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.
