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, co