ence; its more vigorous races have had their periods of conquest
and fierce mastery, but sooner or later what they have conquered has
conquered them and they have accepted, with a kind of inevitable
fatalism, the pressure of forces which they were powerless to subdue to
their own weakening purposes. They have populated their lands to the
limit and accepted the poverty which a dense population without
scientific resource, on a poor soil and in a trying climate, inevitably
engenders. The more helpless have fallen back upon fate and accepted
with a pathetic resignation their hard estate, asking only to be freed
from the weariness of it. "It is better," says an Eastern proverb, "to
sit than to stand, it is better to lie than to sit, it is better to
sleep than to lie, and death is the best of all."

There is an immensity of weariness and disillusionment in such an
interpretation of life, which needs no comment. But the Eastern mind is
subtle and speculative, possessing a peculiar penetrating power; and,
for the want of any other field in which to act, it turned in upon
itself.

Chesterton has both hit and missed the immense difference between the
East and the West in one of his brilliant paragraphs.[64] "No two ideals
could be more opposite than a Christian saint in a Gothic cathedral and
a Buddhist saint in a Chinese temple. The opposition exists at every
point; but perhaps the shortest statement of it is that the Buddhist
saint always has his eyes shut, while the Christian saint always has
them very wide open. The Buddhist saint has a sleek and harmonious
body, but his eyes are heavy and sealed with sleep. The medieval saint's
body is wasted to crazy bones, but his eyes are frightfully alive. There
cannot be any real community of spirit between forces that produced
symbols so different as that. Granted that both images are
extravagances, are perversions of the pure creed, it must be a real
divergence which could produce such opposite extravagances. The Buddhist
is looking with a peculiar intentness inwards; the Christian is staring
with a frantic intentness outwards. If we follow that clue steadily we
shall find some interesting things."

[Footnote 64: "Orthodoxy," p. 243.]

But to follow Chesterton's own method, the saint with the open eyes may
still be blind while the saint with his eyes shut may really see a vast
deal, and the East has seen much. Whether what it sees be true or not,
is another matter, but there is n