d years now been sending its
missionaries to the Orient and oriental religions are beginning to send
their missionaries to the West. More justly the return of the East upon
the West is not so much in a missionary propaganda, though there is a
measure of that, as in a more subtle indoctrination of Western
speculation by the fascination and mystery of the Eastern cults. It is
not possible to follow this process in detail but it has gone on long
enough now for us to begin to see the outcome of it and to appraise its
force. It began with New Thought. One discovers oriental names on the
programs of New Thought conventions; the Vedanta Philosophy was
expounded by East Indian speakers at the Greenacre conference in Maine
in the late nineties; B.F. Mills was lecturing on Oriental Scriptures in
1907; and a lecture on the Vedanta Philosophy appears on the program of
the second convention of the International Metaphysical League held in
New York City in the year 1900. The New Thought movement in England
naturally reflected the same tendency to look for light to Eastern
speculation even more markedly than the American movement.

All this was natural enough because New Thought, once divorced from
inherited Christianity and committed to pure speculation about the
sources and meanings of life, was sure to find out that the Orient had
been doing just this for a thousand years. Two things happened. First,
New Thought welcomed Eastern teachers to its conventions in the hope of
receiving thereby some measure of enlightenment, and second, many of
these seekers, finding that the East had a wealth of speculation
compared with which the West is poor indeed, took over the Eastern cults
bodily, gave themselves up to their study and became their ardent
devotees and missionaries.

Generalizations are always dangerous and though the East has, until the
West began to exploit it, remained practically unchanged, the West has
changed so often that whatever one may say about it must immediately be
qualified. But, on the whole, Eastern and Western life are organized
around utterly different centers. The West in its present phase is
predominantly scientific. Our laboratories are perhaps the
distinguishing hall-mark of our civilization. We are always asking
questions of the outside world; we are hungry for facts; we are always
seeking to discover the law and direction of physical force; we have
taken small account, comparatively, of our own inner states,