and the
Y.M.C.A.; something which distinguishes all these from the Chinese
outlook, and which I, for my part, consider very evil. What I mean is
the habit of regarding mankind as raw material, to be moulded by our
scientific manipulation into whatever form may happen to suit our fancy.
The essence of the matter, from the point of view of the individual who
has this point of view, is the cultivation of will at the expense of
perception, the fervent moral belief that it is our duty to force other
people to realize our conception of the world. The Chinese intellectual
is not much troubled by Imperialism as a creed, but is vigorously
assailed by Bolshevism and the Y.M.C.A., to one or other of which he is
too apt to fall a victim, learning a belief from the one in the
class-war and the dictatorship of the communists, from the other in the
mystic efficacy of cold baths and dumb-bells. Both these creeds, in
their Western adepts, involve a contempt for the rest of mankind except
as potential converts, and the belief that progress consists in the
spread of a doctrine. They both involve a belief in government and a
life against Nature. This view, though I have called it mechanistic, is
as old as religion, though mechanism has given it new and more virulent
forms. The first of Chinese philosophers, Lao-Tze, wrote his book to
protest against it, and his disciple Chuang-Tze put his criticism into a
fable[38]:--

Horses have hoofs to carry them over frost and snow; hair, to
protect them from wind and cold. They eat grass and drink water,
and fling up their heels over the champaign. Such is the real
nature of horses. Palatial dwellings are of no use to them.

One day Po Lo appeared, saying: "I understand the management of
horses."

So he branded them, and clipped them, and pared their hoofs, and
put halters on them, tying them up by the head and shackling them
by the feet, and disposing them in stables, with the result that
two or three in every ten died. Then he kept them hungry and
thirsty, trotting them and galloping them, and grooming, and
trimming, with the misery of the tasselled bridle before and the
fear of the knotted whip behind, until more than half of them
were dead.

The potter says: "I can do what I will with clay. If I want it
round, I use compasses; if rectangular, a square."

The carpenter says: "I can do what I will with wood.