Chapter IX: Section 5: is devoted to automobile gossip and automobile advertisements (2)

I do not intend, however, to plunge into that controversy. The point that interests me is the view of my Canadian friends that in America there is no "culture." And, in the sense they gave to that term, I think they are right. There _is_ no culture in America. There is instruction; there is research; there is technical and professional training; there is specialisation in science and industry; there is every possible application of life, to purposes and ends; but there is no life for its own sake. Let me illustrate. It is, I have read, a maxim of American business that "a man is damned who knows two things." "He is almost a dilettante," it was said of a student, "he reads Dante and Shakespeare"! "The perfect professor," said a College President, "should be willing to work hard eleven months in the year." These are straws, if you like, but they show the way the wind blows. Again, you will find, if you travel long in America, that you are suffering from a kind of atrophy. You will not, at first, realise what it means. But suddenly it will flash upon you that you are suffering from lack of conversation. You do not converse; you cannot; you can only talk. It is the rarest thing to meet a man who, when a subject is started, is willing or able to follow it out into its ramifications, to play with it, to embroider it with pathos or with wit, to penetrate to its roots, to trace its connexions and affinities. Question and answer, anecdote and jest are the staple of American conversation; and, above all, information. They have a hunger for positive facts. And you may hear them hour after hour rehearsing to one another their travels, their business transactions, their experiences in trains, in hotels, on steamers, till you begin to feel you have no alternatives before you but murder or suicide. An American, broadly speaking, never detaches himself from experience. His mind is embedded in it; it moves wedged in fact. His only escape is into humour; and even his humour is but a formula of exaggeration. It implies no imagination, no real envisaging of its object. It does not illuminate a subject, it extinguishes it, clamping upon every topic the same grotesque mould. That is why it does not really much amuse the English. For the English are accustomed to Shakespeare, and to the London cabby.

This may serve to indicate what I mean by lack of culture. I admit, of course, that neither are the English cultured. But they have culture among them. They do not, of course, value it; the Americans, for aught I know, value it more; but they produce it, and the Americans do not. I have visited many of their colleges and universities, and everywhere, except perhaps at Harvard--unless my impressions are very much at fault--I have found the same atmosphere. It is the atmosphere known as the "Yale spirit," and it is very like that of an English Public School. It is virile, athletic, gregarious, all-penetrating, all-embracing. It turns out the whole university to sing rhythmic songs and shout rhythmic cries at football matches. It praises action and sniffs at speculation. It exalts morals and depresses intellect. It suspects the solitary person, the dreamer, the loafer, the poet, the prig. This atmosphere, of course, exists in English universities. It is imported there from the Public Schools. But it is not all-pervading. Individuals and cliques escape. And it is those who escape that acquire culture. In America, no one escapes, or they are too few to count. I know Americans of culture, know and love them; but I feel them to be lost in the sea of philistinism. They cannot draw together, as in England, and leaven the lump. The lump is bigger, and they are fewer. All the more honour to them; and all the more loss to America.

Whether, from all this, any conclusion is to be drawn about the proper policy to be pursued at our universities, is a question I will not here discuss. Culture, I think, is one of those precious things that are achieved by accident, and by accident may be destroyed. The things we do to maintain it might kill it; the things we do to kill it might preserve it. My Canadian friends may be quite wrong in their diagnosis of the causes that engender or destroy it. But they are right in their sense of its importance; and it will be an interesting result of imperial unity if we find, to our astonishment, that the Dominions beyond the seas rally round exactly those things in England which we expect them to declare effete. The Rhodes scholars go to Oxford, not to Birmingham or Liverpool. And it is Cambridge that peoples the universities of the Empire with professors.

XI

ANTÆUS

I saw to-day some really remarkable landscapes by an American artist. So, at least, they seem to me. They have, at any rate, a quality of imagination which one does not expect to find in this country. "One does not expect"--why not? Why, in this respect, is America, as undoubtedly she is, so sterile? Artists must be born here as much as elsewhere. American civilisation, it is true, repels men of reflection and sensitiveness, just as it attracts men of action; so that, as far as immigration is concerned, there is probably a selection working against the artistic type. But, on the other hand, men of action often produce sons with a genius for the arts; and it is to be supposed that they do so as much in America as elsewhere. It must be the environment that is unfavourable. Artists and poets belong to the genus I have named "Mollycoddle"; and in America the Mollycoddle is hardly allowed to breathe. Nowhere on that continent, so far as I have been able to see, is there to be found a class or a clique of men, respected by others and respecting themselves, who also respect not merely art but the artistic calling. Broadly, business is the only respectable pursuit; including under business Politics and Law, which in this country are only departments of business. Business holds the place in popular esteem that is held by arms in Germany, by letters in France, by Public Life in England. The man therefore whose bent is towards the arts meets no encouragement; he meets everywhere the reverse. His father, his uncles, his brothers, his cousins, all are in business. Business is the only virile pursuit for people of education and means, who cannot well become chauffeurs. There is, no doubt, the professorial career; but that, it is agreed, is adopted only by men of "no ambition." Americans believe in education, but they do not believe in educators. There is no money to be made in that profession, and the making of money is the test of character. The born poet or artist is thus handicapped to a point which may easily discourage him from running at all. At the best, he emigrates to Europe, and his achievement is credited to that continent. Or, remaining in America, he succumbs to the environment, puts aside his creative ambition, and enters business. It is not for nothing that Americans are the most active people in the world. They pay the penalty in an atrophy of the faculties of reflection and representation.

Things are different in Europe, and even in England. There, not only are artists and men of letters honoured when they are successful--they are, of course, honoured at that stage in America; but the pursuit of literature and art is one which a young man need not feel it discreditable to adopt. The contemporaries of a brilliant youth at Oxford or at Cambridge do not secretly despise him if he declines to enter business. The first-class man does not normally aspire to start life as a drummer. Public life and the Church offer honourable careers; and both of them have traditional affinities with literature. So has the Law, still in England a profession and not a trade. One may even be a don or a schoolmaster without serious discredit. Under these conditions a young man can escape from the stifling pressure of the business point of view. He can find societies like-minded with himself, equally indifferent to the ideal of success in business, equally inspired by intellectual or æsthetic ambitions. He can choose to be poor without feeling that he will therefore become despicable. The attitude of the business classes in England, no doubt, is much the same as that of the business classes in America. But in England there are other classes and other traditions, havens of refuge from the prevalent commercialism. In America the trade-wind blows broad, steady, universal over the length and breadth of the continent.

This, I believe, is one reason for the sterility of America in Art. But it is not the only one. Literature and Art in Europe rest on a long tradition which has not only produced books and pictures, but has left its mark on the language, the manners, the ideas, the architecture, the physical features of the country. The books and the pictures can be transplanted, but the rest cannot. Thus, even though in every art the technical tradition has been interrupted, there remains in Europe what I will call the tradition of feeling; and it is this that is absent in America. Art in Europe is rooted; and there still persists into the present something of the spirit which fostered it in the past. Not only is Nature beautiful, she is humanised by the works of Man. Politics are mellowed by history, business tempered by culture. Classes are more segregated, types more distinct, ideals and aims more varied. The ghost of a spiritual life still hovers over the natural, shadowing it with the beat of solemn wings. There are finer overtones for a sensitive ear to catch; rainbow hues where the spray of life goes up. All this, it is true, is disappearing in Europe; but in America it has never existed. A sensitive European, travelling there, feels at once starved and flayed. Nothing nourishes, and everything hurts. There is natural beauty, but it has not been crowned and perfected by the hand of man. Whatever he has touched he has touched only to defile. There is one pursuit, commerce; one type, the business man; one ideal, that of increasing wealth. Monotony of talk, monotony of ideas, monotony of aim, monotony of outlook on the world. America is industrialism pure and simple; Europe is industrialism superimposed on feudalism; and, for the arts, the difference is vital.

But the difference is disappearing. Not that America is becoming like Europe, but Europe is becoming like America. This is not a case of the imitation that is a form of flattery; it is a case of similar causes producing similar results. The disease--or shall we say, to use a neutral term--the diathesis of commercialism found in America an open field and swept through it like a fire. In Europe, its course was hampered by the structures of an earlier civilisation. But it is spreading none the less surely. And the question arises--In the future, when the European environment is as unfavourable to Art as the American, will there be, in the West, any Art at all? I do not know; no one knows; but there is this to remark. What I am calling commercialism is the infancy, not the maturity of a civilisation. The revolution in morals, in manners, and in political and social institutions which must accompany the revolution in industry, has hardly yet begun its course. It has gone further in Europe than in America; so that, oddly enough, Europe is at once behind and in front of this continent, overlaps it, so to speak, at both ends. But it has not gone very far even in Europe; and for generations, I conceive, political and social issues will draw away much of the creative talent that might have been available for Art. In the end, one may suppose, something like a stable order will arise; an order, that is, in which people will feel that their institutions correspond sufficiently with their inner life, and will be able to devote themselves with a free mind to reflecting their civilisation in Art.

But will their civilisation be of a kind to invite such reflection? It will be, if the present movement is not altogether abortive, a civilisation of security, equity, and peace; where there is no indigence, no war, and comparatively little disease. Such society, certainly, will not offer a field for much of the kind of Art that has been or is now being produced. The primitive folk-song, the epic of war, the novel or play inspired by social strife, will have passed irrecoverably away. And more than that, it is sometimes urged, there will be such a dearth of those tense moments which alone engender the artistic mood, that Art of any kind will have become impossible. If that were true, it would not, in my opinion, condemn the society. Art is important, but there are things more important; and among those things are justice and peace. I do not, however, accept the view that a peaceable and just society would necessarily also be one that is uninspired. That view seems to me to proceed from our incurable materialism. We think there is no conflict except with arms; no rivalry except for bread; no aspiration except for money and rank. It is my own belief that the removal of the causes of the material strife in which most men are now plunged would liberate the energies for spiritual conflict; that the passion to know, the passion to feel, the passion to love, would begin at last to take their proper place in human life; and would engender the forms of Art appropriate to their expression.

To return to America, what I am driving at is this. America may have an Art, and a great Art. But it will be after she has had her social revolution. Her Art has first to touch ground; and before it can do that, the ground must be fit for it to touch. It was not till the tenth century that the seed of Mediæval Art could be sown; it was not till the thirteenth that the flower bloomed. So now, our civilisation is not ripe for its own Art. What America imports from Europe is useless to her. It is torn from its roots; and it is idle to replant it; it will not grow. There must be a native growth, not so much of America, as of the modern era. That growth America, like Europe, must will. She has her prophet of it, Walt Whitman. In the coming centuries it is her work to make his vision real.

CONCLUDING ESSAY

The preceding pages were written in the course of travel and convey the impressions and reflections of the moment. Whatever interest they may have depends upon this immediacy, and for that reason I have reprinted them substantially as they first appeared. Perhaps, however, some concluding reflections of a more considered nature may be of some interest to my readers. I do not advance them in a dogmatic spirit nor as final judgments, but as the first tentative results of my gropings into a large and complicated subject. I will ask the reader, therefore, be he Western or Oriental, to follow me in a spirit at once critical and sympathetic, challenging my suggestions as much as he will, but rather as a fellow-seeker than as an opponent bent upon refutation. For I am trying to comprehend rather than to judge, and to comprehend as impartially as is compatible with having an attitude of one's own at all.

Ever since Mr. Rudyard Kipling wrote a famous line it has become a commonplace of popular thought in England and America that there is an East and a West, and an impassable gulf between them. But Mr. Kipling was thinking of India, and India is not all the East: he was thinking of England, and England is not all the West. As soon as one approaches the question more particularly it becomes a complicated matter to decide whether there is really an East and a West, and what either stands for. That there is a West, in a real sense, with a unity of its own, is, I think, true. But it must be limited in time to the last two centuries, and in space to the countries of Western Europe and the continent of America. So understood, the West forms, in all the most important respects, a homogeneous system. True, it is divided into different nations, speaking different languages, and pursuing different, and often conflicting, policies; and these distinctions are still so important, that they colour our fears and hopes and sympathies, and take form in the burden of armaments and the menace of war. Nevertheless, seen in the perspective of history, they are survivals, atrophying and disappearing. Behind and despite of them there is a common Western mind and a common Western organisation. Finance is cosmopolitan; industry is cosmopolitan; trade is cosmopolitan. There is one scientific method, and the results achieved by it are common. There is one system of industry, that known as Capitalism; and the problems arising from it and the solutions propounded appear alike in every nation. There is one political tendency, or fact, that of popular government. There are cognate aims and similar achievements in literature and art. There is, in brief, a Western movement, a Western problem, a Western mentality; and the particular happenings of particular nations are all parts of this one happening. Nor is this all. There is in the West a common religion. I do not refer to Christianity, for the religion I mean is held by hundreds and thousands who are not Christians, and indeed does not very readily find in Christianity an expression at once coherent and pure. It has not been formulated in a creed; but it is to be felt and heard in all the serious work and all the serious thought of the West. It is the religion of Good and Evil, of Time and the process in Time. If it tried to draw up a confession of faith perhaps it would produce, as its first attempt, something of this kind:--

"I believe in the ultimate distinction between Good and Evil,
and in a real process in a real Time. I believe it to be my duty
to increase Good and diminish Evil; I believe that in doing this
I am serving the purpose of the world. I know this; I do not
know anything else; and I am reluctant to put questions to which
I have no answer, and to which I do not believe that anyone has
an answer. Action, as defined above, is my creed. Speculation
weakens action. I do not wish to speculate, I wish to live. And
I believe the true life to be the life I have described."

In saying that this is the real creed of the modern Western man I do not pretend that he always knows or would admit it to be so. But if his actions, his words, and his thoughts be sympathetically interpreted, where all are at their best, I think they will be found to imply something of this kind. And this attitude I call religious, not merely ethical, because of its conviction that the impulse towards Good is of the essence of the World, not only of men, or of Man. To believe this is an act of faith, not of reason; though it is not contrary to reason, as no faith should be or long can be. Many men do _not_ believe it, for many are not religious; others, while believing it, may believe also many other things. But it is the irreducible minimum of religion in the modern West, the justification of our life, the faith of our works. I call it the Religion of Time, and distinguish it thus from the Religion of Eternity.

In this sense, then, this profound sense, of a common aim and a common motive, there is really a West. Is there also an East? That is not so clear. In some important respects, no doubt, the Eastern civilisations are alike. They are still predominantly agricultural. Their industry is manual not mechanical. Their social unit is the extended family. To travel in the East is to realise that life on the soil and in the village is there still the normal life, as it has been almost everywhere and always, throughout civilisation, until the last century in the West. But though there is thus in the East a common way of life, there is not a common organisation nor a common spirit. Economically, the great Eastern countries are still independent of one another. Each lives for the most part by and on itself. And their intellectual and spiritual intercourse is now (though it was not in the past) as negligible as their economic commerce. The influence that is beginning to be strong upon them all is that of Western culture; and if they become alike in their outlook on life, it will be by assimilating that. But, at present, they are not alike. It is easy, in this matter, to be deceived by the outward forms of religion. Because Buddhism originated in India and spread to China and Japan, because Japan took Confucian ideals from China, it is natural to conclude that there is a common religious spirit throughout the East, or the Far East. But one might as reasonably infer that the spirit of the christianised Teutons was the same as that of the Jews or of the Christians in the East. Nations borrow religions, but they shape them according to their own genius. And if I am not very much mistaken the outlook of India is, and always has been, radically distinct from and even opposed to that of China or Japan. These latter countries, indeed, I believe, are far closer to the West than they are to India. Let me explain.

India is the true origin and home of what I have called the religion of Eternity. That idea seems to have gone out from her to the rest of the world. But nowhere else was it received with equal purity and passion. Elsewhere than in India the claims of Time were predominant. In India they have been subordinate. This, no doubt, is a matter of emphasis. No society, as a whole, could believe and act upon the belief that activity in Time is simply waste of time, and absorption in the Eternal the direct and immediate object of life. Such a view, acted upon, would bring the society quickly to an end. It would mean that the very physical instinct to live was extinguished. But, as the Eternal was first conceived by the amazing originality of India, so the passion to realise it here and now has been the motive of her saints from the date of the Upanishads to the twentieth century. And the method of realisation proposed and attempted has not been the living of the temporal life in a particular spirit, it has been the transcending of it by a special experience. Indian saints have always believed that by meditation and ascetic discipline, by abstaining from active life and all its claims, and cultivating solitude and mortification, they could reach by a direct experience union with the Infinite. This is as true of the latest as of the earliest saints, if and so far as Western influences have been excluded. Let me illustrate from the words of Sri Ramakrishna, one of the most typical of Indian saints, who died late in the nineteenth century.

First, for the claim to pass directly into union with the Eternal:

"I do see that Being as a Reality before my very eyes! Why then
should I reason? I do actually see that it is the Absolute Who
has become all these things about us; it is He who appears as
the finite soul and the phenomenal world. One must have such an
awakening of the Spirit within to see this Reality.... Spiritual
awakening must be followed by Samadhi. In this state one forgets
that one has a body; one loses all attachment to things of this
world."[5]

And let it not be supposed that this state called Samadhi is merely one of intense meditation. It is something much more abnormal, or super-normal, than this. The book from which I am quoting contains many accounts of its effects upon Sri Ramakrishna. Here is one of them:

"He is now in a state of Samadhi, the superconscious or
God-conscious state. The body is again motionless. The eyes are
again fixed! The boys only a moment ago were laughing and making
merry! Now they all look grave. Their eyes are steadfastly fixed
on the master's face. They marvel at the wonderful change that
has come over him. It takes him long to come back to the sense
world. His limbs now begin to lose their stiffness. His face
beams with smiles, the organs of sense begin to come back each
to its own work. Tears of joy stand at the corners of his eyes.
He chants the sacred name of Rama."[6]

The object, then, of this saint, and one he claims to have attained, is to come into union with the Infinite by a process which removes him altogether from contact with this world and from all possibility of action in it. This world, in fact, is to him, as to all Indian saints and most Indian philosophers, phenomenal and unreal. Of the speculative problems raised by this conception I need not speak here. But it belongs to my purpose to bring out its bearing upon conduct. All conduct depends upon the conception of Good and Evil. Anti-moralists, like Nietzsche, assume and require these ideas, just as much as moralists; they merely attempt to give them a new content. If conduct is to have any meaning, Good and Evil must be real in a real world. If they are held to be appearances conduct becomes absurd. What now is Sri Ramakrishna's view of this matter? The whole life that we Western men call real is to him a mere game played by and for the sake of God, or, to use his phrase, of the Divine Mother. For her pleasure she keeps men bound to Time, instead of free in Eternity. For her pleasure, therefore, she creates and maintains Evil. I quote the passage:

"My Divine Mother is always in Her sportive mood. The world,
indeed, is Her toy. She will have Her own way. It is Her
pleasure to take out of the prisonhouse and set free only one or
two among a hundred thousand of her children!

"_A Brahmo_: Sir, She can if She pleases set everybody free.
Why is it then, that She has bound us hand and foot with the
chains of the world?

"_Sri Ramakrishna_: Well, I suppose it is her pleasure. It is
her pleasure to go on with Her sport with all these beings that
She has brought into existence. The player amongst the children
that touches the person of the Grand-dame, the same need no
longer run about. He cannot take any further part in the
exciting play of Hide and Seek that goes on.

"The others who have not touched the goal must run about and
play to the great delight of the Grand-dame."[7]

Thus the Indian saint. Let us now try to bring his conception into relation with what we in the West believe to be real experience. In a railway accident a driver is pinned against the furnace and slowly burned to death, praying the bystanders in vain to put him out of his misery. What is this? It is the sport of God! In Putumayo innocent natives are deprived of their land, enslaved, tortured, and murdered, that shareholders in Europe may receive high dividends. What is this? The sport of God! In the richest countries of the West a great proportion of those who produce the wealth receive less than the wages which would suffice to keep them in bare physical health. What is this? Once more the sport of God! One might multiply examples, but it would be idle. No Western man could for a moment entertain the view of Sri Ramakrishna. To him such a God would be a mere devil. The Indian position, no doubt, is a form of idealism; but an idealism conditioned by defective experience of the life in Time. The saint has chosen another experience. But clearly he has not transcended ours, he has simply left it out.

Now I am aware that it will be urged by some of the most sincere representatives of religion in India that Sri Ramakrishna does not typify the Indian attitude. Perhaps not, if we take contemporary India. But then contemporary India has been profoundly influenced by Western thought; modern Indians like Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Keshub Chunder Sen, Rabindranath Tagore, could hardly have thought and felt as they did, and do, were it not for this influence. The following poem of Rabindranath Tagore may aptly symbolise this breaking in of the West upon the East, though I do not know that that was the author's intention:

"With days of hard travail I raised a temple. It had no
doors or windows, its walls were thickly built with
massive stones.

I forgot all else, I shunned all the world, I gazed in rapt
contemplation at the image I had set upon the altar.

It was always night inside, and lit by the lamps of
perfumed oil. The ceaseless smoke of incense wound
my heart in its heavy coils.

Sleepless, I carved on the walls fantastic figures in mazy
bewildering lines--winged horses, flowers with human
faces, women with limbs like serpents.

No passage was left anywhere through which could enter
the song of birds, the murmur of leaves, or the hum
of the busy village.

The only sound that echoed in its dark dome was that
of incantations which I chanted.

My mind became keen and still like a pointed flame, my
senses swooned in ecstasy.

I knew not how time passed till the thunderstone had
struck the temple, and a pain stung me through the
heart.

The lamp looked pale and ashamed; the carvings on
the walls, like chained dreams, stared meaningless
in the light, as they would fain hide themselves.

I looked at the image on the altar. I saw it smiling and
alive with the living touch of God. The night I had
imprisoned spread its wings and vanished."[8]

The closed temple, I believe, is a true image of the spiritual life of India, if not at all times, at any rate for many centuries previous to the advent of the English. Everything seems to point to this--the symbolic character of Indian art; the absence of history and the prevalence of religious legend; the cult of the fakir and the wandering ascetic. In India one feels religion as one feels it nowhere else, unless it were in Russia. But the religion one feels is peculiar. It is the religion that denies the value of experience in Time. It is the religion of the Eternal.

But, it will be urged, how can that be, when India continues to produce her teeming millions; when these perforce live their brief lives in a constant and often vain struggle for a bare livelihood; when, in order to live at all, it is necessary at every point to be straining vitality in the pursuit of temporal goods or the avoidance of temporal evils?

I make no attempt to disguise or to weaken this paradox. But I suggest that it is but one of the many paradoxes set up by the conflict between men's instinct for life and their conscious beliefs. Indians live not because they believe in life, but because they cannot help it. Their hold on life is certainly less than that of Western men. Thus I have been told by administrators of famine relief or of precautions against plague, that what they have to contend with is not so much the resistance as the indifference of the population. "Why worry us?" they say, in effect; "life is not worth the trouble. Let us die and be rid of it." Life is an evil, that is the root feeling of India; and the escape is either, for the mass, by death; or for the men of spiritual genius, by a flight to the Eternal. How this attitude has arisen I do not here seek to determine; race, climate, social and political conditions, all no doubt have played their part. The spiritual attitude is probably an effect, rather than a cause, of an enfeebled grip on life. But no one, I think, who knows India, would dispute that this attitude is a fact; and it is a fact that distinguishes India not only from the West but from the Far East.

For China and Japan, though they have had, and to a less extent still have, religion, are not, in the Indian sense, religious. The Chinese, in particular, strike one as secular and practical; quite as secular and practical as the English. They have had Buddhism, as we have had Christianity; but no one who can perceive and understand would say that their outlook is determined by Buddhism, any more than ours is by Christianity. It is Confucianism that expresses the Chinese attitude to life, whenever the Chinese soul, becoming aware of itself, looks out from the forest of animistic beliefs in which the mass of the people wander. And Confucianism is perhaps the best and purest expression of the practical reason that has ever been formulated. Family duty, social duty, political duty, these are the things on which it lays stress. And when the Chinese spirit seeks escape from these primary preoccupations, it finds its freedom in an art that is closer to the world of fact, imaginatively conceived, than that of any other race. Chinese art purifies itself from symbolism to become interpretation; whereas in India the ocean of symbolism never ceases to roll over the drowning surface of the phenomenal world. Chinese literature, again, has this same hold upon life. It is such as Romans or Englishmen, if equally gifted, might have written. Much of it, indeed, is stupidly and tediously didactic. But where it escapes into poetry it is a poetry like Wordsworth's, revealing the beauty of actual things, rather than weaving across them an embroidery of subjective emotions The outlook of China is essentially the outlook of the West, only more sane, more reasonable, more leisured and dignified. Positivism and Humanity, the dominant forms of thought and feeling in the West, have controlled Chinese civilisation for centuries. The Chinese have built differently from ourselves and on a smaller scale, with less violence and less power; but they have built on the same foundations.

And Japan, too, at bottom is secular. Her true religion is that of the Emperor and his divine ancestors. Her strongest passion is patriotism. A Japanese, like an Indian, is always ready to die. But he dies for the splendours and glories of this world of sense. It is not because he has so little hold on life, but because he has so much, that he so readily throws it away. The Japanese are unlike the Chinese and unlike the Europeans and Americans; but their outlook is similar. They believe in the world of time and change; and because of this attitude, they and the rest of the world stand together like a mountain in the sun, contemplating uneasily that other mysterious peak, shrouded in mist, which is India.

The reader by this time will have grasped the point I am trying to put. There are in Man two religious impulses, or, if the expression be preferred, two aspects of the religious impulse. I have called them the religion of the Eternal and the religion of Time; and India I suggest stands pre-eminently for the one, the West for the other, while the other countries of the East rank rather with the West than with India. It is not necessary to my purpose to exaggerate this antithesis. I will say, if it be preferred, that in India the emphasis is on the Eternal, in the West on Time. But that much at least must be said and is plainly true. Now, as between these two attitudes, I find myself quite clearly and definitely on the side of the West. I have said in the preceding pages hard things about Western civilisation. I hate many of its manifestations, I am out of sympathy with many of its purposes. I can see no point, for instance, in the discovery of the north or the south pole, and very little in the invention of aeroplanes; while gramophones, machine guns, advertisements, cinematographs, submarines, dreadnoughts, cosmopolitan hotels, seem to me merely fatuous or sheerly disastrous. But what lies behind all this, the tenacity, the courage, the spirit of adventure, this it is that is the great contribution of the West. It is not the aeroplane that is valuable; probably it will never be anything but pernicious, for its main use is likely to be for war. But the fact that men so lightly risk their lives to perfect it, _that_ is valuable. The West is adventurous; and, what is more, it is adventurous on a quest. For behind and beyond all its fatuities, confusions, crimes, lies, as the justification of it all, that deep determination to secure a society more just and more humane which inspires all men and all movements that are worth considering at all, and, to those who can understand, gives greatness and significance even to some of our most reckless enterprises. We are living very "dangerously"; all the forces are loose, those of destruction as well as those of creation; but we are living towards something; we are living with the religion of Time.

So far, I daresay, most Western men will agree with me in the main. But they may say, some of them, as the Indian will certainly say, "Is that all? Have you no place for the Eternal and the Infinite?" To this I must reply that I think it clear and indisputable that the religion of the Eternal, as interpreted by Sri Ramakrishna, is altogether incompatible with the religion of Time. And the position of Sri Ramakrishna, I have urged, is that of most Indian, and as I think, of most Western mystics. Not, however, of all, and not of all modern mystics, even in India. Rabindranath Tagore, for example, in his "Sádhana," has put forward a mysticism which does, at least, endeavour to allow for and include what I have called the religion of Time. To him, and to other mystics of real experience, I must leave the attempt to reconcile Eternity and Time. For my own part, I can only approach the question from the point of view of Time, and endeavour to discover and realise the most that can be truly said by one who starts with the belief that that is real. The profoundest prophets of the religion of Time are, in my judgment, Goethe and George Meredith; and from them, and from others, and from my own small experience, I seem to have learned this: the importance of that process in Time in whose reality we believe does not lie merely in the bettering of the material and social environment, though we hold the importance of that to be great; it lies in the development of souls. And that development consists in a constant expansion of interest away from and beyond one's own immediate interests out into the activities of the world at large. Such expansion may be pursued in practical life, in art, in science, in contemplation, so long as the contemplation is of the real processes of the real world in time. To that expansion I see no limit except death. And I do not know what comes after death. But I am clear that whatever comes after, the command of Life is the same--to expand out of oneself into the life of the world. This command--I should rather say this impulse--seems to me absolute, the one certain thing on which everything else must build. I think it enough for religion, in the case at least of those who have got beyond the infant need for certitudes and dogmas. These perhaps are few; yet they may be really more numerous than appears. And on the increase in their numbers, and the intensity of their conviction and their life, the fate of the world seems to me to depend.

Footnotes:

[Footnote 5: _Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna_, second edition, Part
1., p. 310.]

[Footnote 6: _Ibid._, p. 61.]

[Footnote 7: _Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna_, second edition, Part
1., p. 145.]

[Footnote 8: _The Gardener_, p. 125.]

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TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:

Pg. 168, added closing single quote mark for clarity. In this case it serves to close a quote within a quote. (speak.'" You can now)

Footnote 3, in the original text, the English translation of Dante's poem did not preserve the line breaks in each stanza. The original appearance has been retained.

Footnote 3, the reference is given as Dante's "Purgatorio". In actual fact the lines of verse come from Dante's "Paradiso". The author's original text has been retained.

Pg. 184 and 191, line of verse beginning "My son, the good you....". In the original text, the fifth word was an abbreviation comprising a "y" and a superscript "o". This is presumed to represent "you" and has been expanded as such for readability.

Pg. 192, "poeple" changed to "people". (property of the American poeple.)

End of Project Gutenberg's Appearances, by Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson