.  To make up, nevertheless,
+for any lack of perplexity due to an absence of inflections,
+adjectives, en revanche, are most elaborately conjugated.  Their
+protean shapes are as long as they are numerous, representing not
+only times, but conditions.  There are, for instance, the root form,
+the adverbial form, the indefinite form, the attributive form, and
+the conclusive form, the two last being conjugated through all the
+various voices, moods, and tenses, to say nothing of all the
+potential forms.  As one change is superposed on another, the
+adjective ends by becoming three or four times its original length. 
+The fact is, the adjective is either adjective, adverb, or verb,
+according to occasion.  In the root form it also helps to make
+nouns; so that it is even more generally useful than as a
+journalistic epithet with us.  As a verb, it does duty as predicate
+and copula combined.  For such an unnecessary part of speech as a
+real copula does not exist in Japanese.  In spite of the shock to
+the prejudices of the old school of logicians, it must be confessed
+that the Tartars get on very well without any such couplings to
+their trains of thought.  But then we should remember that in their
+sentences the cart is always put before the horse, and so needs only
+to be pushed, not pulled along.
+
+The want of a copula is another instance of the primitive character
+of the tongue.  It has its counterpart in our own baby-talk, where a
+quality is predicated of a thing simply by placing the adjective in
+apposition with the noun.
+
+That the Japanese word which is commonly translated "is" is in no
+sense a copula, but an ordinary intransitive verb, referring to a
+natural state, and not to a logical condition, is evident in two
+ways.  In the first place, it is never used to predicate a quality
+directly.  A Japanese does not say, "The scenery is fine," but
+simply, "Scenery, fine." Secondly, wherever this verb is indirectly
+employed in such a manner, it is followed, not by an adjective, but
+by an adverb.  Not "She is beautiful, but "She exists beautifully,"
+would be the Japanese way of expressing his admiration.  What looks
+at first, therefore, like a copula turns out to be merely an
+impersonal intransitive verb.
+
+A negative noun is, of course, an impossibility in any language,
+just as a negative substantive, another name for the same thing, is
+a direct contradiction in terms.  No matter how negative the idea to
+be given, it must be conveyed by a positive expression.  Even a void
+is grammatically quite full of meaning, although unhappily empty in
+fact.  So much is common to all tongues, but Japanese carries its
+positivism yet further.  Not only has it no negative nouns, it has
+not even any negative pronouns nor pronominal adjectives,-- those
+convenient keepers of places for the absent.  "None" and "nothing"
+are unknown words in its vocabulary, because the ideas they
+represent are not founded on observed facts, but upon metaphysical
+abstractions.  Such terms are human-born, not earth-begotten
+concepts, and so to the Far Oriental, who looks at things from the
+point of view of nature, not of man, negation takes another form.
+Usually it is introduced by the verbs, because the verbs, for the
+most part, relate to human actions, and it is man, not nature, who
+is responsible for the omission in question.  After all, it does
+seem more fitting to say, "I am ignorant of everything," than
+"I know nothing." It is indeed you who are wanting, not the thing.
+
+The question of verbs leads us to another matter bearing on the
+subject of impersonality; namely, the arrangement of the words in a
+Japanese sentence.  The Tartar mode of grammatical construction is
+very nearly the inverse of our own.  The fundamental rule of
+Japanese syntax is, that qualifying words precede the words they
+qualify; that is, an idea is elaborately modified before it is so
+much as expressed.  This practice places the hearer at some awkward
+preliminary disadvantage, inasmuch as the story is nearly over
+before he has any notion what it is all about; but really it puts
+the speaker to much more trouble, for he is obliged to fashion his
+whole sentence complete in his brain before he starts to speak. 
+This is largely in consequence of two omissions in Tartar etymology. 
+There are in Japanese no relative pronouns and no temporal
+conjunctions; conjunctions, that is, for connecting consecutive
+events.  The want of these words precludes the admission of
+afterthoughts.  Postscripts in speech are impossible.  The functions
+of relatives are performed by position, explanatory or continuative
+clauses being made to precede directly the word they affect. 
+Ludicrous anachronisms, not unlike those experienced by Alice in her
+looking-glass journey, are occasioned by this practice.  For example,
+"The merry monarch who ended by falling a victim to profound
+melancholia" becomes "To profound melancholia a victim by falling
+ended merry monarch," and the sympathetic hearer weeps first and
+laughs afterward, when chronologically he should be doing precisely
+the opposite.
+
+A like inversion of the natural order of things results from the
+absence of temporal conjunctions.  In Japanese, though nouns can
+be added, actions cannot; you can say "hat and coat," but not
+"dressed and came." Conjunctions are used only for space, never
+for time. Objects that exist together can be joined in speech,
+but it is not allowable thus to connect consecutive events.
+"Having dressed, came" is the Japanese idiom.  To speak otherwise
+would be to violate the unities.  For a Japanese sentence is a
+single rounded whole, not a bunch of facts loosely tied together. 
+It is as much a unit in its composition as a novel or a drama is
+with us.  Such artistic periods, however, are anything but
+convenient.  In their nicely contrived involution they strikingly
+resemble those curious nests of Chinese boxes, where entire shells
+lie closely packed one within another,--a very marvel of ingenious
+and perfectly unnecessary construction. One must be antipodally
+comprehensive to entertain the idea; as it is, the idea entertains us.
+
+On the same general plan, the nouns precede the verbs in the
+sentence, and are in every way the more important parts of speech.
+The consequence is that in ordinary conversation the verbs come so
+late in the day that they not infrequently get left out altogether.
+For the Japanese are much given to docking their phrases, a custom
+the Germans might do well to adopt.  Now, nouns denote facts, while
+verbs express action, and action, as considered in human speech, is
+mostly of human origin.  In this precedence accorded the impersonal
+element in language over the personal, we observe again the
+comparative importance assigned the two.  In Japanese estimation,
+the first place belongs to nature, the second only to man.
+
+As if to mark beyond a doubt the insignificance of the part man
+plays in their thought, sentences are usually subjectless.  Although
+it is a common practice to begin a phrase with the central word of
+the idea, isolated from what follows by the emphasizing particle
+"wa" (which means "as to," the French "quant a"), the word thus
+singled out for distinction is far more likely to be the object of
+the sentence than its subject.  The habit is analogous to the use of
+our phrase "speaking of,"--that is, simply an emphatic mode of
+introducing a fresh thought; only that with them, the practice being
+the rule and not the exception, no correspondingly abrupt effect is
+produced by it.  Ousted thus from the post of honor, the subject is
+not even permitted the second place.  Indeed, it usually fails to
+put in an appearance anywhere.  You may search through sentence
+after sentence without meeting with the slightest suggestion of such
+a thing.  When so unusual an anomaly as a motive cause is directly
+adduced, it owes its mention, not to the fact of being the subject,
+but because for other reasons it happens to be the important word of
+the thought.  The truth is, the Japanese conception of events is
+only very vaguely subjective.  An action is looked upon more as
+happening than as being performed, as impersonally rather than
+personally produced.  The idea is due, however, to anything but
+philosophic profundity.  It springs from the most superficial of
+childish conceptions.  For the Japanese mind is quite the reverse of
+abstract. Its consideration of things is concrete to a primitive
+degree.  The language reflects the fact.  The few abstract ideas
+these people now possess are not represented, for the most part, by
+pure Japanese, but by imported Chinese expressions.  The islanders
+got such general notions from their foreign education, and they
+imported idea and word at the same time.
+
+Summing up, as it were, in propria persona the impersonality of
+Japanese speech, the word for "man," "hito," is identical with,
+and probably originally the same word as "hito," the numeral "one;"
+a noun and a numeral, from which Aryan languages have coined the only
+impersonal pronoun they possess.  On the one hand, we have the
+German "mann;" on the other, the French "on".  While as if to give
+the official seal to the oneness of man with the universe, the word
+mono, thing, is applied, without the faintest implication of insult,
+to men.
+
+Such, then, is the mould into which, as children, these people learn
+to cast their thought.  What an influence it must exert upon their
+subsequent views of life we have but to ask of our own memories to
+know.  With each one of us, if we are to advance beyond the steps of
+the last generation, there comes a time when our growing ideas
+refuse any longer to fit the childish grooves in which we were
+taught to let them run.  How great the wrench is when this supreme
+moment arrives we have all felt too keenly ever to forget.  We
+hesitate, we delay, to abandon the beliefs which, dating from the
+dawn of our being, seem to us even as a part of our very selves.
+From the religion of our mother to the birth of our boyish first
+love, all our early associations send down roots so deep that long
+after our minds have outgrown them our hearts refuse to give them
+up.  Even when reason conquers at last, sentiment still throbs at
+the voids they necessarily have left.
+
+In the Far East, this fondness for the old is further consecrated by
+religion.  The worship of ancestors sets its seal upon the
+traditions of the past, to break which were impious as well as sad. 
+The golden age, that time when each man himself was young, has
+lingered on in the lands where it is always morning, and where man
+has never passed to his prosaic noon.  Befitting the place is the
+mind we find there. As its language so clearly shows, it still is in
+that early impersonal state to which we all awake first before we
+become aware of that something we later know so well as self.
+
+Particularly potent with these people is their language, for a
+reason that also lends it additional interest to us,--because it is
+their own.  Among the mass of foreign thought the Japanese
+imitativeness has caused the nation to adopt, here is one thing
+which is indigenous.  Half of the present speech, it is true, is of
+Chinese importation, but conservatism has kept the other half pure.
+From what it reveals we can see how each man starts to-day with the
+same impersonal outlook upon life the race had reached centuries
+ago, and which it has since kept unchanged.  The man's mind has done
+likewise.
+
+Footnote to Chapter 4
+
+[1] Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain: The Japanese Language.
+
+
+Chapter 5. Nature and Art.
+
+We have seen how impersonal is the form which Far Eastern thought
+assumes when it crystallizes into words.  Let us turn now to a
+consideration of the thoughts themselves before they are thus
+stereotyped for transmission to others, and scan them as they find
+expression unconsciously in the man's doings, or seek it consciously
+in his deeds.
+
+To the Far Oriental there is one subject which so permeates and
+pervades his whole being as to be to him, not so much a conscious
+matter of thought as an unconscious mode of thinking.  For it is a
+thing which shapes all his thoughts instead of constituting the
+substance of one particular set of them.  That subject is art.
+To it he is born as to a birthright.  Artistic perception is with
+him an instinct to which he intuitively conforms, and for which he
+inherits the skill of countless generations.  From the tips of his
+fingers to the tips of his toes, in whose use he is surprisingly
+proficient, he is the artist all over.  Admirable, however, as is
+his manual dexterity, his mental altitude is still more to be
+admired; for it is artistic to perfection.  His perception of beauty
+is as keen as his comprehension of the cosmos is crude; for while
+with science he has not even a speaking acquaintance, with art he is
+on terms of the most affectionate intimacy.
+
+To the whole Far Eastern world science is a stranger.  Such nescience
+is patent even in matters seemingly scientific.  For although the
+Chinese civilization, even in the so-called modern inventions,
+was already old while ours lay still in the cradle, it was to no
+scientific spirit that its discoveries were due.  Notwithstanding
+the fact that Cathay was the happy possessor of gunpowder, movable
+type, and the compass before such things were dreamt of in Europe,
+she owed them to no knowledge of physics, chemistry, or mechanics. 
+It was as arts, not as sciences, they were invented.  And it speaks
+volumes for her civilization that she burnt her powder for fireworks,
+not for firearms.  To the West alone belongs the credit of
+manufacturing that article for the sake of killing people instead
+of merely killing time.
+
+The scientific is not the Far Oriental point of view.  To wish to
+know the reasons of things, that irrepressible yearning of the
+Western spirit, is no characteristic of the Chinaman's mind, nor is
+it a Tartar trait.  Metaphysics, a species of speculation that has
+usually proved peculiarly attractive to mankind, probably from its
+not requiring any scientific capital whatever, would seem the most
+likely place to seek it.  But upon such matters he has expended no
+imagination of his own, having quietly taken on trust from India
+what he now professes.  As for science proper, it has reached at his
+hands only the quasimorphologic stage; that is, it consists of
+catalogues concocted according to the ingenuity of the individual
+and resembles the real thing about as much as a haphazard
+arrangement of human bones might be expected to resemble a man.
+Not only is the spirit of the subject left out altogether, but the
+mere outward semblance is misleading.  For pseudo-scientific
+collections of facts which never rise to be classifications of
+phenomena forms to his idea the acme of erudition.  His mathematics,
+for example, consists of a set of empiric rules, of which no
+explanation is ever vouchsafed the taught for the simple reason that
+it is quite unknown to the teacher.  It is not even easy to decide
+how much of what there is is Jesuitical.  Of more recent sciences he
+has still less notion, particularly of the natural ones.  Physics,
+chemistry, geology, and the like are matters that have never entered
+his head.  Even in studies more immediately connected with obvious
+everyday life, such as language, history, customs, it is truly
+remarkable how little he possesses the power of generalization and
+inference.  His elaborate lists of facts are imposing typographically,
+but are not even formally important, while his reasoning about them
+is as exquisite a bit of scientific satire as could well be
+imagined.
+
+But with the arts it is quite another matter.  While you will search
+in vain, in his civilization, for explanations of even the most
+simple of nature's laws, you will meet at every turn with devices
+for the beautifying of life, which may stand not unworthily beside
+the products of nature's own skill.  Whatever these people fashion,
+from the toy of an hour to the triumphs of all time, is touched by a
+taste unknown elsewhere.  To stroll down the Broadway of Tokio of an
+evening is a liberal education in everyday art.  As you enter it
+there opens out in front of you a fairy-like vista of illumination.
+Two long lines of gayly lighted shops, stretching off into the
+distance, look out across two equally endless rows of torch-lit
+booths, the decorous yellow gleam of the one contrasting strangely
+with the demoniacal red flare of the other.  This perspective of
+pleasure fulfils its promise.  As your feet follow your eyes you
+find yourself in a veritable shoppers' paradise, the galaxy of
+twinkle resolving into worlds of delight.  Nor do you long remain a
+mere spectator; for the shops open their arms to you.  No cold glass
+reveals their charms only to shut you off.  Their wares lie
+invitingly exposed to the public, seeming to you already half your
+own.  At the very first you come to you stop involuntarily, lost in
+admiration over what you take to be bric-a-brac.  It is only
+afterwards you learn that the object of your ecstasy was the
+commonest of kitchen crockery.  Next door you halt again, this time
+in front of some leathern pocket-books, stamped with designs in
+color to tempt you instantly to empty your wallet for more new ones
+than you will ever have the means to fill.  If you do succeed in
+tearing yourself away purse-whole, it is only to fall a victim to
+some painted fans of so exquisite a make and decoration that escape
+short of possession is impossible.  Opposed as stubbornly as you may
+be to idle purchase at home, here you will find yourself the prey of
+an acute case of shopping fever before you know it.  Nor will it be
+much consolation subsequently to discover that you have squandered
+your patrimony upon the most ordinary articles of every-day use.
+If in despair you turn for refuge to the booths, you will but have
+delivered yourself into the embrace of still more irresistible
+fascinations.  For the nocturnal squatters are there for the express
+purpose of catching the susceptible.  The shops were modestly
+attractive from their nature, but the booths deliberately make eyes
+at you, and with telling effect.  The very atmosphere is bewitching.
+The lurid smurkiness of the torches lends an appropriate weirdness
+to the figure of the uncouthly clad pedlar who, with the politeness
+of the arch-fiend himself, displays to an eager group the fatal
+fascinations of some new conceit.  Here the latest thing in
+inventions, a gutta-percha rat, which, for reasons best known to the
+vender, scampers about squeaking with a mimicry to shame the
+original, holds an admiring crowd spellbound with mingled
+trepidation and delight.  There a native zoetrope, indefatigable
+round of pleasure, whose top fashioned after the type of a turbine
+wheel enables a candle at the centre ingeniously to supply both
+illumination and motive power at the same time, affords to as many
+as can find room on its circumference a peep at the composite antics
+of a consecutively pictured monkey in the act of jumping a box.
+Beyond this "wheel of life" lies spread out on a mat a most happy
+family of curios, the whole of which you are quite prepared to
+purchase en bloc.  While a little farther on stands a flower show
+which seems to be coyly beckoning to you as the blossoms nod their
+heads to an imperceptible breeze.  So one attraction fairly jostles
+its neighbor for recognition from the gay thousands that like
+yourself stroll past in holiday delight.  Chattering children in
+brilliant colors, voluble women and talkative men in quieter but no
+less picturesque costumes, stream on in kaleidoscopic continuity.
+And you, carried along by the current, wander thus for miles with
+the tide of pleasure-seekers, till, late at night, when at last you
+turn reluctantly homeward, you feel as one does when wakened from
+some too delightful dream.
+
+Or instead of night, suppose it day and the place a temple.  With
+those who are entering you enter too through the outer gateway into
+the courtyard.  At the farther end rises a building the like of
+which for richness of effect you have probably never beheld or even
+imagined.  In front of you a flight of white stone steps leads up to
+a terrace whose parapet, also of stone, is diapered for half its
+height and open latticework the rest.  This piazza gives entrance to
+a building or set of buildings whose every detail challenges the eye.
+Twelve pillars of snow-white wood sheathed in part with bronze,
+arranged in four rows, make, as it were, the bones of the structure.
+The space between the centre columns lies open.  The other triplets
+are webbed in the middle and connected, on the sides and front, by
+grilles of wood and bronze forming on the outside a couple of
+embrasures on either hand the entrance in which stand the guardian
+Nio, two colossal demons, Gog and Magog.  Instead of capitals ,a
+frieze bristling with Chinese lions protects the top of the pillars.
+Above this in place of entablature rises tier upon tier of decoration,
+each tier projecting beyond the one beneath, and the topmost of all
+terminating in a balcony which encircles the whole second story. 
+The parapet of this balcony is one mass of ornament, and its cornice
+another row of lions, brown instead of white.  The second story is
+no less crowded with carving.  Twelve pillars make its ribs, the
+spaces between being filled with elaborate woodwork, while on top
+rest more friezes, more cornices, clustered with excrescences of all
+colors and kinds, and guarded by lions innumerable.  To begin to tell
+the details of so multi-faceted a gem were artistically impossible.
+It is a jewel of a thousand rays, yet whose beauties blend into one
+as the prismatic tints combine to white.  And then, after the first
+dazzle of admiration, when the spirit of curiosity urges you to
+penetrate the centre aisle, lo and behold it is but a gate!  The dupe
+of unexpected splendor, you have been paying court to the means of
+approach.  It is only a portal after all.  For as you pass through,
+you catch a glimpse of a building beyond more gorgeous still.
+Like in general to the first, unlike it in detail, resembling it
+only as the mistress may the maid.  But who shall convince of charm
+by enumerating the features of a face! From the tiles of its terrace
+to the encrusted gables that drape it as with some rich bejewelled
+mantle falling about it in the most graceful of folds, it is the
+very eastern princess of a building standing in the majesty of her
+court to give you audience.
+
+A pebbly path, a low flight of stone steps, a pause to leave your
+shoes without the sill, and you tread in the twilight of reverence
+upon the moss-like mats within.  The richness of its outer ornament,
+so impressive at first, is, you discover, but prelude to the lavish
+luxury of its interior.  Lacquer, bronze, pigments, deck its ceiling
+and its sides in such profusion that it seems to you as if art had
+expanded, in the congenial atmosphere, into a tropical luxuriance of
+decoration, and grew here as naturally on temples as in the jungle
+creepers do on trees.  Yet all is but setting to what the place
+contains; objects of bigotry and virtue that appeal to the artistic
+as much as to the religious instincts of the devout.  More sacred
+still are the things treasured in the sanctum of the priests.  There
+you will find gems of art for whose sake only the most abnormal
+impersonality can prevent you from breaking the tenth commandment.
+Of the value set upon them you can form a distant approximation from
+the exceeding richness and the amazing number of the silk cloths and
+lacquered boxes in which they are so religiously kept.  As you gaze
+thus, amid the soul-satisfying repose of the spot, at some
+masterpiece from the brush of Motonobu, you find yourself wondering,
+in a fanciful sort of way, whether Buddhist contemplation is not
+after all only another name for the contemplation of the beautiful,
+since devotees to the one are ex officio such votaries of the other.
+
+Dissimilar as are these two glimpses of Japanese existence, in one
+point the bustling street and the hushed temple are alike,--in the
+nameless grace that beautifies both.
+
+This spirit is even more remarkable for its all-pervasiveness than
+for its inherent excellence.  Both objectively and subjectively its
+catholicity is remarkable.  It imbues everything, and affects
+everybody.  So universally is it applied to the daily affairs of
+life that there may be said to be no mechanical arts in Japan simply
+because all such have been raised to the position of fine arts.  The
+lowest artisan is essentially an artist.  Modern French nomenclature
+on the subject, in spite of the satire to which the more prosaic
+Anglo-Saxon has subjected it, is peculiarly applicable there.
+To call a Japanese cook, for instance, an artist would be but the
+barest acknowledgment of fact, for Japanese food is far more
+beautiful to look at than agreeable to eat; while Tokio tailors are
+certainly masters of drapery, if they are sublimely oblivious to the
+natural modelings of the male or female form.
+
+On the other hand, art is sown, like the use of tobacco, broadcast
+among the people.  It is the birthright of the Far East, the talent
+it never hides.  Throughout the length and breadth of the land, and
+from the highest prince to the humblest peasant, art reigns supreme.
+
+Now such a prevalence of artistic feeling implies of itself
+impersonality in the people.  At first sight it might seem as if
+science did the same, and that in this respect the one hemisphere
+offset the other, and that consequently both should be equally
+impersonal.  But in the first place, our masses are not imbued with
+the scientific spirit, as theirs are with artistic sensibility.
+Who would expect of a mason an impersonal interest in the principles
+of the arch, or of a plumber a non-financial devotion to hydraulics?
+Certainly one would be wrong in crediting the masses in general or
+European waiters in particular with much abstract love of mathematics,
+for example.  In the second place, there is an essential difference
+in the attitude of the two subjects upon personality. Emotionally,
+science appeals to nobody, art to everybody.  Now the emotions
+constitute the larger part of that complex bundle of ideas which we
+know as self.  A thought which is not tinged to some extent with
+feeling is not only not personal; properly speaking, it is not even
+distinctively human, but cosmical.  In its lofty superiority to man,
+science is unpersonal rather than impersonal.  Art, on the other hand,
+is a familiar spirit.  Through the windows of the senses she finds
+her way into the very soul of man, and makes for herself a home there.
+But it is to his humanity, not to his individuality, that she
+whispers, for she speaks in that universal tongue which all can
+understand.
+
+Examples are not wanting to substantiate theory.  It is no mere
+coincidence that the two most impersonal nations of Europe and Asia
+respectively, the French and the Japanese, are at the same time the
+most artistic.  Even politeness, which, as we have seen,
+distinguishes both, is itself but a form of art,--the social art of
+living agreeably with one's fellows.
+
+This impersonality comes out with all the more prominence when we
+pass from the consideration of art in itself to the spirit which
+actuates that art, and especially when we compare their spirit with
+our own.  The mainsprings of Far Eastern art may be said to be
+three: Nature, Religion, and Humor.  Incongruous collection that
+they are, all three witness to the same trait.  For the first
+typifies concrete impersonality, the second abstract impersonality,
+while the province of the last is to ridicule personality generally. 
+Of the trio the first is altogether the most important.  Indeed, to
+a Far Oriental, so fundamental a part of himself is his love of
+Nature that before we view its mirrored image it will be well to
+look the emotion itself in the face.  The Far Oriental lives in a
+long day-dream of beauty.  He muses rather than reasons, and all
+musing, so the word itself confesses, springs from the inspiration
+of a Muse.  But this Muse appears not to him, as to the Greeks,
+after the fashion of a woman, nor even more prosaically after the
+likeness of a man. Unnatural though it seem to us, his inspiration
+seeks no human symbol.  His Muse is not kin to mankind.  She is too
+impersonal for any personification, for she is Nature.
+
+That poet whose name carries with it a certain presumption of
+infallibility has told us that "the proper study of mankind is man;"
+and if material advancement in consequence be any criterion of the
+fitness of a particular mental pursuit, events have assuredly
+justified the saying.  Indeed, the Levant has helped antithetically
+to preach the same lesson, in showing us by its own fatal example
+that the improper study of mankind is woman, and that they who but
+follow the fair will inevitably degenerate.
+
+The Far Oriental knows nothing of either study, and cares less.
+The delight of self-exploration, or the possibly even greater delight
+of losing one's self in trying to fathom femininity, is a sensation
+equally foreign to his temperament.  Neither the remarkable
+persistence of one's own characteristics, not infrequently matter of
+deep regret to their possessor, nor the charmingly unaccountable
+variability of the fairer sex, at times quite as annoying, is a
+phenomenon sufficient to stir his curiosity.  Accepting, as he does,
+the existing state of things more as a material fact than as a phase
+in a gradual process of development, he regards humanity as but a
+small part of the great natural world, instead of considering it the
+crowning glory of the whole.  He recognizes man merely as a fraction
+of the universe,--one might almost say as a vulgar fraction of it,
+considering the low regard in which he is held,--and accords him his
+proportionate share of attention, and no more.
+
+In his thought, nature is not accessory to man.  Worthy M. Perichon,
+of prosaic, not to say philistinic fame, had, as we remember, his
+travels immortalized in a painting where a colossal Perichon in
+front almost completely eclipsed a tiny Mont Blanc behind.  A Far
+Oriental thinks poetry, which may possibly account for the fact that
+in his mind-pictures the relative importance of man and mountain
+stands reversed.  "The matchless Fuji," first of motifs in his art,
+admits no pilgrim as its peer.
+
+Nor is it to woman that turn his thoughts.  Mother Earth is fairer,
+in his eyes, than are any of her daughters.  To her is given the
+heart that should be theirs.  The Far Eastern love of Nature amounts
+almost to a passion.  To the study of her ever varying moods her
+Japanese admirer brings an impersonal adoration that combines oddly
+the aestheticism of a poet with the asceticism of a recluse.  Not
+that he worships in secret, however.  His passion is too genuine
+either to find disguise or seek display.  With us, unfortunately,
+the love of Nature is apt to be considered a mental extravagance
+peculiar to poets, excusable in exact ratio to the ability to give
+it expression.  For an ordinary mortal to feel a fondness for Mother
+Earth is a kind of folly, to be carefully concealed from his
+fellows.  A sort of shamefacedness prevents him from avowing it,
+as a boy at boarding-school hides his homesickness, or a lad his love. 
+He shrinks from appearing less pachydermatous than the rest.
+Or else he flies to the other extreme, and affects the odd; pretends,
+poses, parades, and at last succeeds half in duping himself, half in
+deceiving other people.  But with Far Orientals the case is
+different.  Their love has all the unostentatious assurance of what
+has received the sanction of public opinion.  Nor is it still at
+that doubtful, hesitating stage when, by the instrumentality of a
+third, its soul-harmony can suddenly be changed from the jubilant
+major key into the despairing minor.  No trace of sadness tinges his
+delight. He has long since passed this melancholy phase of erotic
+misery, if so be that the course of his true love did not always run
+smooth, and is now well on in matrimonial bliss.  The very look of
+the land is enough to betray the fact.  In Japan the landscape has
+an air of domesticity about it, patent even to the most casual
+observer. Wherever the Japanese has come in contact with the country
+he has made her unmistakably his own.  He has touched her to caress,
+not injure, and it seems as if Nature accepted his fondness as a
+matter of course, and yielded him a wifely submission in return. 
+His garden is more human, even, than his house.  Not only is
+everything exquisitely in keeping with man, but natural features are
+actually changed, plastic to the imprint of their lord and master's
+mind. Bushes, shrubs, trees, forget to follow their original intent,
+and grow as he wills them to; now expanding in wanton luxuriance,
+now contracting into dwarf designs of their former selves, all to
+obey his caprice and please his eye.  Even stubborn rocks lose their
+wildness, and come to seem a part of the almost sentient life around
+them.  If the description of such dutifulness seems fanciful, the
+thing itself surpasses all supposition.  Hedges and shrubbery,
+clipped into the most fantastic shapes, accept the suggestion of the
+pruning-knife as if man's wishes were their own whims.  Manikin
+maples, Tom Thumb trees, a foot high and thirty years old, with all
+the gnarls and knots and knuckles of their fellows of the forest,
+grow in his parterres, their native vitality not a whit diminished.
+And they are not regarded as monstrosities but only as the most
+natural of artificialities; for they are a part of a horticultural
+whole.  To walk into a Japanese garden is like wandering of a sudden
+into one of those strange worlds we see reflected in the polished
+surface of a concave mirror, where all but the observer himself is
+transformed into a fantastic miniature of the reality.  In that
+quaint fairyland diminutive rivers flow gracefully under tiny trees,
+past mole-hill mountains, till they fall at last into lilliputian
+lakes, almost smothered for the flowers that grow upon their banks;
+while in the extreme distance of a couple of rods the cone of a Fuji
+ten feet high looks approvingly down upon a scene which would be
+nationally incomplete without it.
+
+But besides the delights of domesticity which the Japanese enjoys
+daily in Nature's company, he has his acces de tendresse, too.
+When he feels thus specially stirred, he invites a chosen few
+of his friends, equally infatuated, and together they repair to some
+spot noted for its scenery.  It may be a waterfall, or some dreamy
+pond overhung by trees, or the distant glimpse of a mountain peak
+framed in picture-wise between the nearer hills; or, at their
+appropriate seasons, the blossoming of the many tree flowers, which
+in eastern Asia are beautiful beyond description.  For he
+appreciates not only places, but times.  One spot is to be seen at
+sunrise, another by moonlight; one to be visited in the spring-time,
+another in the fall. But wherever or whenever it be, a tea-house,
+placed to command the best view of the sight, stands ready to
+receive him.  For nature's beauties are too well recognized to
+remain the exclusive property of the first chance lover.  People
+flock to view nature as we do to see a play, and privacy is as
+impossible as it is unsought.  Indeed, the aversion to publicity is
+simply a result of the sense of self, and therefore necessarily not
+a feature of so impersonal a civilization. Aesthetic guidebooks
+are written for the nature-enamoured, descriptive of these views
+which the Japanese translator quaintly calls "Sceneries," and which
+visitors come not only from near but from far to gaze upon.  In
+front of the tea-house proper are rows of summer pavilions, in one
+of which the party make themselves at home, while gentle little
+tea-house girls toddle forth to serve them the invariable
+preliminary tea and confections.  Each man then produces from up his
+sleeve, or from out his girdle, paper, ink, and brush, and proceeds
+to compose a poem on the beauty of the spot and the feelings it
+calls up, which he subsequently reads to his admiring companions. 
+Hot sake is next served, which is to them what beer is to a German
+or absinthe to a blouse; and there they sit, sip, and poetize,
+passing their couplets, as they do their cups, in honor to one
+another.  At last, after drinking in an hour or two of scenery and
+sake combined, the symposium of poets breaks up.
+
+Sometimes, instead of a company of friends, a man will take his
+family, wife, babies, and all, on such an outing, but the details of
+his holiday are much the same as before.  For the scenery is still
+the centre of attraction, and in the attendant creature comforts Far
+Eastern etiquette permits an equal enjoyment to man, woman, and
+child.
+
+This love of nature is quite irrespective of social condition.
+All classes feel its force, and freely indulge the feeling.  Poor as
+well as rich, low as well as high, contrive to gratify their poetic
+instincts for natural scenery.  As for flowers, especially tree
+flowers, or those of the larger plants, like the lotus or the iris,
+the Japanese appreciation of their beauty is as phenomenal as is
+that beauty itself.  Those who can afford the luxury possess the
+shrubs in private; those who cannot, feast their eyes on the public
+specimens.  From a sprig in a vase to a park planted on purpose,
+there is no part of them too small or too great to be excluded from
+Far Oriental affection.  And of the two "drawing-rooms" of the Mikado
+held every year, in April and November, both are garden-parties:
+the one given at the time and with the title of "the cherry blossoms,"
+and the other of "the chrysanthemum."
+
+These same tree flowers deserve more than a passing notice, not
+simply because of their amazing beauty, which would arrest attention
+anywhere, but for the national attitude toward them.  For no better
+example of the Japanese passion for nature could well be cited.
+If the anniversaries of people are slightingly treated in the land
+of the sunrise, the same cannot be said of plants.  The yearly
+birthdays of the vegetable world are observed with more than botanic
+enthusiasm.  The regard in which they are held is truly emotional,
+and it not actually individual in its object, at least personal to
+the species.  Each kind of tree as its season brings it into flower
+is made the occasion of a festival.  For the beauty of the
+blossoming receives the tribute of a national admiration.
+From peers to populace mankind turns out to witness it.  Nor are
+these occasions few.  Spring in the Far East is one long chain of
+flower fetes, and as spring begins by the end of January and lasts
+till the middle of June, opportunities for appreciating each in turn
+are not half spoiled by a common contemporaneousness.  People have
+not only occasion but time to admire.  Indeed, spring itself is
+suitably respected by being dated conformably to fact.  Far Orientals
+begin their year when Nature begins hers, instead of starting
+anachronously as we do in the very middle of the dead season, much
+as our colleges hold their commencements, on the last in place at on
+the first day of the academic term.  So previous has the haste of
+Western civilization become.  The result is that our rejoicing
+partakes of the incongruity of humor.  The new year exists only in
+name.  In the Far East, on the other band, the calendar is made to
+fit the time.  Men begin to reckon their year some three weeks later
+than the Western world, just as the plum-tree opens its pink white
+petals, as it were, in rosy reflection of the snow that lies yet
+upon the ground.  But the coldness of the weather does not in the
+least deter people from thronging the spot in which the trees grow,
+where they spend hours in admiration, and end by pinning appropriate
+poems on the twigs for later comers to peruse.  Fleeting as the
+flowers are in fact, they live forever in fancy.  For they
+constitute one of the commonest motifs of both painting and poetry. 
+A branch just breaking into bloom seen against the sunrise sky, or a
+bough bending its blossoms to the bosom of a stream, is subject
+enough for their greatest masters, who thus wed, as it were,
+two arts in one,--the spirit of poesy with pictorial form.
+This plum-tree is but a blossom.  Precocious harbinger of a host
+of flowers, its gay heralding over, it vanishes not to be recalled,
+for it bears no edible fruit.
+
+The next event in the series might fairly be called phenomenal.
+Early in April takes place what is perhaps as superb a sight as
+anything in this world, the blossoming of the cherry-trees.  Indeed,
+it is not easy to do the thing justice in description.  If the plum
+invited admiration, the cherry commands it; for to see the sakura in
+flower for the first time is to experience a new sensation. 
+Familiar as a man may be with cherry blossoms at home, the sight
+there bursts upon him with the dazzling effect of a revelation. 
+Such is the profusion of flowers that the tree seems to have turned
+into a living mass of rosy light.  No leaves break the brilliance. 
+The snowy-pink petals drape the branches entirely, yet so
+delicately, one deems it all a veil donned for the tree's nuptials
+with the spring.  For nothing could more completely personify the
+spirit of the spring-time.  You can almost fancy it some dryad
+decked for her bridal, in maidenly day-dreaming too lovely to last. 
+For like the plum the cherry fails in its fruit to fulfil the
+promise of its flower.
+
+It would be strange indeed if so much beauty received no recognition,
+but it is even more strange that recognition should be so complete
+and so universal as it is.  Appreciation is not confined to the
+cultivated few; it is shown quite as enthusiastically by the masses. 
+The popularity of the plants is all-embracing.  The common people
+are as sensitive to their beauty as are the upper classes.  Private
+gratification, roseate as it is, pales beside the public delight. 
+Indeed, not content with what revelation Nature makes of herself of
+her own accord, man has multiplied her manifestations.  Spots
+suitable to their growth have been peopled by him with trees.
+Sometimes they stand in groups like star-clusters, as in Oji,
+crowning a hill; sometimes, as at Mukojima, they line an avenue for
+miles, dividing the blue river on the one hand from the blue-green
+rice-fields on the other,--a floral milky way of light.  But
+wherever the trees may be, there at their flowering season are to be
+found throngs of admirers.  For in crowds people go out to see the
+sight, multitudes streaming incessantly to and fro beneath their
+blossoms as the time of day determines the turn of the human tide.
+To the Occidental stranger such a gathering suggests some social
+loadstone; but none exists.  In the cherry-trees alone lies the
+attraction.
+
+For one week out of the fifty-two the cherry-tree stands thus
+glorified, a vision of beauty prolonged somewhat by the want of
+synchronousness of the different kinds.  Then the petals fall.
+What was a nuptial veil becomes a winding-sheet, covering the sod as
+with winter's winding-sheet of snow, destined itself to disappear,
+and the tree is nothing but a common cherry-tree once more.
+
+But flowers are by no means over because the cherry blossoms are
+past.  A brief space, and the same crowds that flocked to the cherry
+turn to the wistaria.  Gardens are devoted to the plants, and the
+populace greatly given to the gardens.  There they go to sit and
+gaze at the grape-like clusters of pale purple flowers that hang
+more than a cubit long over the wooden trellis, and grow daily down
+toward their own reflections in the pond beneath, vying with one
+another in Narcissus-like endeavor.  And the people, as they sip
+their tea on the veranda opposite, behold a doubled delight, the
+flower itself and its mirrored image stretching to kiss.
+
+After the wistaria comes the tree-peony, and then the iris, with its
+trefoil flowers broader than a man may span, and at all colors under
+the sky.  To one who has seen the great Japanese fleur-de-lis,
+France looks ludicrously infelicitous in her choice of emblem.
+
+But the list grows too long, limited as it is only by its own annual
+repetition.  We have as yet reached but the first week in June; the
+summer and autumn are still to come, the first bringing the lotus
+for its crown, and the second the chrysanthemum.  And lazily grand
+the lotus is, itself the embodiment of the spirit of the drowsy
+August air, the very essence of Buddha-like repose.  The castle
+moats are its special domain, which in this its flowering season it
+wrests wholly from their more proper occupant--the water.  A dense
+growth of leather-like leaves, above which rise in majestic isolation
+the solitary flowers, encircles the outer rampart, shutting the
+castle in as it might be the palace of the Sleeping Beauty.  In the
+delightful dreaminess that creeps over one as he stands thus before
+some old daimyo's former abode in the heart of Japan, he forgets all
+his metaphysical difficulties about Nirvana, for he fancies he has
+found it, one long Lotus afternoon.
+
+And then last, but in some sort first, since it has been taken for
+the imperial insignia, comes the chrysanthemum.  The symmetry of its
+shape well fits it to symbolize the completeness of perfection which
+the Mikado, the son of heaven, mundanely represents.  It typifies,
+too, the fullness of the year; for it marks, as it were, the golden
+wedding of the spring, the reminiscence in November of the nuptials
+of the May.  Its own color, however, is not confined to gold.
+It may be of almost any hue and within the general limits of a circle
+of any form.  Now it is a chariot wheel with petals for spokes; now
+a ball of fire with lambent tongues of flame; while another kind
+seems the button of some natural legion of honor, and still another
+a pin-wheel in Nature's own day-fireworks.
+
+Admired as a thing of beauty for its own sake, it is also used
+merely as a material for artistic effects; for among the quaintest
+of such conceits are the Japanese Jarley chrysanthemum works.  Every
+November in the florists' gardens that share the temple grounds at
+Asakusa may be seen groups of historical and mythological figures
+composed entirely of chrysanthemum flowers. These effigies are quite
+worthy of comparison with their London cousins, being sufficiently
+life-like to terrify children and startle anybody.  To come suddenly,
+on turning a corner, upon a colossal warrior, deterrently uncouth
+and frightfully battle-clad, in the act of dispatching a fallen foe,
+is a sensation not instantly dispelled by the fact that he is made
+of flowers.  The practice, at least, bears witness to an artistic
+ingenuity of no mean merit, and to a horticulture ably carried on,
+if somewhat eccentrically applied.
+
+From the passing of the chrysanthemum dates the dead season.
+But it is suitably short-lived.  Sometimes as early as November,
+the plum-tree is already blossoming again.
+
+Even from so imperfectly gathered a garland it will be seen that the
+Japanese do not lack for opportunities to admire, nor do they turn
+coldly away from what they are given.  Indeed, they may be said to
+live in a chronic state of flower-fever; but in spite of the vast
+amount of admiration which they bestow on plants, it is not so much
+the quantity of that admiration as the quality of it which is
+remarkable.  The intense appreciation shown the subject by the Far
+Oriental is something whose very character seems strange to us, and
+when in addition we consider that it permeates the entire people
+from the commonest coolie to the most aesthetic courtier, it becomes
+to our comprehension a state of things little short of inexplicable.
+To call it artistic sensibility is to use too limited a term, for it
+pervades the entire people; rather is it a sixth sense of a natural,
+because national description; for the trait differs from our
+corresponding feeling in degree, and especially in universality
+enough to merit the distinction.  Their care for tree flowers is not
+confined to a cultivation, it is a cult.  It approaches to a sort of
+natural nature-worship, an adoration in which nothing is personified. 
+For the emotion aroused in the Far Oriental is just as truly an
+emotion as it was to the Greek; but whereas the Greek personified
+its object, the Japanese admires that object for what it is.
+To think of the cherry-tree, for instance, as a woman, would be to
+his mind a conception transcending even the limits of the ludicrous.
+
+
+Chapter 6.  Art.
+
+That nature, not man, is their beau ideal, the source of inspiration
+to them, is evident again on looking at their art.  The same spirit
+that makes of them such wonderful landscape gardeners and such
+wonder-full landscape gazers shows itself unmistakably in their
+paintings.
+
+The current impression that Japanese pictorial ambition, and
+consequent skill, is confined to the representation of birds and
+flowers, though entirely erroneous as it stands, has a grain of
+truth behind it.  This idea is due to the attitude of the foreign
+observers, and was in fact a tribute to Japanese technique rather
+than an appreciation of Far Eastern artistic feeling.  The truth is,
+the foreigners brought to the subject their own Western criteria of
+merit, and judged everything by these standards.  Such works
+naturally commended themselves most as had least occasion to deviate
+from their canons.  The simplest pictures, therefore, were
+pronounced the best.  Paintings of birds and flowers were thus
+admitted to be fine, because their realism spoke for itself.  Of the
+exquisite poetic feeling of their landscape paintings the foreign
+critics were not at first conscious, because it was not expressed in
+terms with which they were familiar.
+
+But first impressions, here as elsewhere, are valuable.  One is very
+apt to turn to them again from the reasoning of his second thoughts.
+Flora and fauna are a conspicuous feature of Far Asiatic art,
+because they enter as details of the subject-matter of the artist's
+thoughts and day-dreams.  These birds and flowers are his sujets de
+genre.  Where we should select a phase of human life for effective
+isolation, they choose instead a bit of nature.  A spray of grass or
+a twig of cherry-blossoms is motif enough for them.  To their
+thought its beauty is amply suggestive.  For to the Far Oriental all
+nature is sympathetically sentient.  His admiration, instead of
+being centred on man, embraces the universe.  His art reflects it.
+
+Leaving out of consideration, for the moment, minor though still
+important distinctions in tone, treatment, and technique, the great
+fundamental difference between Western and Far Eastern art lies in
+its attitude toward humanity.
+
+With us, from the time of the Greeks to the present day, man has
+been the cynosure of artistic eyes; with them he has never been
+vouchsafed more than a casual, not to say a cursory glance, even
+woman failing to rivet his attention.  One of our own writers has
+said that, without passing the bounds of due respect, a man is
+permitted two looks at any woman he may meet, one to recognize, one
+to admire.  A Japanese ordinarily never dreams of taking but one,
+--if indeed he goes so far as that,--the first.  It is the omitting
+to take that second look that has left him what he is.  Not that
+Fortune has been unpropitious; only blind.  Fate has offered him
+opportunity enough; too much, perhaps.   For in Japan the exposure
+of the female form is without a parallel in latitude.  Never nude,
+it is frequently naked.  The result artistically is much the same,
+though the cause be different.  For it is a fatal mistake to suppose
+the Japanese an immodest people.  According to their own standards,
+they are exceedingly modest.  No respectable Japanese woman would,
+for instance, ever for a moment turn out her toes in walking.
+It is considered immodest to do so. Their code is, however, not so
+whimsical as this bit of etiquette might suggest.  The intent is
+with them the touchstone of propriety. In their eyes a state of
+nature is not a state of indecency.  Whatever exposure is required
+for convenience is right; whatever unnecessary, wrong.  Such an
+Eden-like condition of society would seem to be the very spot for a
+something like the modern French school of art to have developed in. 
+And yet it is just that study of the nude which has from immemorial
+antiquity been entirely neglected in the Far East.  An ancient
+Greek, to say nothing of a modern Parisian, would have shocked a
+Japanese.  Yet we are shocked by them.  We are astounded at the
+sights we see in their country villages, while they in their turn
+marvel at the exhibitions they witness in our city theatres.  At
+their watering-places the two sexes bathe promiscuously together in
+all the simplicity of nature; but for a Japanese woman to appear on
+the stage in any character, however proper, would be deemed indecent.
+The difference between the two hemispheres may be said to consist in
+an artless liberty on the one hand, and artistic license on the
+other.  Their unwritten code of propriety on the subject seems to
+be, "You must see, but you may not observe."
+
+These people live more in accordance with their code of propriety
+than we do with ours.  All classes alike conform to it.  The
+adjective "respectable," used above as a distinction in speaking of
+woman, was in reality superfluous, for all women there, as far as
+appearance goes, are respectable.  Even the most abandoned creature
+does not betray her status by her behavior.  The reason of this
+uniformity and its psychological importance I shall discuss later.
+
+This form of modesty, a sort of want of modesty of form, has no
+connection whatever with sex.  It applies with equal force to the
+male figure, which is even more exposed than the female, and offers
+anatomical suggestions invaluable alike to the artistic and medical
+professions,--suggestions that are equally ignored by both.
+The coolies are frequently possessed of physiques which would have
+delighted Michael Angelo; and as for the phenomenal corpulency of
+the wrestlers, it would have made of the place a very paradise for
+Rubens.  In regard to the doctors,--for to call them surgeons would
+be to give a name to what does not exist,--a lack of scientific zeal
+has been the cause of their not investigating what tempts too
+seductively, we should imagine, to be ignored.  Acupuncture, or the
+practice of sticking long pins into any part of the patient's body
+that may happen to be paining him, pretty much irrespective of
+anatomical position, is the nearest approach to surgery of which
+they are guilty, and proclaims of itself the in corpore vili
+character of the thing operated upon.
+
+Nor does the painter owe anything to science.  He represents
+humanity simply as he sees it in its every-day costume; and it
+betokens the highest powers of generalized observation that he
+produces the results he does.  In his drawings, man is shown, not as
+he might look in the primitive, or privitive, simplicity of his
+ancestral Garden of Eden, but as he does look in the ordinary wear
+and tear of his present garments.  Civilization has furnished him
+with clothes, and he prefers, when he has his picture taken, to keep
+them on.
+
+In dealing with man, the Far Oriental artist is emphatically a
+realist; it is when he turns to nature that he becomes ideal.
+But by ideal is not meant here conventional.  That term of reproach
+is a misnomer, founded upon a mistake.  His idealism is simply the
+outcome of his love, which, like all human love, transfigures its
+object. The Far Oriental has plenty of this, which, if sometimes a
+delusion, seems also second sight, but it is peculiarly impersonal. 
+His color-blindness to the warm, blood-red end of the spectrum of
+life in no wise affects his perception of the colder beauty of the
+great blues and greens of nature.  To their poetry he is ever
+sensitive. His appreciation of them is something phenomenal, and his
+power of presentation worthy his appreciation.
+
+A Japanese painting is a poem rather than a picture.  It portrays an
+emotion called up by a scene, and not the scene itself in all its
+elaborate complexity.  It undertakes to give only so much of it as
+is vital to that particular feeling, and intentionally omits all
+irrelevant details.  It is the expression caught from a glimpse of
+the soul of nature by the soul of man; the mirror of a mood,
+passing, perhaps, in fact, but perpetuated thus to fancy.  Being an
+emotion, its intensity is directly proportional to the singleness
+with which it possesses the thoughts.  The Far Oriental fully
+realizes the power of simplicity.  This principle is his fundamental
+canon of pictorial art.  To understand his paintings, it is from
+this standpoint they must be regarded; not as soulless photographs
+of scenery, but as poetic presentations of the spirit of the scenes.
+The very charter of painting depends upon its not giving us charts.
+And if with us a long poem be a contradiction in terms, a full
+picture is with them as self-condemnatory a production.  From the
+contemplation of such works of art as we call finished, one is apt,
+after he has once appreciated Far Eastern taste, to rise with an
+unpleasant feeling of satiety, as if he has eaten too much at the
+feast.
+
+Their paintings, by comparison, we call sketches.  Is not our
+would-be slight unwittingly the reverse?  Is not a sketch, after all,
+fuller of meaning, to one who knows how to read it, than a finished
+affair, which is very apt to end with itself, barren of fruit?
+Does not one's own imagination elude one's power to portray it?  Is it
+not forever flitting will-o'-the-wisp-like ahead of us just beyond
+exact definition?  For the soul of art lies in what art can suggest,
+and nothing is half so suggestive as the half expressed, not even a
+double entente.  To hint a great deal by displaying a little is more
+vital to effect than the cleverest representation of the whole.
+The art of partially revealing is more telling, even, than the ars
+celare artem.  Who has not suspected through a veil a fairer face
+than veil ever hid?  Who has not been delightedly duped by the
+semi-disclosures of a dress?  The principle is just as true in any
+one branch of art as it is of the attempted developments by one of
+the suggestions of another.  Yet who but has thus felt its force? 
+Who has not had a shock of day-dream desecration on chancing upon an
+illustrated edition of some book whose story he had lain to heart?
+Portraits of people, pictures of places, he does not know, and yet
+which purport to be his!  And I venture to believe that to more than
+one of us the exquisite pathos of the Bride of Lammermoor is gone
+when Lucia warbles her woes, be it never so entrancingly, to an
+admiring house.  It almost seems as if the garish publicity of using
+her name for operatic title were a special intervention of the Muse,
+that we might the less connect song with story,--two sensations
+that, like two lights, destroy one another by mutual interference.
+
+Against this preference shown the sketch it may be urged that to
+appreciate such suggestions presupposes as much art in the public as
+in the painter.  But the ability to appreciate a thing when
+expressed is but half that necessary to express it.  Some
+understanding must exist in the observer for any work to be
+intelligible.  It is only a question of degree.  The greater the
+art-sense in the person addressed, the more had better be left to it.
+Now in Japan the public is singularly artistic.  In fact, the
+artistic appreciation of the masses there is something astonishing
+to us, accustomed to our immense intellectual differences between
+man and man.  Sketches are thus peculiarly fitting to such a land.
+
+Besides, there is a quiet modesty about the sketch which is itself
+taking.  To attempt the complete even in a fractional bit of the
+cosmos, like a picture, has in it a difficulty akin to the logical
+one of proving a universal negative.  The possibilities of failure
+are enormously increased, and failure is less forgiven for the
+assumption.  Art might perhaps not unwisely follow the example of
+science in such matters where an exhaustive work, which takes the
+better part of a lifetime to produce, is invariably entitled by its
+erudite author an Elementary Treatise on the subject in hand.
+
+To aid the effect due to simplicity of conception steps in the Far
+Oriental's wonderful technique.  His brush-strokes are very few in
+number, but each one tells.  They are laid on with a touch which is
+little short of marvelous, and requires heredity to explain its
+skill.  For in his method there is no emending, no super-position,
+no change possible.  What he does is done once and for all.
+The force of it grows on you as you gaze.  Each stroke expresses
+surprisingly much, and suggests more.  Even omissions are made
+significant.  In his painting it is visibly true that objects can be
+rendered conspicuous by their very absence.  You are quite sure you
+see what on scrutiny you discover to be only the illusion of
+inevitable inference.  The Far Oriental artist understands the power
+of suggestion well; for imagination always fills in the picture
+better than the brush, however perfect be its skill.
+
+Even the neglect of certain general principles which we consider
+vital to effect, such as the absence of shadows and the lack of
+perspective, proves not to be of the importance we imagine.
+We discover in these paintings how immaterial, artistically, was
+Peter Schlimmel's sad loss, and how perfectly possible it is to
+make bits of discontinuous distance take the place effectively of
+continuous space.
+
+Far Eastern pictures are epigrams rather than descriptions.
+They present a bit of nature with the terseness of a maxim of
+La Rochefoucault, and they delight as aphorisms do by their insight
+and the happy conciseness of its expression.  Few aphorisms are
+absolutely true, but then boldness more than makes up for what they
+lack in verity.  So complex a subject is life that to state a truth
+with all its accompanying limitations is to weaken it at once.
+Exceptions, while demonstrating the rule, do not tend to emphasize it.
+And though the whole truth is essential to science, such
+exhaustiveness is by no means a canon of art.
+
+Parallels are not wanting at home.  What they do with space in their
+paintings do we not with time in the case of our comedies, those
+acted pictures of life?  Should we not refuse to tolerate a play
+that insisted on furnishing us with a full perspective of its
+characters' past?  And yet of the two, it is far perferable,
+artistically, to be given too much in sequence than too much at once.
+The Chinese, who put much less into a painting than what we deem
+indispensable, delight in dramas that last six weeks.
+
+To give a concluding touch of life to my necessarily skeleton-like
+generalities, memory pictures me a certain painting of Okio's which
+I fell in love with at first sight.  It is of a sunrise on the coast
+of Japan.  A long line of surf is seen tumbling in to you from out a
+bank of mist, just piercing which shows the blood-red disk of the
+rising sun, while over the narrow strip of breaking rollers three
+cranes are slowly sailing north.  And that is all you see.  You do
+not see the shore; you do not see the main; you are looking but at
+the border-land of that great unknown, the heaving ocean still
+slumbering beneath its chilly coverlid of mist, out of which come
+the breakers, and the sun, and the cranes.
+
+So much for the more serious side of Japanese fancy; a look at the
+lighter leads to the same conclusion.
+
+Hand in hand with his keen poetic sensibility goes a vivid sense of
+humor,--two traits that commonly, indeed, are found Maying
+together over the meadows of imagination.  For, as it might be put,
+
+  "The heart that is soonest awake to the flowers
+   Is also the first to be touched by the fun."
+
+The Far Oriental well exemplifies this fact.  His art, wherever fun
+is possible, fairly bubbles over with laughter.  From the oldest
+masters down to Hokusai, it is constantly welling up in the drollest
+conceits.  It is of all descriptions, too.  Now it lurks in merry
+ambush, like the faint suggestion of a smile on an otherwise serious
+face, so subtile that the observer is left wondering whether the
+artist could have meant what seems more like one's own ingenious
+discovery; now it breaks out into the broadest of grins, absurd
+juxtapositions of singularly happy incongruities.  For Hokusai's
+caricatures and Hendschel's sketches might be twins.  If there is a
+difference, it lies not so much in the artist's work as in the
+greater generality of its appreciation.  Humor flits easily there at
+the sea-level of the multitude.  For the Japanese temperament is
+ever on the verge of a smile which breaks out with catching naivete
+at the first provocation.  The language abounds in puns which are
+not suffered to lie idle, and even poetry often hinges on certain
+consecrated plays on words.  From the very constitution of the
+people there is of course nothing selfish in the national enjoyment. 
+A man is quite as ready to laugh at his own expense as at his
+neighbor's, a courtesy which his neighbor cordially returns.
+
+Now the ludicrous is essentially human in its application.
+The principle of the synthesis of contradictories, popularly known
+by the name of humor, is necessarily limited in its field to man. 
+For whether it have to do wholly with actions, or partly with the
+words that express them, whether it be presented in the shape of a
+pun or a pleasantry, it is in incongruous contrasts that its virtue
+lies. It is the unexpected that provokes the smile.  Now no such
+incongruity exists in nature; man enjoys a monopoly of the power of
+making himself ridiculous.  So pleasant is pleasantry that we do
+indeed cultivate it beyond its proper pale.  But it is only by
+personifying Nature, and gratuitously attributing to her errors of
+which she is incapable, that we can make fun of her; as, for
+instance, when we hold the weather up to ridicule by way of impotent
+revenge.  But satires upon the clown-like character of our climate,
+which, after the lamest sort of a spring, somehow manages a capital
+fall, would in the Far East be as out of keeping with fancy as with
+fact.  To a Japanese, who never personifies anything, such innocent
+irony is unmeaning.  Besides, it would be also untrue.  For his May
+carries no suggestion of unfulfilment in its name.
+
+Those Far Eastern paintings which have to do with man fall for the
+most part under one of two heads, the facetious and the historical.
+The latter implies no particularly intimate concern for man in
+himself, for the past has very little personality for the present.
+As for the former, its attention is, if anything, derogatory to him,
+for we are always shy of making fun of what we feel to be too
+closely a part of ourselves.  But impersonality has prevented the
+Far Oriental from having much amour propre.  He has no particular
+aversion to caricaturing himself.  Few Europeans, perhaps, would
+have cared to perpetrate a self-portrait like one painted by the
+potter Kinsei, which was sold me one day as an amusing tour de force
+by a facetious picture-dealer.  It is a composite picture of a new
+kind, a Japanese variety of type face.  The great potter, who was
+also apparently no mean painter, has combined three aspects of
+himself in a single representation.  At first sight the portrait
+appears to be simply a full front view of a somewhat moon-faced
+citizen; but as you continue to gaze, it suddenly dawns on you that
+there are two other individuals, one on either side, hob-nobbing in
+profile with the first, the lines of the features being ingeniously
+made to do double duty; and when this aspect of the thing has once
+struck you, you cannot look at the picture without seeing all three
+citizens simultaneously.  The result is doubtless more effective as
+a composition than flattering as a likeness.
+
+Far Eastern sculpture, by its secondary importance among Far Eastern
+arts, witnesses again to the secondary importance assigned to man at
+our mental antipodes.  In this art, owing to its necessary
+limitations, the representation of nature in its broader sense is
+impossible.  For in the first place, whatever the subject, it must
+be such as it is possible to present in one continuous piece;
+disconnected adjuncts, as, for instance, a flock of birds flying,
+which might be introduced with great effect in painting, being here
+practically beyond the artist's reach.  Secondly, the material being
+of uniform appearance, as a rule, color, or even shading, vital
+points in landscape portrayal, is out of the question, unless the
+piece were subsequently painted, as in Grecian sculptures, a custom
+which is not practised in China or Japan.  Lastly, another fact
+fatal to the representation of landscape is the size.  The reduced
+scale of the reproduction suggests falsity at once, a falsity whose
+belittlement the mind can neither forget nor forgive.  Plain
+sculpture is therefore practically limited to statuary, either of
+men or animals.  The result is that in their art, where landscape
+counts for so much, sculpture plays a very minor part.  In what
+little there is, Nature's place is taken by Buddha.  For there are
+two classes of statues, divided the one from the other by that step
+which separates the sublime from the ridiculous, namely, the
+colossal and the diminutive.  There is no happy human mean.  Of the
+first kind are the beautiful bronze figures of the Buddha, like the
+Kamakura Buddha, fifty feet high and ninety-seven feet round, in
+whose face all that is grand and noble lies sleeping, the living
+representation of Nirvana; and of the second, those odd little
+ornaments known as netsuke, comical carvings for the most part,
+grotesque figures of men and monkeys, saints and sinners, gods and
+devils.  Appealing bits of ivory, bone, or wood they are, in which
+the dumb animals are as speaking likenesses as their human fellows.
+
+The other arts show the same motif in their decorations.  Pottery
+and lacquer alike witness the respective positions assigned to the
+serious and the comic in Far Eastern feeling.
+
+The Far Oriental makes fun of man and makes love to Nature; and it
+almost seems as if Nature heard his silent prayer, and smiled upon
+him in acceptance; as if the love-light lent her face the added
+beauty that it lends the maid's.  For nowhere in this world,
+probably, is she lovelier than in Japan: a climate of long, happy
+means and short extremes, months of spring and months of autumn,
+with but a few weeks of winter in between; a land of flowers, where
+the lotus and the cherry, the plum and wistaria, grow wantonly side
+by side; a land where the bamboo embosoms the maple, where the pine
+at last has found its palm-tree, and the tropic and the temperate
+zones forget their separate identity in one long self-obliterating
+kiss.
+
+
+Chapter 7.  Religion. 
+
+In regard to their religion, nations, like individuals, seem
+singularly averse to practising what they have preached.  Whether it
+be that his self-constructed idols prove to the maker too suggestive
+of his own intellectual chisel to deceive him for long, or whether
+sacred soil, like less hallowed ground, becomes after a time
+incapable of responding to repeated sowings of the same seed,
+certain it is that in spiritual matters most peoples have grown out
+of conceit with their own conceptions.  An individual may cling with
+a certain sentiment to the religion of his mother, but nations have
+shown anything but a foolish fondness for the sacred superstitions
+of their great-grandfathers.  To the charm of creation succeeds
+invariably the bitter-sweet after-taste of criticism, and man would
+not be the progressive animal he is if he long remained in love with
+his own productions.
+
+What his future will be is too engrossing a subject, and one too
+deeply shrouded in mystery, not to be constantly pictured anew.
+No wonder that the consideration at that country toward which mankind
+is ever being hastened should prove as absorbing to fancy as
+contemplated earthly journeys proverbially are.  Few people but have
+laid out skeleton tours through its ideal regions, and perhaps,
+as in the mapping beforehand of merely mundane travels, one element
+of attraction has always consisted in the possible revision of one's
+routes.
+
+Besides, there is a fascination about the foreign merely because it
+is such.  Distance lends enchantment to the views of others, and
+never more so than when those views are religious visions.
+An enthusiast has certainly a greater chance of being taken for a
+god among a people who do not know him intimately as a man.  So with
+his doctrines.  The imported is apt to seem more important than the
+home-made; as the far-off bewitches more easily than the near.  But
+just as castles in the air do not commonly become the property of
+their builders, so mansions in the skies almost as frequently have
+failed of direct inheritance.  Rather strikingly has this proved the
+case with what are to-day the two most powerful religions of the
+world,--Buddhism and Christianity.  Neither is now the belief of its
+founder's people.  What was Aryan-born has become Turanian-bred,
+and what was Semitic by conception is at present Aryan by adoption.
+The possibilities of another's hereafter look so much rosier than
+the limitations of one's own present!
+
+Few pastimes are more delightful than tossing pebbles into some
+still, dark pool, and watching the ripples that rise responsive,
+as they run in ever widening circles to the shore.  Most of us have
+felt its fascination second only to that of the dotted spiral of the
+skipping-stone, a fascination not outgrown with years.  There is
+something singularly attractive in the subtle force that for a
+moment sways each particle only to pass on to the next, a motion
+mysterious in its immateriality.  Some such pleasure must be theirs
+who have thrown their thoughts into the hearts of men, and seen them
+spread in waves of feeling, whose sphere time widens through the
+world.  For like the mobile water is the mind of man,--quick to
+catch emotions, quick to transmit them.  Of all waves of feeling,
+this is not the least true of religious ones, that, starting from
+their birthplace, pass out to stir others, who have but humanity in
+common with those who professed them first.  Like the ripples in the
+pool, they leave their initial converts to sink back again into
+comparative quiescence, as they advance to throw into sudden tremors
+hordes of outer barbarians.  In both of the great religions in
+question this wave propagation has been most marked, only the
+direction it took differed.  Christianity went westward; Buddhism
+travelled east.  Proselytes in Asia Minor, Greece, and Italy find
+counterparts in Eastern India, Burmah, and Thibet.  Eventually the
+taught surpassed their teachers both in zeal and numbers.  Jerusalem
+and Benares at last gave place to Rome and Lassa as sacerdotal
+centres.  Still the movement journeyed on.  Popes and Lhamas
+remained where their predecessors had founded sees, but the tide of
+belief surged past them in its irresistible advance.  Farther yet
+from where each faith began are to be found to-day the greater part
+of its adherents.  The home that the Western hemisphere seems to
+promise to the one, the extreme Orient affords the other.  As Roman
+Catholicism now looks to America for its strength, so Buddhism
+to-day finds its worshippers chiefly in China and Japan.
+
+But though the Japanese may be said to be all Buddhists, Buddhist is
+by no means all that they are.  At the time of their adoption of the
+great Indian faith, the Japanese were already in possession of a
+system of superstition which has held its own to this day.  In fact,
+as the state religion of the land, it has just experienced a
+revival, a regalvanizing of its old-time energy, at the hands of
+some of the native archaeologists.  Its sacred mirror, held up to
+Nature, has been burnished anew.  Formerly this body of belief was
+the national faith, the Mikado, the direct descendant of the early
+gods, being its head on earth.  His reinstatement to temporal power
+formed a very fitting first step toward reinvesting the cult with
+its former prestige; a curious instance, indeed, of a religious
+revival due to archaeological, not to religious zeal.
+
+This cult is the mythological inheritance of the whole eastern
+seaboard of Asia, from Siam to Kamtchatka.  In Japan it is called
+Shintoism.  The word "Shinto" means literally "the way of the gods,"
+and the letter of its name is a true exponent of the spirit of the
+belief.  For its scriptures are rather an itinerary of the gods'
+lives than a guide to that road by which man himself may attain to
+immortality.  Thus with a certain fitness pilgrimages are its most
+noticeable rites.  One cannot journey anywhere in the heart of Japan
+without meeting multitudes of these pilgrims, with their neat white
+leggings and their mushroom-like hats, nor rest at night at any inn
+that is not hung with countless little banners of the pilgrim
+associations, of which they all are members.  Being a pilgrim there
+is equivalent to being a tourist here, only that to the excitement
+of doing the country is added a sustaining sense of the
+meritoriousness of the deed.  Oftener than not the objective point
+of the devout is the summit of some noted mountain.  For peaks are
+peculiarly sacred spots in the Shinto faith.  The fact is perhaps an
+expression of man's instinctive desire to rise, as if the bodily act
+in some wise betokened the mental action.  The shrine in so exalted
+a position is of the simplest: a rude hut, with or without the only
+distinctive emblems of the cult, a mirror typical of the god and the
+pendent gohei, or zigzag strips of paper, permanent votive offerings
+of man.  As for the belief itself, it is but the deification of
+those natural elements which aboriginal man instinctively wonders at
+or fears, the sun, the moon, the thunder, the lightning, and the
+wind; all, in short, that he sees, hears, and feels, yet cannot
+comprehend.  He clothes his terrors with forms which resemble the
+human, because he can conceive of nothing else that could cause the
+unexpected.  But the awful shapes he conjures up have naught in
+common with himself.  They are far too fearful to be followed. 
+Their way is the "highway of the gods," but no Jacob's ladder for
+wayward man.
+
+In this externality to the human lies the reason that Shintoism and
+Buddhism can agree so well, and can both join with Confucianism in
+helping to form that happy family of faith which is so singular a
+feature of Far Eastern religious capability.  It is not simply that
+the two contrive to live peaceably together; they are actually both
+of them implicitly believed by the same individual.  Millions of
+Japanese are good Buddhists and good Shintoists at the same time.
+That such a combination should be possible is due to the essential
+difference in the character of the two beliefs.  The one is
+extrinsic, the other intrinsic, in its relations to the human soul.
+Shintoism tells man but little about himself and his hereafter;
+Buddhism, little but about himself and what he may become.  In
+examining Far Eastern religion, therefore, for personality, or the
+reverse, we may dismiss Shintoism as having no particular bearing
+upon the subject.  The only effect it has is indirect in furthering
+the natural propensity of these people to an adoration of nature.
+
+In Korea and in China, again, Confucianism is the great moral law,
+as by reflection it is to a certain extent in Japan.  But that in
+its turn may be omitted in the present argument; inasmuch as
+Confucius taught confessedly and designedly only a system of morals,
+and religiously abstained from pronouncing any opinion whatever upon
+the character or the career of the human soul.
+
+Taouism, the third great religion of China, resembles Shintoism to
+this extent, that it is a body of superstition, and not a form of
+philosophy.  It undertakes to provide nostrums for spiritual ills,
+but is dumb as to the constitution of the soul for which it professes
+to prescribe.  Its pills are to be swallowed unquestioningly by the
+patient, and are warranted to cure; and owing to the two great human
+frailties, fear and credulity, its practice is very large. 
+Possessing, however, no philosophic diploma, it is without the pale
+of the present discussion.
+
+The demon-worship of Korea is a mild form of the same thing with the
+hierarchy left out, every man there being his own spiritual adviser.
+An ordinary Korean is born with an innate belief in malevolent
+spirits, whom he accordingly propitiates from time to time.  One of
+nobler birth propitiates only the spirits of his own ancestors.
+
+We come, then, by a process of elimination to a consideration of
+Buddhism, the great philosophic faith of the whole Far East.
+
+Not uncommonly in the courtyard of a Japanese temple, in the solemn
+half-light of the sombre firs, there stands a large stone basin, cut
+from a single block, and filled to the brim with water.  The trees,
+the basin, and a few stone lanterns--so called from their form, and
+not their function, for they have votive pebbles where we should
+look for wicks--are the sole occupants of the place.  Sheltered from
+the wind, withdrawn from sound, and only piously approached by man,
+this antechamber of the god seems the very abode of silence and rest.
+It might be Nirvana itself, human entrance to an immortality like
+the god's within, so peaceful, so pervasive is its calm; and in its
+midst is the moss-covered monolith, holding in its embrace the
+little imprisoned pool of water.  So still is the spot and so clear
+the liquid that you know the one only as the reflection of the other.
+Mirrored in its glassy surface appears everything around it.
+As you peer in, far down you see a tiny bit of sky, as deep as the
+blue is high above, across which slowly sail the passing clouds;
+then nearer stand the trees, arching overhead, as if bending to
+catch glimpses of themselves in that other world below; and then,
+nearer yet--yourself.
+
+Emblem of the spirit of man is this little pool to Far Oriental eyes.
+Subtile as the soul is the incomprehensible water; so responsive to
+light that it remains itself invisible; so clear that it seems
+illusion!  Though portrayer so perfect of forms about it, all we know
+of the thing itself is that it is.  Through none of the five senses
+do we perceive it.  Neither sight, nor hearing, nor taste, nor smell,
+nor touch can tell us it exists; we feel it to be by the muscular
+sense alone, that blind and dumb analogue for the body of what
+consciousness is for the soul.  Only when disturbed, troubled, does
+the water itself become visible, and then it is but the surface that
+we see.  So to the Far Oriental this still little lake typifies the
+soul, the eventual purification of his own; a something lost in
+reflection, self-effaced, only the alter ego of the outer world.
+
+For contemplation, not action, is the Far Oriental's ideal of life.
+The repose of self-adjustment like that to which our whole solar
+system is slowly tending as its death,--this to him appears, though
+from no scientific deduction, the end of all existence.  So he sits
+and ponders, abstractly, vaguely, upon everything in general,
+--synonym, alas, to man's finite mind, for nothing in particular,--
+till even the sense of self seems to vanish, and through the
+mist-like portal of unconsciousness he floats out into the vast
+indistinguishable sameness of Nirvana's sea.
+
+At first sight Buddhism is much more like Christianity than those of
+us who stay at home and speculate upon it commonly appreciate.  As a
+system of philosophy it sounds exceedingly foreign, but it looks
+unexpectedly familiar as a faith.  Indeed, the one religion might
+well pass for the counterfeit presentment of the other.  The
+resemblance so struck the early Catholic missionaries that they felt
+obliged to explain the remarkable similarity between the two.
+With them ingenuous surprise instantly begot ingenious sophistry.
+Externally, the likeness was so exact that at first they could not
+bring themselves to believe that the Buddhist ceremonials had not
+been filched bodily from the practices of the true faith.  Finding,
+however, that no known human agency had acted in the matter, they
+bethought them of introducing, to account for things, a deus ex
+machina in the shape of the devil.  They were so pleased with this
+solution of the difficulty that they imparted it at once with much
+pride to the natives.  You have indeed got, they graciously if
+somewhat gratuitously informed them, the outward semblance of the
+true faith, but you are in fact the miserable victims of an impious
+fraud.  Satan has stolen the insignia of divinity, and is now
+masquerading before you as the deity; your god is really our devil,
+--a recognition of antipodal inversion truly worthy the Jesuitical
+mind!
+
+Perhaps it is not matter for great surprise that they converted but
+few of their hearers.  The suggestion was hardly so diplomatic as
+might have been expected from so generally astute a body; for it
+could not make much difference what the all-presiding deity was
+called, if his actions were the same, since his motives were beyond
+human observation.  Besides, the bare idea of a foreign bogus was
+not very terrifying.  The Chinese possessed too many familiar devils
+of their own.  But there was another and a much deeper reason, which
+we shall come to later, why Christianity made but little headway in
+the Far East.
+
+But it is by no means in externals only that the two religions are
+alike.  If the first glance at them awakens that peculiar sensation
+which most of us have felt at some time or other, a sense of having
+seen all this before, further scrutiny reveals a deeper agreement
+than merely in appearances.
+
+In passing from the surface into the substance, it may be mentioned
+incidentally that the codes of morality of the two are about on a
+level.  I say incidentally, for so far as its practice, certainly,
+is concerned, it not its preaching, morality has no more intimate
+connection with religion than it has with art or politics.  If we
+doubt this, we have but to examine the facts.  Are the most religious
+peoples the most moral?  It needs no prolonged investigation to
+convince us that they are not.  If proof of the want of a bond were
+required, the matter of truth-telling might be adduced in point.
+As this is a subject upon which a slight misconception exists in the
+minds of some evangelically persuaded persons, and because, what is
+more generally relevant, the presence of this quality, honesty in
+word and deed, has more than almost any other one characteristic
+helped to put us in the van of the world's advance to-day, it may
+not unfittingly be cited here.
+
+The argument in the case may be put thus.  Have specially religious
+races been proportionally truth-telling ones?  If not, has there been
+any other cause at work in the development of mankind tending to
+increase veracity?  The answer to the first question has all the
+simplicity of a plain negative.  No such pleasing concomitance of
+characteristics is observable to-day, or has been presented in the
+past.  Permitting, however, the dead past to bury its shortcomings
+in oblivion, let us look at the world as we find it.  We observe,
+then, that the religious spirit is quite as strong in Asia as it is
+in Europe; if anything, that at the present time it is rather
+stronger.  The average Brahman, Mahometan, or Buddhist is quite as
+devout as the ordinary Roman Catholic or Presbyterian.  If he is
+somewhat less given to propagandism, he is not a whit less regardful
+of his own salvation.  Yet throughout the Orient truth is a thing
+unknown, lies of courtesy being de rigueur and lies of convenience
+de raison; while with us, fortunately, mendacity is generally
+discredited.  But we need not travel so far for proof.  The same is
+evident in less antipodal relations.  Have the least religious
+nations of Europe been any less truthful than the most bigoted?  Was
+fanatic Spain remarkable for veracity?  Was Loyola a gentleman whose
+assertions carried conviction other than to the stake?  Were the
+eminently mundane burghers whom he persecuted noted for a pious
+superiority to fact?  Or, to narrow the field still further, and scan
+the circle of one's own acquaintance, are the most believing
+individuals among them worthy of the most belief?  Assuredly not.
+
+We come, then, to the second point.  Has there been any influence at
+work to differentiate us in this respect from Far Orientals?
+There has.  Two separate causes, in fact, have conduced to the same
+result. The one is the development of physical science; the other,
+the extension of trade.  The sole object of science being to
+discover truth, truth-telling is a necessity of its existence.
+Professionally, scientists are obliged to be truthful.  Aliter of a
+Jesuit.
+
+So long as science was of the closet, its influence upon mankind
+generally was indirect and slight; but so soon as it proceeded to
+stalk into the street and earn its own living, its veracious
+character began to tell.  When out of its theories sprang inventions
+and discoveries that revolutionized every-day affairs and changed
+the very face of things, society insensibly caught its spirit.
+Man awoke to the inestimable value of exactness.  From scientists
+proper, the spirit filtered down through every stratum of education,
+till to-day the average man is born exact to a degree which his
+forefathers never dreamed of becoming.  To-day, as a rule, the more
+intelligent the individual, the more truthful he is, because the
+more innately exact in thought, and thence in word and action.
+With us, to lie is a sign of a want of cleverness, not of an excess
+of it.
+
+The second cause, the extension of trade, has inculcated the same
+regard for veracity through the pocket.  For with the increase of
+business transactions in both time and space, the telling of the
+truth has become a financial necessity.  Without it, trade would
+come to a standstill at once.  Our whole mercantile system, a modern
+piece of mechanism unknown to the East till we imported it thither,
+turns on an implicit belief in the word of one's neighbor.  Our
+legal safeguards would snap like red tape were the great bond of
+mutual trust once broken.  Western civilization has to be truthful,
+or perish.
+
+And now for the spirits of the two beliefs.
+
+The soul of any religion realizes in one respect the Brahman idea of
+the individual soul of man, namely, that it exists much after the
+manner of an onion, in many concentric envelopes.  Man, they tell us,
+is composed not of a single body simply, but of several layers of body,
+each shell as it were respectively inclosing another.  The outermost
+is the merely material body, of which we are so directly cognizant. 
+This encases a second, more spiritual, but yet not wholly free from
+earthly affinities.  This contains another, still more refined; till
+finally, inside of all is that immaterial something which they
+conceive to constitute the soul.  This eventual residuum exemplifies
+the Franciscan notion of pure substance, for it is a thing
+delightfully devoid of any attributes whatever.
+
+We may, perhaps, not be aware of the existence of such an elaborate
+set of encasings to our own heart of hearts, nor of a something so
+very indefinite within, but the most casual glance at any religion
+will reveal its truth as regards the soul of a belief.  We recognize
+the fact outwardly in the buildings erected to celebrate its worship.
+Not among the Jews alone was the holy of holies kept veiled, to
+temper the divine radiance to man's benighted understanding.  Nor is
+the chancel-rail of Christianity the sole survivor of the more
+exclusive barriers of olden times, even in the Western world.
+In the Far East, where difficulty of access is deemed indispensable
+to dignity, the material approaches are still manifold and imposing. 
+Court within court, building after building, isolate the shrine
+itself from the profane familiarity of the passers-by. But though
+the material encasings vary in number and in exclusiveness,
+according to the temperament of the particular race concerned, the
+mental envelopes exist, and must exist, in both hemispheres alike,
+so long as society resembles the crust of the earth on which it
+dwells,--a crust composed of strata that grow denser as one
+descends.  What is clear to those on top seems obscure to those
+below; what are weighty arguments to the second have no force at all
+upon the first.  There must necessarily be grades of elevation in
+individual beliefs, suited to the needs and cravings of each
+individual soul.  A creed that fills the shallow with satisfaction
+leaves but an aching void in the deep.  It is not of the slightest
+consequence how the belief starts; differentiated it is bound to
+become.  The higher minds alone can rest content with abstract
+imaginings; the lower must have concrete realities on which to pin
+their faith.  With them, inevitably, ideals degenerate into idols. 
+In all religions this unavoidable debasement has taken place.
+The Roman Catholic who prays to a wooden image of Christ is not one
+whit less idolatrous than the Buddhist who worships a bronze statue
+of Amida Butzu.  All that the common people are capable of seeing is
+the soul-envelope, for the soul itself they are unable to
+appreciate.  Spiritually they are undiscerning, because
+imaginatively they are blind.
+
+Now the grosser soul-envelopes of the two great European and Asiatic
+faiths, though differing in detail, are in general parallel in
+structure.  Each boasts its full complement of saints, whose
+congruent catalogues are equally wearisome in length.  Each tells
+its circle of beads to help it keep count of similarly endless
+prayers. For in both, in the popular estimation, quantity is more
+effective to salvation than quality.  In both the believer
+practically pictures his heaven for himself, while in each his hell,
+with a vividness that does like credit to its religious imagination,
+is painted for him by those of the cult who are themselves confident
+of escaping it.  Into the lap of each mother church the pious
+believer drops his little votive offering with the same affectionate
+zeal, and in Asia, as in Europe, the mites of the many make the
+might of the mass.
+
+But behind all this is the religion of the few,--of those to whom
+sensuous forms cannot suffice to represent super-sensuous cravings;
+whose god is something more than an anthropomorphic creation; to
+whom worship means not the cramping of the body, but the expansion
+of the soul.
+
+The rays of the truth, like the rays of the sun, which universally
+seems to have been man's first adoration, have two properties
+equally inherent in their essence, warmth and light.  And as for the
+life of all things on this globe both attributes of sunshine are
+necessary, so to the development of that something which constitutes
+the ego both qualities of the truth are vital.  We sometimes speak
+of character as if it were a thing wholly apart from mind; but, in
+fact, the two things are so interwoven that to perceive the right
+course is the strongest possible of incentives to pursue it.  In the
+end the two are one.  Now, while clearness of head is all-important,
+kindness of heart is none the less so.  The first, perhaps, is more
+needed in our communings with ourselves, the second in our commerce
+with others.  For, dark and dense bodies that we are, we can radiate
+affection much more effectively than we can reflect views.
+
+That Christianity is a religion of love needs no mention; that
+Buddhism is equally such is perhaps not so generally appreciated.
+But just as the gospel of the disciple who loved and was loved the
+most begins its story by telling us of the Light that came into the
+world, so none the less surely could the Light of Asia but be also
+its warmth.  Half of the teachings of Buddhism are spent in
+inculcating charity.  Not only to men is man enjoined to show
+kindliness, but to all other animals as well.  The people practise
+what their scriptures preach.  The effect indirectly on the
+condition of the brutes is almost as marked as its more direct
+effect on the character of mankind.  In heart, at least, Buddhism
+and Christianity are very close.
+
+But here the two paths to a something beyond an earthly life
+diverge.  Up to this point the two religions are alike, but from
+this point on they are so utterly unlike that the very similarity of
+all that went before only suffices to make of the second the weird,
+life-counterfeiting shadow of the first.  As in a silhouette,
+externally the contours are all there, but within is one vast blank.
+In relation to one's neighbor the two beliefs are kin, but as
+regards one's self, as far apart as the West is from the East.
+For here, at this idea of self, we are suddenly aware of standing on
+the brink of a fathomless abyss, gazing giddily down into that great
+gulf which divides Buddhism from Christianity.  We cannot see the
+bottom.  It is a separation more profound than death; it seems to
+necessitate annihilation.  To cross it we must bury in its depths
+all we know as ourselves.
+
+Christianity is a personal religion; Buddhism, an impersonal one. 
+In this fundamental difference lies the world-wide opposition of the
+two beliefs.  Christianity tells us to purify ourselves that we may
+enjoy countless aeons of that bettered self hereafter; Buddhism
+would have us purify ourselves that we may lose all sense of self
+for evermore.
+
+For all that it preaches the essential vileness of the natural man,
+Christianity is a gospel of optimism.  While it affirms that at
+present you are bad, it also affirms that this depravity is no
+intrinsic part of yourself.  It unquestioningly asserts that it is
+something foreign to your true being.  It even believes that in a
+more or less spiritual manner your very body will survive.
+It essentially clings to the ego.  What it inculcates is really
+present endeavor sanctioned by the prospect of future bliss.
+It tacitly takes for granted the desirability of personal existence,
+and promises the certainty of personal immortality,--a terror to
+evildoers, and a sustaining sense of coming unalloyed happiness to
+the good.  Through and through its teachings runs the feeling of the
+fullness of life, that desire which will not die, that wish of the
+soul which beats its wings against its earthly casement in its
+longing for expansion beyond the narrow confines of threescore years
+and ten.
+
+Buddhism, on the contrary, is the cri du coeur of pessimism.
+This life, it says, is but a chain of sorrows.  To multiply days is
+only to multiply evil.  These desires that urge us on are really
+cause of all our woe.  We think they are ourselves.  We are
+mistaken.  They are all illusion, and we are victims of a mirage. 
+This personality, this sense of self, is a cruel deception and a
+snare.  Realize once the true soul behind it, devoid of attributes,
+therefore without this capacity for suffering, an indivisible part
+of the great impersonal soul of nature: then, and then only, will
+you have found happiness in the blissful quiescence of Nirvana.
+
+With a certain poetic fitness, misery and impersonality were both
+present in the occasion that gave the belief birth.  Many have
+turned to the consolations of religion by reason of their own
+wretchedness; Gautama sought its help touched by the woes of others
+whom, in his own happy life journey, he chanced one day to come
+across.  Shocked by the sight of human disease, old age, and death,
+sad facts to which hitherto he had been sedulously kept a stranger,
+he renounced the world that he might find for it an escape from its
+ills.  But bliss, as he conceived it, lay not in wanting to be
+something he was not, but in actual want of being.  His quest for
+mankind was immunity from suffering, not the active enjoyment of
+life.  In this negative way of looking at happiness, he acted in
+strict conformity with the spirit of his world.  For the doctrine of
+pessimism had already been preached.  It underlay the whole Brahman
+philosophy, and everybody believed it implicitly.  Already the East
+looked at this life as an evil, and had affirmed for the individual
+spirit extinction to be happier than existence.  The wish for an end
+to the ego, the hope to be eventually nothing, Gautama accepted for
+a truism as undeniably as the Brahmans did.  What he pronounced
+false was the Brahman prospectus of the way to reach this desirable
+impersonal state. Their road, be said, could not possibly land the
+traveller where it professed, since it began wrong, and ended
+nowhere.  The way, he asserted, is within a man.  He has but to
+realize the truth, and from that moment he will see his goal and the
+road that leads there. There is no panacea for human ills, of
+external application.  The Brahman homoeopathic treatment of sin is
+folly.  The slaughtering of men and bulls cannot possibly bring life
+to the soul.  To mortify the body for the sins of the flesh is
+palpably futile, for in desire alone lies all the ill.  Quench the
+desire, and the deeds will die of inanition.  Man himself is sole
+cause of his own misery.  Get rid, then, said the Buddha, of these
+passions, these strivings for the sake of self, that hold the true
+soul a prisoner.  They have to do with things which we know are
+transitory: how can they be immortal themselves?  We recognize them
+as subject to our will; they are, then, not the I.
+
+As a man, he taught, becomes conscious that he himself is something
+distinct from his body, so, if he reflect and ponder, he will come
+to see that in like manner his appetites, ambitions, hopes, are
+really extrinsic to the spirit proper.  Neither heart nor head is
+truly the man, for he is conscious of something that stands behind
+both.  Behind desire, behind even the will, lies the soul, the same
+for all men, one with the soul of the universe.  When he has once
+realized this eternal truth, the man has entered Nirvana.  For
+Nirvana is not an absorption of the individual soul into the soul of
+all things, since the one has always been a part of the other. 
+Still less is it utter annihilation.  It is simply the recognition
+of the eternal oneness of the two, back through an everlasting past
+on through an everlasting future.
+
+Such is the belief which the Japanese adopted, and which they
+profess to-day.  Such to them is to be the dawn of death's
+to-morrow; a blessed impersonal immortality, in which all sense of
+self, illusion that it is, shall itself have ceased to be; a long
+dreamless sleep, a beatified rest, which no awakening shall ever
+disturb.
+
+Among such a people personal Christianity converts but few.
+They accept our material civilization, but they reject our creeds. 
+To preach a prolongation of life appears to them like preaching an
+extension of sorrow.  At most, Christianity succeeds only in making
+them doubters of what lies beyond this life.  But though professing
+agnosticism while they live, they turn, when the shadows of death's
+night come on, to the bosom of that faith which teaches that,
+whatever may have been one's earthly share of happiness,
+"'tis something better not to be."
+
+Strange it seems at first that those who have looked so long to the
+rising sun for inspiration should be they who live only in a sort of
+lethargy of life, while those who for so many centuries have turned
+their faces steadily to the fading glory of the sunset should be the
+ones who have embodied the spirit of progress of the world.  Perhaps
+the light, by its very rising, checks the desire to pursue; in its
+setting it lures one on to follow.
+
+Though this religion of impersonality is not their child, it is
+their choice.  They embraced it with the rest that India taught
+them, centuries ago.  But though just as eager to learn of us now as
+of India then, Christianity fails to commend itself.  This is not
+due to the fact that the Buddhist missionaries came by invitation,
+and ours do not.  Nor is it due to any want of personal character in
+these latter, but simply to an excess of it in their doctrines.
+
+For to-day the Far East is even more impersonal in its religion than
+are those from whom that religion originally came.  India has
+returned again to its worship of Brahma, which, though impersonal
+enough, is less so than is the gospel of Gautama.  For it is
+passively instead of actively impersonal.
+
+Buddhism bears to Brahmanism something like the relation that
+Protestantism does to Roman Catholicism.  Both bishops and Brahmans
+undertake to save all who shall blindly commit themselves to
+professional guidance, while Buddhists and Protestants alike believe
+that a man's salvation must be brought about by the action of the
+man himself.  The result is, that in the matter of individuality the
+two reformed beliefs are further apart than those against which they
+severally protested.  For by the change the personal became more
+personal, and the impersonal more impersonal than before.
+The Protestant, from having tamely allowed himself to be led, began
+to take a lively interest in his own self-improvement; while the
+Buddhist, from a former apathetic acquiescence in the doctrine of
+the universally illusive, set to work energetically towards
+self-extinction.  Curious labor for a mind, that of devoting all its
+strength to the thinking itself out of existence! Not content with
+being born impersonal, a Far Oriental is constantly striving to make
+himself more so.
+
+We have seen, then, how in trying to understand these peoples we are
+brought face to face with impersonality in each of those three
+expressions of the human soul, speech, thought, yearning.  We have
+looked at them first from a social standpoint.  We have seen how
+singularly little regard is paid the individual from his birth to
+his death.  How he lives his life long the slave of patriarchal
+customs of so puerile a tendency as to be practically impossible to
+a people really grown up.  How he practises a wholesale system of
+adoption sufficient of itself to destroy any surviving regard for
+the ego his other relations might have left.  How in his daily life
+he gives the minimum of thought to the bettering himself in any
+worldly sense, and the maximum of polite consideration to his
+neighbor.  How, in short, he acts toward himself as much as possible
+as if he were another, and to that other as if he were himself.
+Then, not content with standing stranger like upon the threshold,
+we have sought to see the soul of their civilization in its intrinsic
+manifestations.  We have pushed our inquiry, as it were, one step
+nearer its home.  And the same trait that was apparent
+sociologically has been exposed in this our antipodal phase of
+psychical research. We have seen how impersonal is his language, the
+principal medium of communication between one soul and another; how
+impersonal are the communings of his soul with itself.  How the man
+turns to nature instead of to his fellowman in silent sympathy.
+And how, when he speculates upon his coming castles in the air, his
+most roseate desire is to be but an indistinguishable particle of
+the sunset clouds and vanish invisible as they into the starry
+stillness of all-embracing space.
+
+Now what does this strange impersonality betoken?  Why are these
+peoples so different from us in this most fundamental of
+considerations to any people, the consideration of themselves?
+The answer leads to some interesting conclusions.
+
+
+Chapter 8.  Imagination.
+
+If, as is the case with the moon, the earth, as she travelled round
+her orbit turned always the same face inward, we might expect to
+find, between the thoughts of that hemisphere which looked
+continually to the sun, and those of the other peering eternally out
+at the stars, some such difference as actually exists between
+ourselves and our longitudinal antipodes.  For our conception of the
+cosmos is of a sunlit world throbbing with life, while their Nirvana
+finds not unfit expression in the still, cold, fathomless awe of the
+midnight sky.  That we cannot thus directly account for the
+difference in local coloring serves but to make that difference of
+more human interest.  The dissimilarity between the Western and the
+Far Eastern attitude of mind has in it something beyond the effect
+of environment.  For it points to the importance of the part which
+the principle of individuality plays in the great drama daily
+enacting before our eyes, and which we know as evolution.  It shows,
+as I shall hope to prove, that individuality bears the same relation
+to the development of mind that the differentiation of species does
+to the evolution of organic life: that the degree of individualization
+of a people is the self-recorded measure of its place in the great
+march of mind.
+
+All life, whether organic or inorganic, consists, as we know, in a
+change from a state of simple homogeneity to one of complex
+heterogeneity.  The process is apparently the same in a nebula or a
+brachiopod, although much more intricate in the latter.  The
+immediate force which works this change, the life principle of
+things, is, in the case of organic beings, a subtle something which
+we call spontaneous variation.  What this mysterious impulse may be
+is beyond our present powers of recognition.  As yet, the ultimates
+of all things lie hidden in the womb of the vast unknown.  But just
+as in the case of a man we can tell what organs are vital, though we
+are ignorant what the vital spark may be, so in our great cosmical
+laws we can say in what their power resides, though we know not
+really what they are.  Whether mind be but a sublimated form of
+matter, or, what amounts to the same thing, matter a menial kind of
+mind, or whether, which seems less likely, it be a something
+incomparable with substance, of one thing we are sure, the same laws
+of heredity govern both.  In each a like chain of continuity leads
+from the present to the dim past, a connecting clue which we can
+follow backward in imagination.  Now what spontaneous variation is
+to the material organism, imagination, apparently, is to the mental
+one.  Just as spontaneous variation is constantly pushing the animal
+or the plant to push out, as a vine its tendrils, in all directions,
+while natural conditions are as constantly exercising over it a sort
+of unconscious pruning power, so imagination is ever at work urging
+man's mind out and on, while the sentiment of the community,
+commonly called common sense, which simply means the point already
+reached by the average, is as steadily tending to keep it at its own
+level.  The environment helps, in the one case as in the other,
+to the shaping of the development.  Purely physical in the first,
+it is both physical and psychical in the second, the two reacting on
+each other.  But in either case it is only a constraining condition,
+not the divine impulse itself.  Precisely, then, as in the organism,
+this subtle spirit checked in one direction finds a way to advance
+in another, and produces in consequence among an originally similar
+set of bodies a gradual separation into species which grow wider
+with time, so in brain evolution a like force for like reasons tends
+inevitably to an ever-increasing individualization.
+
+Now what evidence have we that this analogy holds?  Let us look at
+the facts, first as they present themselves subjectively.
+
+The instinct of self-preservation, that guardian angel so persistent
+to appear when needed, owes its summons to another instinct no less
+strong, which we may call the instinct of individuality; for with
+the same innate tenacity with which we severally cling to life do we
+hold to the idea of our own identity.  It is not for the philosophic
+desire of preserving a very small fraction of humanity at large that
+we take such pains to avoid destruction; it is that we insensibly
+regard death as threatening to the continuance of the ego, in spite
+of the theories of a future life which we have so elaborately
+developed.  Indeed, the psychical shrinking is really the
+quintessence of the physical fear.  We cleave to the abstract idea
+closer even than to its concrete embodiment.  Sooner would we forego
+this earthly existence than surrender that something we know as
+self.  For sufficient cause we can imagine courting death; we cannot
+conceive of so much as exchanging our individuality for another's,
+still less of abandoning it altogether; for gradually a man, as he
+grows older, comes to regard his body as, after all, separable from
+himself.  It is the soul's covering, rendered indispensable by the
+climatic conditions of our present existence, one without which we
+could no longer continue to live here.  To forego it does not
+necessarily negative, so far as we yet know, the possibility of
+living elsewhere.  Some more congenial tropic may be the wandering
+spirit's fate.  But to part with the sense of self seems to be like
+taking an eternal farewell of the soul.  The Western mind shrinks
+before the bare idea of such a thought.
+
+The clinging to one's own identity, then, is now an instinct,
+whatever it may originally have been.  It is a something we
+inherited from our ancestors and which we shall transmit more or
+less modified to our descendants.  How far back this consciousness
+has been felt passes the possibilities of history to determine,
+since the recording of it necessarily followed the fact.  All we
+know is that its mention is coeval with chronicle, and its origin
+lost in allegory.  The Bible, one of the oldest written records in
+the world, begins with a bit of mythology of a very significant
+kind.  When the Jews undertook to trace back their family tree to an
+idyllic garden of Eden, they mentioned as growing there beside the
+tree of life, another tree called the tree of knowledge.  Of what
+character this knowledge was is inferable from the sudden
+self-consciousness that followed the partaking of it.  So that if
+we please we may attribute directly to Eve's indiscretion the many
+evils of our morbid self-consciousness of the present day.
+But without indulging in unchivalrous reflections we may draw
+certain morals from it of both immediate and ultimate applicability.
+
+To begin with, it is a most salutary warning to the introspective,
+and in the second place it is a striking instance of a myth which is
+not a sun myth; for it is essentially of human regard, an attempt on
+man's part to explain that most peculiar attribute of his
+constitution, the all-possessing sense of self.  It looks certainly
+as if he was not over-proud of his person that he should have deemed
+its recognition occasion for the primal curse, and among early races
+the person is for a good deal of the personality.  What he lamented
+was not life but the unavoidable exertion necessary to getting his
+daily bread, for the question whether life were worth while was as
+futile then as now, and as inconceivable really as 4-dimensional
+space.
+
+We are then conscious of individuality as a force within ourselves.
+But our knowledge by no means ends there; for we are aware of it in
+the case of others as well.
+
+About certain people there exists a subtle something which leaves
+its impress indelibly upon the consciousness of all who come in
+contact with them.  This something is a power, but a power of so
+indefinable a description that we beg definition by calling it
+simply the personality of the man.  It is not a matter of subsequent
+reasoning, but of direct perception.  We feel it.  Sometimes it
+charms us; sometimes it repels.  But we can no more be oblivious to
+it than we can to the temperature of the air.  Its possessor has but
+to enter the room, and insensibly we are conscious of a presence. 
+It is as if we had suddenly been placed in the field of a magnetic
+force.
+
+On the other hand there are people who produce no effect upon us
+whatever.  They come and go with a like indifference.  They are as
+unimportant psychically as if they were any other portion of the
+furniture.  They never stir us.  We might live with them for fifty
+years and be hardly able to tell, for any influence upon ourselves,
+whether they existed or not.  They remind us of that neutral drab
+which certain religious sects assume to show their own irrelevancy
+to the world.  They are often most estimable folk, but they are no
+more capable of inspiring a strong emotion than the other kind are
+incapable of doing so.  And we say the difference is due to the
+personality or want of personality of the man.  Now, in what does
+this so-called personality consist?  Not in bodily presence simply,
+for men quite destitute of it possess the force in question; not in
+character only, for we often disapprove of a character whose
+attraction we are powerless to resist; not in intellect alone, for
+men more rational fail of stirring us as these unconsciously do.
+In what, then?  In life itself; not that modicum of it, indeed,
+which suffices simply to keep the machine moving, but in the life
+principle, the power which causes psychical change; which makes the
+individual something distinct from all other individuals, a being
+capable of proving sufficient, if need be, unto himself; which shows
+itself, in short, as individuality.  This is not a mere restatement
+of the case, for individuality is an objective fact capable of being
+treated by physical science.  And as we know much more at present
+about physical facts than we do of psychological problems, we may be
+able to arrive the sooner at solution.
+
+Individuality, personality, and the sense of self are only three
+different aspects of one and the same thing.  They are so many
+various views of the soul according as we regard it from an
+intrinsic, an altruistic, or an egoistic standpoint.  For by
+individuality is not meant simply the isolation in a corporeal
+casing of a small portion of the universal soul of mankind.  So far
+as mind goes, this would not be individuality at all, but the
+reverse.  By individuality we mean that bundle of ideas, thoughts,
+and daydreams which constitute our separate identity, and by virtue
+of which we feel each one of us at home within himself.  Now man in
+his mind-development is bound to become more and more distinct from
+his neighbor.  We can hardly conceive a progress so uniform as not
+to necessitate this.  It would be contrary to all we know of natural
+law, besides contradicting daily experience.  For each successive
+generation bears unmistakable testimony to the fact.  Children of
+the same parents are never exactly like either their parents or one
+another, and they often differ amazingly from both.  In such
+instances they revert to type, as we say; but inasmuch as the race
+is steadily advancing in development, such reversion must resemble
+that of an estate which has been greatly improved since its previous
+possession.  The appearance of the quality is really the sprouting
+of a seed whose original germ was in some sense coeval with the
+beginning of things.  This mind-seed takes root in some cases and
+not in others, according to the soil it finds.  And as certain
+traits develop and others do not, one man turns out very differently
+from his neighbor.  Such inevitable distinction implies furthermore
+that the man shall be sensible of it.  Consciousness is the
+necessary attribute of mental action.  Not only is it the sole way
+we have of knowing mind; without it there would be no mind to know. 
+Not to be conscious of one's self is, mentally speaking, not to be. 
+This complex entity, this little cosmos of a world, the "I," has for
+its very law of existence self-consciousness, while personality is
+the effect it produces upon the consciousness of others.
+
+But we may push our inquiry a step further, and find in imagination
+the cause of this strange force.  For imagination, or the
+image-making faculty, may in a certain sense be said to be the
+creator of the world within.  The separate senses furnish it with
+material, but to it alone is due the building of our castles, on
+premises of fact or in the air.  For there is no impassable gulf
+between the two.  Coleridge's distinction that imagination drew
+possible pictures and fancy impossible ones, is itself, except as a
+classification, an impossible distinction to draw; for it is only
+the inconceivable that can never be.  All else is purely a matter of
+relation.  We may instance dreams which are usually considered to
+rank among the most fanciful creations of the mind.  Who has not in
+his dreams fallen repeatedly from giddy heights and invariably
+escaped unhurt?  If he had attempted the feat in his waking moments
+he would assuredly have been dashed to pieces at the bottom.  And so
+we say the thing is impossible.  But is it?  Only under the relative
+conditions of his mass and the earth's.  If the world he happens to
+inhabit were not its present size, but the size of one of the tinier
+asteroids, no such disastrous results would follow a chance misstep.
+He could there walk off precipices when too closely pursued by bears
+--if I remember rightly the usual childish cause of the same--
+with perfect impunity.  The bear could do likewise, unfortunately. 
+We should have arrived at our conclusion even quicker had we
+decreased the size both of the man and his world.  He would not then
+have had to tumble actually so far, and would therefore have arrived
+yet more gently at the foot.  This turns out, then, to be a mere
+question of size.  Decrease the scale of the picture, and the
+impossible becomes possible at once.  All fancies are not so easily
+reducible to actual facts as the one we have taken, but all,
+perhaps, eventually may be explicable in the same general way.  At
+present we certainly cannot affirm that anything may not be thus
+explained.  For the actual is widening its field every day.  Even in
+this little world of our own we are daily discovering to be fact
+what we should have thought fiction, like the sailor's mother the
+tale of the flying fish. Beyond it our ken is widening still more. 
+Gulliver's travels may turn out truer than we think.  Could we
+traverse the inter-planetary ocean of ether, we might eventually
+find in Jupiter the land of Lilliput or in Ceres some old-time
+country of the Brobdignagians. For men constituted muscularly like
+ourselves would have to be proportionately small in the big planet
+and big in the small one. Still stranger things may exist around
+other suns.  In those bright particular stars--which the little girl
+thought pinholes in the dark canopy of the sky to let the glory
+beyond shine through--we are finding conditions of existence like
+yet unlike those we already know.  To our groping speculations of
+the night they almost seem, as we gaze on them in their twinkling,
+to be winking us a sort of comprehension.  Conditions may exist
+there under which our wildest fancies may be commonplace facts. 
+There may be
+
+   "Some Xanadu where Kublai can 
+    a stately pleasure dome decree,"
+
+and carry out his conceptions to his own disillusionment, perhaps.
+For if the embodiment of a fancy, however complete, left nothing
+further to be wished, imagination would have no incentive to work.
+Coleridge's distinction does very well to separate, empirically,
+certain kinds of imaginative concepts from certain others; but it
+has no real foundation in fact.  Nor presumably did he mean it to
+have.  But it serves, not inaptly, as a text to point out an
+important scientific truth, namely, that there are not two such
+qualities of the mind, but only one.  For otherwise we might have
+supposed the fact too evident to need mention.  Imagination is the
+single source of the new, the one mainspring of psychical advance;
+reason, like a balance-wheel, only keeping the action regular.
+For reason is but the touchstone of experience, our own, inherited,
+or acquired from others.  It compares what we imagine with what we
+know, and gives us answer in terms of the here and the now, which
+we call the actual.  But the actual is really nothing but the local. 
+It does not mark the limits of the possible.
+
+That imagination has been the moving spirit of the psychical world
+is evident, whatever branch of human thought we are pleased to
+examine.  We are in the habit, in common parlance, of making a
+distinction between the search after truth and the search after
+beauty, calling the one science and the other art.  Now while we are
+not slow to impute imagination to art, we are by no means so ready
+to appreciate its connection with science.  Yet contrary, perhaps,
+to exogeric ideas on the subject, it is science rather than art that
+demands imagination of her votaries.  Not that art may not involve
+the quality to a high degree, but that a high degree of art is quite
+compatible with a very small amount of imagination.  On the one side
+we may instance painting.  Now painting begins its career in the
+humble capacity of copyist, a pretty poor copyist at that.  At first
+so slight was its skill that the rudest symbols sufficed.
+"This is a man" was conventionally implied by a few scratches
+bearing a very distant relationship to the real thing.  Gradually,
+owing to human vanity and a growing taste, pictures improved. 
+Combinations were tried, a bit from one place with a piece from
+another; a sort of mosaic requiring but a slight amount of
+imagination.  Not that imagination of a higher order has not been
+called into play, although even now pictures are often happy
+adaptations rather than creations proper.  Some masters have been
+imaginative; others, unfortunately for themselves and still more for
+the public, have not.  For that the art may attain a high degree of
+excellence for itself and much distinction for its professors,
+without calling in the aid of imagination, is evident enough on this
+side of the globe, without travelling to the other.  
+
+Take, on the other hand, a branch of science which, to the average
+layman, seems peculiarly unimaginative, the science of mathematics. 
+Yet at the risk of appearing to cast doubts upon the validity of its
+conclusions, it might be called the most imaginative product of
+human thought; for it is simply one vast imagination based upon a
+few so-called axioms, which are nothing more nor less than the
+results of experience.  It is none the less imaginative because its
+discoveries always accord subsequently with fact, since man was not
+aware of them beforehand. Nor are its inevitable conclusions
+inevitable to any save those possessed of the mathematician's
+prophetic sight.  Once discovered, it requires much less imagination
+to understand them.  With the light coming from in front, it is an
+easy matter to see what lies behind one.
+
+So with other fabrics of human thought, imagination has been
+spinning and weaving them all.  From the most concrete of inventions
+to the most abstract of conceptions the same force reveals itself
+upon examination; for there is no gulf between what we call practical
+and what we consider theoretical.  Everything abstract is ultimately
+of practical use, and even the most immediately utilitarian has an
+abstract principle at its core.  We are too prone to regard the
+present age of the world as preeminently practical, much as a
+middle-aged man laments the witching fancies of his boyhood.  But,
+and there is more in the parallel than analogy, if the man be truly
+imaginative he is none the less so at forty-five than he was at
+twenty, if his imagination have taken on a more critical form;
+for this latter half of the nineteenth century is perhaps the most
+imaginative period the world's history has ever known.  While with
+one hand we are contriving means of transit for our ideas, and even
+our very voices, compared to which Puck's girdle is anything but
+talismanic, with the other we are stretching out to grasp the action
+of mind on mind, pushing our way into the very realm of mind itself.
+
+History tells the same story in detail; for the history of mankind,
+imperfectly as we know it, discloses the fact that imagination,
+and not the power of observation nor the kindred capability of
+perception, has been the cause of soul-evolution.
+
+The savage is but little of an imaginative being.  We are tempted,
+at times, to imagine him more so than he is, for his fanciful
+folk-lore.  The proof of which overestimation is that we find no
+difficulty in imagining what he does, and even of imagining what he
+probably imagined, and finding our suppositions verified by
+discovery.  Yet his powers of observation may be marvellously
+developed.  The North American Indian tracks his foe through the
+forest by signs unrecognizable to a white man, and he reasons most
+astutely upon them, and still that very man turns out to be a mere
+child when put before problems a trifle out of his beaten path.
+And all because his forefathers had not the power to imagine
+something beyond what they actually saw.  The very essence of the
+force of imagination lies in its ability to change a man's habitat
+for him. Without it, man would forever have remained, not a mollusk,
+to be sure, but an animal simply.  A plant cannot change its place,
+an animal cannot alter its conditions of existence except within
+very narrow bounds; man is free in the sense nothing else in the
+world is.
+
+What is true of individuals has been true of races.  The most
+imaginative races have proved the greatest factors in the world's
+advance.
+
+Now after this look at our own side of the world, let us turn to
+the other; for it is this very psychological fact that mental
+progression implies an ever-increasing individualization, and that
+imagination is the force at work in the process which Far Eastern
+civilization, taken in connection with our own, reveals.  In doing
+this, it explains incidentally its own seeming anomalies, the most
+unaccountable of which, apparently, is its existence.
+
+We have seen how impressively impersonal the Far East is.  Now if
+individuality be the natural measure of the height of civilization
+which a nation has reached, impersonality should betoken a
+relatively laggard position in the race.  We ought, therefore, to
+find among these people certain other characteristics corroborative
+of a less advanced state of development.  In the first place,
+if imagination be the impulse of which increase in individuality is
+the resulting motion, that quality should be at a minimum there.
+The Far Orientals ought to be a particularly unimaginative set of
+people. Such is precisely what they are.  Their lack of imagination
+is a well-recognized fact.  All who have been brought in contact
+with them have observed it, merchants as strikingly as students. 
+Indeed, the slightest intercourse with them could not fail to make
+it evident. Their matter-of-fact way of looking at things is truly
+distressing, coming as it does from so artistic a people.
+One notices it all the more for the shock.  To get a prosaic answer
+from a man whose appearance and surroundings betoken better things
+is not calculated to dull that answer's effect.  Aston, in a
+pamphlet on the Altaic tongues, cites an instance which is so much
+to the point that I venture to repeat it here.  He was a true
+Chinaman, he says, who, when his English master asked him what he
+thought of
+
+   "That orbed maiden
+    With white fires laden
+    Whom mortals call the moon,"
+
+replied, "My thinkee all same lamp pidgin" (pidgin meaning thing in
+the mongrel speech, Chinese in form and English in diction, which
+goes by the name of pidgin English).
+
+Their own tongues show the same prosaic character, picturesque as
+they appear to us at first sight.  That effect is due simply to the
+novelty to us of their expressions.  To talk of a pass as an
+"up-down"  has a refreshing turn to our unused ear, but it is a much
+more descriptive than imaginative figure of speech.  Nor is the
+phrase "the being (so) is difficult," in place of "thank you,"
+a surprisingly beautiful bit of imagery, delightful as it sounds for
+a change.  Our own tongue has, in its daily vocabulary, far more
+suggestive expressions, only familiarity has rendered us callous to
+their use.  We employ at every instant words which, could we but
+stop to think of them, would strike us as poetic in the ideas they
+call up.  As has been well said, they were once happy thoughts of
+some bright particular genius bequeathed to posterity without so
+much as an accompanying name, and which proved so popular that they
+soon became but symbols themselves.
+
+Their languages are paralleled by their whole life.  A lack of any
+fanciful ideas is one of the most salient traits of all Far Eastern
+races, if indeed a sad dearth of anything can properly be spoken of
+as salient.  Indirectly their want of imagination betrays itself in
+their every-day sayings and doings, and more directly in every
+branch of thought.  Originality is not their strong point.  Their
+utter ignorance of science shows this, and paradoxical as it may
+seem, their art, in spite of its merit and its universality, does
+the same.  That art and imagination are necessarily bound together
+receives no very forcible confirmation from a land where, nationally
+speaking, at any rate, the first is easily first and the last easily
+last, as nations go.  It is to quite another quality that their
+artistic excellence must be ascribed.  That the Chinese and later
+the Japanese have accomplished results at which the rest of the
+world will yet live to marvel, is due to their--taste.  But taste or
+delicacy of perception has absolutely nothing to do with
+imagination.  That certain of the senses of Far Orientals are
+wonderfully keen, as also those parts of the brain that directly
+respond to them, is beyond question; but such sensitiveness does not
+in the least involve the less earth-tied portions of the intellect.
+A peculiar responsiveness to natural beauty, a sort of mental
+agreement with its earthly environment, is a marked feature of the
+Japanese mind.  But appreciation, however intimate, is a very
+different thing from originality.  The one is commonly the handmaid
+of the other, but the other by no means always accompanies the one.
+
+So much for the cause; now for the effect which we might expect to
+find if our diagnosis be correct.
+
+If the evolving force be less active in one race than in another,
+three relative results should follow.  In the first place, the race
+in question will at any given moment be less advanced than its
+fellow; secondly, its rate of progress will be less rapid; and
+lastly, its individual members will all be nearer together, just as
+a stream, in falling from a cliff, starts one compact mass, then
+gradually increasing in speed, divides into drops, which, growing
+finer and finer and farther and farther apart, descend at last as
+spray.  All three of these consequences are visible in the career of
+the Far Eastern peoples.  The first result scarcely needs to be
+proved to us, who are only too ready to believe it without proof. 
+It is, nevertheless, a fact.  Viewed unprejudicedly, their
+civilization is not so advanced a one as our own.  Although they
+are certainly our superiors in some very desirable particulars,
+their whole scheme is distinctly more aboriginal fundamentally.
+It is more finished, as far as it goes, but it does not go so far.
+Less rude, it is more rudimentary.  Indeed, as we have seen, its
+surface-perfection really shows that nature has given less thought
+to its substance.  One may say of it that it is the adult form of a
+lower type of mind-specification.
+
+The second effect is scarcely less patent.  How slow their progress
+has been, if for centuries now it can be called progress at all, is
+world-known.  Chinese conservatism has passed into a proverb.
+The pendulum of pulsation in the Middle Kingdom long since came to a
+stop at the medial point of rest.  Centre of civilization, as they
+call themselves, one would imagine that their mind-machinery had got
+caught on their own dead centre, and now could not be made to move.
+Life, which elsewhere is a condition of unstable equilibrium, there
+is of a fatally stable kind.  For the Chinaman's disinclination to
+progress is something more than vis inertiae; it has become an
+ardent devotion to the status quo.  Jostled, he at once settles back
+to his previous condition again; much as more materially, after a
+lifetime spent in California, at his death his body is punctiliously
+embalmed and sent home across five thousand miles of sea for burial.
+With the Japanese the condition of affairs is somewhat different.
+Their tendency to stand still is of a purely passive kind.  It is a
+state of neutral equilibrium, stationary of itself but perfectly
+responsive to an impulse from without.  Left to their own devices,
+they are conservative enough, but they instantly copy a more
+advanced civilization the moment they get a chance.  This proclivity
+on their part is not out of keeping with our theory.  On the
+contrary, it is precisely what was to have been expected; for we see
+the very same apparent contradiction in characters we are thrown
+with every day.  Imitation is the natural substitute for originality.
+The less strong a man's personality the more prone is he to adopt
+the ideas of others, on the same principle that a void more easily
+admits a foreign body than does space that is already occupied; or
+as a blank piece of paper takes a dye more brilliantly for not being
+already tinted itself.
+
+The third result, the remarkable homogeneity of the people, is not,
+perhaps, so universally appreciated, but it is equally evident on
+inspection, and no less weighty in proof.  Indeed, the Far Eastern
+state of things is a kind of charade on the word; for humanity there
+is singularly uniform.  The distance between the extremes of
+mind-development in Japan is much less than with us.  This lack of
+divergence exists not simply in certain lines of thought, but in all
+those characteristics by which man is parted from the brutes.
+In reasoning power, in artistic sensibility, in delicacy of perception,
+it is the same story.  If this were simply the impression at first
+sight, no deductions could be drawn from it, for an impression of
+racial similarity invariably marks the first stage of acquaintance
+of one people by another.  Even in outward appearance it is so.
+We find it at first impossible to tell the Japanese apart; they find it
+equally impossible to differentiate us.  But the present resemblance
+is not a matter of first impressions.  The fact is patent historically.
+The men whom Japan reveres are much less removed from the common
+herd than is the case in any Western land.  And this has been so
+from the earliest times.  Shakspeares and Newtons have never existed
+there.  Japanese humanity is not the soil to grow them.
+The comparative absence of genius is fully paralleled by the want of
+its opposite.  Not only are the paths of preeminence untrodden; the
+purlieus of brutish ignorance are likewise unfrequented.  On neither
+side of the great medial line is the departure of individuals far or
+frequent.  All men there are more alike;--so much alike, indeed,
+that the place would seem to offer a sort of forlorn hope for
+disappointed socialists.  Although religious missionaries have not
+met with any marked success among the natives, this less deserving
+class of enthusiastic disseminators of an all-possessing belief
+might do well to attempt it.  They would find there a very virgin
+field of a most promisingly dead level.  It is true, human
+opposition would undoubtedly prevent their tilling it, but Nature,
+at least, would not present quite such constitutional obstacles as
+she wisely does with us.
+
+The individual's mind is, as it were, an isolated bit of the race
+mind.  The same set of traits will be found in each.  Mental
+characteristics there are a sort of common property, of which a
+certain undifferentiated portion is indiscriminately allotted to
+every man at birth.  One soul resembles another so much, that in
+view of the patriarchal system under which they all exist, there
+seems to the stranger a peculiar appropriateness in so strong a
+family likeness of mind.  An idea of how little one man's brain
+differs from his neighbor's may be gathered from the fact, that
+while a common coolie in Japan spends his spare time in playing a
+chess twice as complicated as ours, the most advanced philosopher
+is still on the blissfully ignorant side of the pons asinorum.
+
+We find, then, that in all three points the Far East fulfils what
+our theory demanded.
+
+There is one more consideration worthy of notice.  We said that the
+environment had not been the deus ex materia in the matter; but that
+the soul itself possessed the germ of its own evolution.  This fact
+does not, however, preclude another, that the environment has helped
+in the process.  Change of scene is beneficial to others besides
+invalids.  How stimulating to growth a different habitat can prove,
+when at all favorable, is perhaps sufficiently shown in the case of
+the marguerite, which, as an emigrant called white-weed, has usurped
+our fields.  The same has been no less true of peoples.  Now these
+Far Eastern peoples, in comparison with our own forefathers, have
+travelled very little.  A race in its travels gains two things:
+first it acquires directly a great deal from both places and peoples
+that it meets, and secondly it is constantly put to its own
+resources in its struggle for existence, and becomes more personal
+as the outcome of such strife.  The changed conditions, the hostile
+forces it finds, necessitate mental ingenuity to adapt them and
+influence it unconsciously.  To see how potent these influences
+prove we have but to look at the two great branches of the Aryan
+family, the one that for so long now has stayed at home, and the one
+that went abroad. Destitute of stimulus from without, the Indo-Aryan
+mind turned upon itself and consumed in dreamy metaphysics the
+imagination which has made its cousins the leaders in the world's
+progress to-day.  The inevitable numbness of monotony crept over the
+stay-at-homes.  The deadly sameness of their surroundings produced
+its unavoidable effect.  The torpor of the East, like some
+paralyzing poison, stole into their souls, and they fell into a
+drowsy slumber only to dream in the land they had formerly wrested
+from its possessors.  Their birthright passed with their cousins
+into the West.
+
+In the case of the Altaic races which we are considering, cause and
+effect mutually strengthened each other.  That they did not travel
+more is due primarily to a lack of enterprise consequent upon a lack
+of imagination, and then their want of travel told upon their
+imagination.  They were also unfortunate in their journeying.  Their
+travels were prematurely brought to an end by that vast geographical
+Nirvana the Pacific Ocean, the great peaceful sea as they call it
+themselves.  That they would have journeyed further is shown by the
+way their dreams went eastward still.  They themselves could not for
+the preventing ocean, and the lapping of its waters proved a
+nation's lullaby.
+
+One thing, I think, then, our glance at Far Eastern civilization has
+more than suggested.  The soul, in its progress through the world,
+tends inevitably to individualization.  Yet the more we perceive of
+the cosmos the more do we recognize an all-pervading unity in it.
+Its soul must be one, not many.  The divine power that made all
+things is not itself multifold.  How to reconcile the
+ever-increasing divergence with an eventual similarity is a problem
+at present transcending our generalizations.  What we know would
+seem to be opposed to what we must infer.  But perception of how we
+shall merge the personal in the universal, though at present hidden
+from sight, may sometime come to us, and the seemingly
+irreconcilable will then turn out to involve no contradiction at all.
+For this much is certain: grand as is the great conception of
+Buddhism, majestic as is the idea of the stately rest it would lead
+us to, the road here below is not one the life of the world can
+follow.  If earthly existence be an evil, then Buddhism will help us
+ignore it; but if by an impulse we cannot explain we instinctively
+crave activity of mind, then the great gospel of Gautama touches us
+not; for to abandon self--egoism, that is, not selfishness is the
+true vacuum which nature abhors.  As for Far Orientals, they
+themselves furnish proof against themselves.  That impersonality is
+not man's earthly goal they unwittingly bear witness; for they are
+not of those who will survive.  Artistic attractive people that they
+are, their civilization is like their own tree flowers, beautiful
+blossoms destined never to bear fruit; for whatever we may conceive
+the far future of another life to be, the immediate effect of
+impersonality cannot but be annihilating.  If these people continue
+in their old course, their earthly career is closed.  Just as surely
+as morning passes into afternoon, so surely are these races of the
+Far East, if unchanged, destined to disappear before the advancing
+nations of the West.  Vanish they will off the face of the earth and
+leave our planet the eventual possession of the dwellers where the
+day declines.  Unless their newly imported ideas really take root,
+it is from this whole world that Japanese and Koreans, as well as
+Chinese, will inevitably be excluded.  Their Nirvana is already
+being realized; already it has wrapped Far Eastern Asia in its
+winding-sheet, the shroud of those whose day was but a dawn, as if
+in prophetic keeping with the names they gave their homes,--the Land
+of the Day's Beginning, and the Land of the Morning Calm.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Etext of The Soul of the Far East, by Lowell
+
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