The Soul of the Far East [9]
he shall have ceased, practically, to be anybody, such tardy recognition is scarcely timely enough to be properly appreciated. Human nature is so earth-tied, after all, that a post-mundane existence is very apt to seem immaterial as well as be so.
With the old familiar landmarks of life obliterated in this wholesale manner, it is to be doubted whether one of us, placed in the midst of such a civilization, would know himself. He certainly would derive but scanty satisfaction from the recognition if he did. Even Nirvana might seem a happy limbo by comparison. With a communal, not to say a cosmic, birthday, and a conventional wife, he might well deem his separate existence the shadow of a shade and embrace Buddhism from mere force of circumstances.
Further investigation would not shake his opinion. For a far-oriental career is thoroughly in keeping with these, its typical turning-points. From one end of its course to the other it is painfully impersonal. In its regular routine as in its more salient junctures, life presents itself to these races a totally different affair from what it seems to us. The cause lies in what is taken to be the basis of socio-biology, if one may so express it.
In the Far East the social unit, the ultimate molecule of existence, is not the individual, but the family.
We occidentals think we value family. We even parade our pretensions so prominently as sometimes to tread on other people's prejudices of a like nature. Yet we scarcely seem to appreciate the inheritance. For with a logic which does us questionable credit, we are proud of our ancestors in direct proportion to their remoteness from ourselves, thus permitting Democracy to revenge its insignificance by smiling at our self-imposed satire. To esteem a man in inverse ratio to the amount of remarkable blood he has inherited is, to say the least, bathetic. Others, again, make themselves objectionable by preferring their immediate relatives to all less connected companions, and cling to their cousins so closely that affection often culminates in matrimony, nature's remonstrances notwithstanding. But with all the pride or pleasure which we take in the members of our particular clan, our satisfaction really springs from viewing them on an autocentric theory of the social system. In our own eyes we are the star about which, as in Joseph's dream, our relatives revolve and upon which they help to shed an added lustre. Our Ptolemaic theory of society is necessitated by our tenacity to the personal standpoint. This fixed idea of ours causes all else seemingly to rotate about it. Such an egoistic conception is quite foreign to our longitudinal antipodes. However much appearances may agree, the fundamental principles upon which family consideration is based are widely different in the two hemispheres. For the far-eastern social universe turns on a patricentric pivot.
Upon the conception of the family as the social and political unit depends the whole constitution of China. The same theory somewhat modified constitutes the life-principle of Korea, of Japan, and of their less advanced cousins who fill the vast centre of the Asiatic continent. From the emperor on his throne to the common coolie in his hovel it is the idea of kinship that knits the entire body politic together. The Empire is one great family; the family is a little empire.
The one developed out of the other. The patriarchal is, as is well known, probably the oldest political system in the world. All nations may be said to have experienced such a paternal government, but most nations outgrew it.
Now the interesting fact about the yellow branch of the human race is, not that they had so juvenile a constitution, but that they have it; that it has persisted practically unchanged from prehistoric ages. It is certainly surprising in this kaleidoscopic world whose pattern is constantly changing as time merges one combination of its elements into another, that on the other side of the globe this set should have remained the same. Yet in spite of the lapse
With the old familiar landmarks of life obliterated in this wholesale manner, it is to be doubted whether one of us, placed in the midst of such a civilization, would know himself. He certainly would derive but scanty satisfaction from the recognition if he did. Even Nirvana might seem a happy limbo by comparison. With a communal, not to say a cosmic, birthday, and a conventional wife, he might well deem his separate existence the shadow of a shade and embrace Buddhism from mere force of circumstances.
Further investigation would not shake his opinion. For a far-oriental career is thoroughly in keeping with these, its typical turning-points. From one end of its course to the other it is painfully impersonal. In its regular routine as in its more salient junctures, life presents itself to these races a totally different affair from what it seems to us. The cause lies in what is taken to be the basis of socio-biology, if one may so express it.
In the Far East the social unit, the ultimate molecule of existence, is not the individual, but the family.
We occidentals think we value family. We even parade our pretensions so prominently as sometimes to tread on other people's prejudices of a like nature. Yet we scarcely seem to appreciate the inheritance. For with a logic which does us questionable credit, we are proud of our ancestors in direct proportion to their remoteness from ourselves, thus permitting Democracy to revenge its insignificance by smiling at our self-imposed satire. To esteem a man in inverse ratio to the amount of remarkable blood he has inherited is, to say the least, bathetic. Others, again, make themselves objectionable by preferring their immediate relatives to all less connected companions, and cling to their cousins so closely that affection often culminates in matrimony, nature's remonstrances notwithstanding. But with all the pride or pleasure which we take in the members of our particular clan, our satisfaction really springs from viewing them on an autocentric theory of the social system. In our own eyes we are the star about which, as in Joseph's dream, our relatives revolve and upon which they help to shed an added lustre. Our Ptolemaic theory of society is necessitated by our tenacity to the personal standpoint. This fixed idea of ours causes all else seemingly to rotate about it. Such an egoistic conception is quite foreign to our longitudinal antipodes. However much appearances may agree, the fundamental principles upon which family consideration is based are widely different in the two hemispheres. For the far-eastern social universe turns on a patricentric pivot.
Upon the conception of the family as the social and political unit depends the whole constitution of China. The same theory somewhat modified constitutes the life-principle of Korea, of Japan, and of their less advanced cousins who fill the vast centre of the Asiatic continent. From the emperor on his throne to the common coolie in his hovel it is the idea of kinship that knits the entire body politic together. The Empire is one great family; the family is a little empire.
The one developed out of the other. The patriarchal is, as is well known, probably the oldest political system in the world. All nations may be said to have experienced such a paternal government, but most nations outgrew it.
Now the interesting fact about the yellow branch of the human race is, not that they had so juvenile a constitution, but that they have it; that it has persisted practically unchanged from prehistoric ages. It is certainly surprising in this kaleidoscopic world whose pattern is constantly changing as time merges one combination of its elements into another, that on the other side of the globe this set should have remained the same. Yet in spite of the lapse