y, which so obsessed the imagination of Europe, went, I found
that any faith I may have had in its importance had simply fallen out of
my mind. As a danger to civilization, as a conceivable source of
destruction and delay, it was a monstrous business enough, but that in
the long run it mattered how or when they fought and which won I did not
believe. In the development of mankind the thing was of far less
importance than the struggle for Flanders or the wars of France and
Burgundy. I was already coming to see Europe as no more than the
dog's-eared corner of the page of history,--like most Europeans I had
thought it the page--and my recovering mind was eager and open to see
the world beyond and form some conception of the greater forces that lay
outside our insularities. What is humanity as a whole doing? What is the
nature of the world process of which I am a part? Why should I drift
from cradle to grave wearing the blinkers of my time and nationality, a
mere denizen of Christendom, accepting its beliefs, its stale
antagonisms, its unreal purposes? That perhaps had been tolerable while
I was still an accepted member of the little world into which my lot had
fallen, but now that I was thrust out its absurdity glared. For me the
alternative was to be a world-man or no man. I had seemed sinking
towards the latter: now I faced about and began to make myself what I
still seek to make myself to-day, a son of mankind, a conscious part of
that web of effort and perplexity which wraps about our globe....

All this I say came into my mind as if it were a part of that recovery
of my mind from its first passionate abjection. And it seemed a simple
and obvious part of the same conversion to realize that I was ignorant
and narrow, and that, too, in a world which is suffering like a beast in
a slime pit by reason of ignorance and narrowness of outlook, and that
it was my manifest work and purpose to make myself less ignorant and to
see and learn with all my being. It came to me as a clear duty that I
should get out of the land of hotels and leisure and go seeking the
facts and clues to human inter-relationship nearer the earthy roots of
things, and I turned my thoughts to India and China, those vast enigmas
of human accumulation, in a spirit extraordinarily like that of some
mystic who receives a call. I felt I must go to Asia and from Asia
perhaps round the world. But it was the greatness of Asia commanded me.
I wanted to see the East