The Soul of the Far East [58]
sight. Once discovered, it requires much less imagination to understand them. With the light coming from in front, it is an easy matter to see what lies behind one.
So with other fabrics of human thought, imagination has been spinning and weaving them all. From the most concrete of inventions to the most abstract of conceptions the same force reveals itself upon examination; for there is no gulf between what we call practical and what we consider theoretical. Everything abstract is ultimately of practical use, and even the most immediately utilitarian has an abstract principle at its core. We are too prone to regard the present age of the world as preeminently practical, much as a middle-aged man laments the witching fancies of his boyhood. But, and there is more in the parallel than analogy, if the man be truly imaginative he is none the less so at forty-five than he was at twenty, if his imagination have taken on a more critical form; for this latter half of the nineteenth century is perhaps the most imaginative period the world's history has ever known. While with one hand we are contriving means of transit for our ideas, and even our very voices, compared to which Puck's girdle is anything but talismanic, with the other we are stretching out to grasp the action of mind on mind, pushing our way into the very realm of mind itself.
History tells the same story in detail; for the history of mankind, imperfectly as we know it, discloses the fact that imagination, and not the power of observation nor the kindred capability of perception, has been the cause of soul-evolution.
The savage is but little of an imaginative being. We are tempted, at times, to imagine him more so than he is, for his fanciful folk-lore. The proof of which overestimation is that we find no difficulty in imagining what he does, and even of imagining what he probably imagined, and finding our suppositions verified by discovery. Yet his powers of observation may be marvellously developed. The North American Indian tracks his foe through the forest by signs unrecognizable to a white man, and he reasons most astutely upon them, and still that very man turns out to be a mere child when put before problems a trifle out of his beaten path. And all because his forefathers had not the power to imagine something beyond what they actually saw. The very essence of the force of imagination lies in its ability to change a man's habitat for him. Without it, man would forever have remained, not a mollusk, to be sure, but an animal simply. A plant cannot change its place, an animal cannot alter its conditions of existence except within very narrow bounds; man is free in the sense nothing else in the world is.
What is true of individuals has been true of races. The most imaginative races have proved the greatest factors in the world's advance.
Now after this look at our own side of the world, let us turn to the other; for it is this very psychological fact that mental progression implies an ever-increasing individualization, and that imagination is the force at work in the process which Far Eastern civilization, taken in connection with our own, reveals. In doing this, it explains incidentally its own seeming anomalies, the most unaccountable of which, apparently, is its existence.
We have seen how impressively impersonal the Far East is. Now if individuality be the natural measure of the height of civilization which a nation has reached, impersonality should betoken a relatively laggard position in the race. We ought, therefore, to find among these people certain other characteristics corroborative of a less advanced state of development. In the first place, if imagination be the impulse of which increase in individuality is the resulting motion, that quality should be at a minimum there. The Far Orientals ought to be a particularly unimaginative set of people. Such is precisely what they are. Their lack of imagination is a well-recognized fact. All who have been brought in contact with them have observed it, merchants as strikingly
So with other fabrics of human thought, imagination has been spinning and weaving them all. From the most concrete of inventions to the most abstract of conceptions the same force reveals itself upon examination; for there is no gulf between what we call practical and what we consider theoretical. Everything abstract is ultimately of practical use, and even the most immediately utilitarian has an abstract principle at its core. We are too prone to regard the present age of the world as preeminently practical, much as a middle-aged man laments the witching fancies of his boyhood. But, and there is more in the parallel than analogy, if the man be truly imaginative he is none the less so at forty-five than he was at twenty, if his imagination have taken on a more critical form; for this latter half of the nineteenth century is perhaps the most imaginative period the world's history has ever known. While with one hand we are contriving means of transit for our ideas, and even our very voices, compared to which Puck's girdle is anything but talismanic, with the other we are stretching out to grasp the action of mind on mind, pushing our way into the very realm of mind itself.
History tells the same story in detail; for the history of mankind, imperfectly as we know it, discloses the fact that imagination, and not the power of observation nor the kindred capability of perception, has been the cause of soul-evolution.
The savage is but little of an imaginative being. We are tempted, at times, to imagine him more so than he is, for his fanciful folk-lore. The proof of which overestimation is that we find no difficulty in imagining what he does, and even of imagining what he probably imagined, and finding our suppositions verified by discovery. Yet his powers of observation may be marvellously developed. The North American Indian tracks his foe through the forest by signs unrecognizable to a white man, and he reasons most astutely upon them, and still that very man turns out to be a mere child when put before problems a trifle out of his beaten path. And all because his forefathers had not the power to imagine something beyond what they actually saw. The very essence of the force of imagination lies in its ability to change a man's habitat for him. Without it, man would forever have remained, not a mollusk, to be sure, but an animal simply. A plant cannot change its place, an animal cannot alter its conditions of existence except within very narrow bounds; man is free in the sense nothing else in the world is.
What is true of individuals has been true of races. The most imaginative races have proved the greatest factors in the world's advance.
Now after this look at our own side of the world, let us turn to the other; for it is this very psychological fact that mental progression implies an ever-increasing individualization, and that imagination is the force at work in the process which Far Eastern civilization, taken in connection with our own, reveals. In doing this, it explains incidentally its own seeming anomalies, the most unaccountable of which, apparently, is its existence.
We have seen how impressively impersonal the Far East is. Now if individuality be the natural measure of the height of civilization which a nation has reached, impersonality should betoken a relatively laggard position in the race. We ought, therefore, to find among these people certain other characteristics corroborative of a less advanced state of development. In the first place, if imagination be the impulse of which increase in individuality is the resulting motion, that quality should be at a minimum there. The Far Orientals ought to be a particularly unimaginative set of people. Such is precisely what they are. Their lack of imagination is a well-recognized fact. All who have been brought in contact with them have observed it, merchants as strikingly