ocrates also said (in "Crito") that man was indebted to the State
for his existence. "Did not thy father, in obedience to the law, take
thy mother to wife and beget thee?" This sentiment was as antique as it
could well be, and the death of Socrates--as related by Plato--was the
most magnificent confirmation of the Greek idea that the individual,
even the wisest, was entirely subordinate to the community.

The civilisations of China and Japan are impersonal even to a greater
extent than the civilisation of ancient Greece. Percival Lowell
maintains that the diverse manifestations of the spirit of those
countries can only be understood if regarded from the standpoint of
absolute impersonality. He sees in a "pronounced impersonality the most
striking characteristic of the Far East", "the foundation on which the
Oriental character is built up." It is very instructive to observe how
it determines the individual's conception of birth and marriage,
thoughts and acts, life and death. It is carried to so great an extreme
that special terms for "I," "you," "he," do not even exist in the
Japanese language, and have to be replaced by objective circumlocutions.
Not content with the fact of having been born impersonal, it is the
ambition of the inhabitant of the Far East to become more and more so as
his life unfolds itself. Witness the heroic exploits of Japanese
soldiers during the last war: individual soldiers frequently went to
their death for the sake of a small advantage to their group. We
Europeans regard this in the light of heroism--and it would be heroism
in the case of a European. But with the sacrifice of his individual life
in the interest of the community, the Japanese instinctively yields the
smaller value. In the same way Greeks and Romans did not attach very
much importance to life; suicide was very common, and frequently
committed without any special motive. As true love is based on
personality, it is impossible for the modern East-Asiatic to know love
in our sense. Lowell agrees with this: "Love, as we understand it, is an
unknown feeling in the East." He reports that Japanese women will appear
before strangers entirely nude, without the least trace of
embarrassment--as would Greek women!--because they are innocent of that
other aspect of personality--the feeling of shame. To be ashamed implies
the desire of concealing something individual and intimate; where this
is not the case, there can be no feeling of shame. Fi