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Aldous Huxley - "Crome Yellow"

Arthur B. Reeve - "The Silent Bullet"

Edna Lyall - "The Autobiography of a Slander"

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - "The Adventure of the Cardboard Box"

Project Gutenberg surfs with a modem donated by Supra.

P >> Percival Lowell >> Project Gutenberg surfs with a modem donated by Supra.




"Some Xanadu where Kublai can
a stately pleasure dome decree,"

and carry out his conceptions to his own disillusionment, perhaps.
For if the embodiment of a fancy, however complete, left nothing
further to be wished, imagination would have no incentive to work.
Coleridge's distinction does very well to separate, empirically,
certain kinds of imaginative concepts from certain others; but it
has no real foundation in fact. Nor presumably did he mean it to
have. But it serves, not inaptly, as a text to point out an
important scientific truth, namely, that there are not two such
qualities of the mind, but only one. For otherwise we might have
supposed the fact too evident to need mention. Imagination is the
single source of the new, the one mainspring of psychical advance;
reason, like a balance-wheel, only keeping the action regular.
For reason is but the touchstone of experience, our own, inherited,
or acquired from others. It compares what we imagine with what we
know, and gives us answer in terms of the here and the now, which
we call the actual. But the actual is really nothing but the local.
It does not mark the limits of the possible.

That imagination has been the moving spirit of the psychical world
is evident, whatever branch of human thought we are pleased to
examine. We are in the habit, in common parlance, of making a
distinction between the search after truth and the search after
beauty, calling the one science and the other art. Now while we are
not slow to impute imagination to art, we are by no means so ready
to appreciate its connection with science. Yet contrary, perhaps,
to exogeric ideas on the subject, it is science rather than art that
demands imagination of her votaries. Not that art may not involve
the quality to a high degree, but that a high degree of art is quite
compatible with a very small amount of imagination. On the one side
we may instance painting. Now painting begins its career in the
humble capacity of copyist, a pretty poor copyist at that. At first
so slight was its skill that the rudest symbols sufficed.
"This is a man" was conventionally implied by a few scratches
bearing a very distant relationship to the real thing. Gradually,
owing to human vanity and a growing taste, pictures improved.
Combinations were tried, a bit from one place with a piece from
another; a sort of mosaic requiring but a slight amount of
imagination. Not that imagination of a higher order has not been
called into play, although even now pictures are often happy
adaptations rather than creations proper. Some masters have been
imaginative; others, unfortunately for themselves and still more for
the public, have not. For that the art may attain a high degree of
excellence for itself and much distinction for its professors,
without calling in the aid of imagination, is evident enough on this
side of the globe, without travelling to the other.

Take, on the other hand, a branch of science which, to the average
layman, seems peculiarly unimaginative, the science of mathematics.
Yet at the risk of appearing to cast doubts upon the validity of its
conclusions, it might be called the most imaginative product of
human thought; for it is simply one vast imagination based upon a
few so-called axioms, which are nothing more nor less than the
results of experience. It is none the less imaginative because its
discoveries always accord subsequently with fact, since man was not
aware of them beforehand. Nor are its inevitable conclusions
inevitable to any save those possessed of the mathematician's
prophetic 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 as students.
Indeed, the slightest intercourse with them could not fail to make
it evident. Their matter-of-fact way of looking at things is truly
distressing, coming as it does from so artistic a people.
One notices it all the more for the shock. To get a prosaic answer
from a man whose appearance and surroundings betoken better things
is not calculated to dull that answer's effect. Aston, in a
pamphlet on the Altaic tongues, cites an instance which is so much
to the point that I venture to repeat it here. He was a true
Chinaman, he says, who, when his English master asked him what he
thought of

"That orbed maiden
With white fires laden
Whom mortals call the moon,"

replied, "My thinkee all same lamp pidgin" (pidgin meaning thing in
the mongrel speech, Chinese in form and English in diction, which
goes by the name of pidgin English).

Their own tongues show the same prosaic character, picturesque as
they appear to us at first sight. That effect is due simply to the
novelty to us of their expressions. To talk of a pass as an
"up-down" has a refreshing turn to our unused ear, but it is a much
more descriptive than imaginative figure of speech. Nor is the
phrase "the being (so) is difficult," in place of "thank you,"
a surprisingly beautiful bit of imagery, delightful as it sounds for
a change. Our own tongue has, in its daily vocabulary, far more
suggestive expressions, only familiarity has rendered us callous to
their use. We employ at every instant words which, could we but
stop to think of them, would strike us as poetic in the ideas they
call up. As has been well said, they were once happy thoughts of
some bright particular genius bequeathed to posterity without so
much as an accompanying name, and which proved so popular that they
soon became but symbols themselves.

Their languages are paralleled by their whole life. A lack of any
fanciful ideas is one of the most salient traits of all Far Eastern
races, if indeed a sad dearth of anything can properly be spoken of
as salient. Indirectly their want of imagination betrays itself in
their every-day sayings and doings, and more directly in every
branch of thought. Originality is not their strong point. Their
utter ignorance of science shows this, and paradoxical as it may
seem, their art, in spite of its merit and its universality, does
the same. That art and imagination are necessarily bound together
receives no very forcible confirmation from a land where, nationally
speaking, at any rate, the first is easily first and the last easily
last, as nations go. It is to quite another quality that their
artistic excellence must be ascribed. That the Chinese and later
the Japanese have accomplished results at which the rest of the
world will yet live to marvel, is due to their--taste. But taste or
delicacy of perception has absolutely nothing to do with
imagination. That certain of the senses of Far Orientals are
wonderfully keen, as also those parts of the brain that directly
respond to them, is beyond question; but such sensitiveness does not
in the least involve the less earth-tied portions of the intellect.
A peculiar responsiveness to natural beauty, a sort of mental
agreement with its earthly environment, is a marked feature of the
Japanese mind. But appreciation, however intimate, is a very
different thing from originality. The one is commonly the handmaid
of the other, but the other by no means always accompanies the one.

So much for the cause; now for the effect which we might expect to
find if our diagnosis be correct.

If the evolving force be less active in one race than in another,
three relative results should follow. In the first place, the race
in question will at any given moment be less advanced than its
fellow; secondly, its rate of progress will be less rapid; and
lastly, its individual members will all be nearer together, just as
a stream, in falling from a cliff, starts one compact mass, then
gradually increasing in speed, divides into drops, which, growing
finer and finer and farther and farther apart, descend at last as
spray. All three of these consequences are visible in the career of
the Far Eastern peoples. The first result scarcely needs to be
proved to us, who are only too ready to believe it without proof.
It is, nevertheless, a fact. Viewed unprejudicedly, their
civilization is not so advanced a one as our own. Although they
are certainly our superiors in some very desirable particulars,
their whole scheme is distinctly more aboriginal fundamentally.
It is more finished, as far as it goes, but it does not go so far.
Less rude, it is more rudimentary. Indeed, as we have seen, its
surface-perfection really shows that nature has given less thought
to its substance. One may say of it that it is the adult form of a
lower type of mind-specification.

The second effect is scarcely less patent. How slow their progress
has been, if for centuries now it can be called progress at all, is
world-known. Chinese conservatism has passed into a proverb.
The pendulum of pulsation in the Middle Kingdom long since came to a
stop at the medial point of rest. Centre of civilization, as they
call themselves, one would imagine that their mind-machinery had got
caught on their own dead centre, and now could not be made to move.
Life, which elsewhere is a condition of unstable equilibrium, there
is of a fatally stable kind. For the Chinaman's disinclination to
progress is something more than vis inertiae; it has become an
ardent devotion to the status quo. Jostled, he at once settles back
to his previous condition again; much as more materially, after a
lifetime spent in California, at his death his body is punctiliously
embalmed and sent home across five thousand miles of sea for burial.
With the Japanese the condition of affairs is somewhat different.
Their tendency to stand still is of a purely passive kind. It is a
state of neutral equilibrium, stationary of itself but perfectly
responsive to an impulse from without. Left to their own devices,
they are conservative enough, but they instantly copy a more
advanced civilization the moment they get a chance. This proclivity
on their part is not out of keeping with our theory. On the
contrary, it is precisely what was to have been expected; for we see
the very same apparent contradiction in characters we are thrown
with every day. Imitation is the natural substitute for originality.
The less strong a man's personality the more prone is he to adopt
the ideas of others, on the same principle that a void more easily
admits a foreign body than does space that is already occupied; or
as a blank piece of paper takes a dye more brilliantly for not being
already tinted itself.

The third result, the remarkable homogeneity of the people, is not,
perhaps, so universally appreciated, but it is equally evident on
inspection, and no less weighty in proof. Indeed, the Far Eastern
state of things is a kind of charade on the word; for humanity there
is singularly uniform. The distance between the extremes of
mind-development in Japan is much less than with us. This lack of
divergence exists not simply in certain lines of thought, but in all
those characteristics by which man is parted from the brutes.
In reasoning power, in artistic sensibility, in delicacy of perception,
it is the same story. If this were simply the impression at first
sight, no deductions could be drawn from it, for an impression of
racial similarity invariably marks the first stage of acquaintance
of one people by another. Even in outward appearance it is so.
We find it at first impossible to tell the Japanese apart; they find it
equally impossible to differentiate us. But the present resemblance
is not a matter of first impressions. The fact is patent historically.
The men whom Japan reveres are much less removed from the common
herd than is the case in any Western land. And this has been so
from the earliest times. Shakspeares and Newtons have never existed
there. Japanese humanity is not the soil to grow them.
The comparative absence of genius is fully paralleled by the want of
its opposite. Not only are the paths of preeminence untrodden; the
purlieus of brutish ignorance are likewise unfrequented. On neither
side of the great medial line is the departure of individuals far or
frequent. All men there are more alike;--so much alike, indeed,
that the place would seem to offer a sort of forlorn hope for
disappointed socialists. Although religious missionaries have not
met with any marked success among the natives, this less deserving
class of enthusiastic disseminators of an all-possessing belief
might do well to attempt it. They would find there a very virgin
field of a most promisingly dead level. It is true, human
opposition would undoubtedly prevent their tilling it, but Nature,
at least, would not present quite such constitutional obstacles as
she wisely does with us.

The individual's mind is, as it were, an isolated bit of the race
mind. The same set of traits will be found in each. Mental
characteristics there are a sort of common property, of which a
certain undifferentiated portion is indiscriminately allotted to
every man at birth. One soul resembles another so much, that in
view of the patriarchal system under which they all exist, there
seems to the stranger a peculiar appropriateness in so strong a
family likeness of mind. An idea of how little one man's brain
differs from his neighbor's may be gathered from the fact, that
while a common coolie in Japan spends his spare time in playing a
chess twice as complicated as ours, the most advanced philosopher
is still on the blissfully ignorant side of the pons asinorum.

We find, then, that in all three points the Far East fulfils what
our theory demanded.

There is one more consideration worthy of notice. We said that the
environment had not been the deus ex materia in the matter; but that
the soul itself possessed the germ of its own evolution. This fact
does not, however, preclude another, that the environment has helped
in the process. Change of scene is beneficial to others besides
invalids. How stimulating to growth a different habitat can prove,
when at all favorable, is perhaps sufficiently shown in the case of
the marguerite, which, as an emigrant called white-weed, has usurped
our fields. The same has been no less true of peoples. Now these
Far Eastern peoples, in comparison with our own forefathers, have
travelled very little. A race in its travels gains two things:
first it acquires directly a great deal from both places and peoples
that it meets, and secondly it is constantly put to its own
resources in its struggle for existence, and becomes more personal
as the outcome of such strife. The changed conditions, the hostile
forces it finds, necessitate mental ingenuity to adapt them and
influence it unconsciously. To see how potent these influences
prove we have but to look at the two great branches of the Aryan
family, the one that for so long now has stayed at home, and the one
that went abroad. Destitute of stimulus from without, the Indo-Aryan
mind turned upon itself and consumed in dreamy metaphysics the
imagination which has made its cousins the leaders in the world's
progress to-day. The inevitable numbness of monotony crept over the
stay-at-homes. The deadly sameness of their surroundings produced
its unavoidable effect. The torpor of the East, like some
paralyzing poison, stole into their souls, and they fell into a
drowsy slumber only to dream in the land they had formerly wrested
from its possessors. Their birthright passed with their cousins
into the West.

In the case of the Altaic races which we are considering, cause and
effect mutually strengthened each other. That they did not travel
more is due primarily to a lack of enterprise consequent upon a lack
of imagination, and then their want of travel told upon their
imagination. They were also unfortunate in their journeying. Their
travels were prematurely brought to an end by that vast geographical
Nirvana the Pacific Ocean, the great peaceful sea as they call it
themselves. That they would have journeyed further is shown by the
way their dreams went eastward still. They themselves could not for
the preventing ocean, and the lapping of its waters proved a
nation's lullaby.

One thing, I think, then, our glance at Far Eastern civilization has
more than suggested. The soul, in its progress through the world,
tends inevitably to individualization. Yet the more we perceive of
the cosmos the more do we recognize an all-pervading unity in it.
Its soul must be one, not many. The divine power that made all
things is not itself multifold. How to reconcile the
ever-increasing divergence with an eventual similarity is a problem
at present transcending our generalizations. What we know would
seem to be opposed to what we must infer. But perception of how we
shall merge the personal in the universal, though at present hidden
from sight, may sometime come to us, and the seemingly
irreconcilable will then turn out to involve no contradiction at all.
For this much is certain: grand as is the great conception of
Buddhism, majestic as is the idea of the stately rest it would lead
us to, the road here below is not one the life of the world can
follow. If earthly existence be an evil, then Buddhism will help us
ignore it; but if by an impulse we cannot explain we instinctively
crave activity of mind, then the great gospel of Gautama touches us
not; for to abandon self--egoism, that is, not selfishness is the
true vacuum which nature abhors. As for Far Orientals, they
themselves furnish proof against themselves. That impersonality is
not man's earthly goal they unwittingly bear witness; for they are
not of those who will survive. Artistic attractive people that they
are, their civilization is like their own tree flowers, beautiful
blossoms destined never to bear fruit; for whatever we may conceive
the far future of another life to be, the immediate effect of
impersonality cannot but be annihilating. If these people continue
in their old course, their earthly career is closed. Just as surely
as morning passes into afternoon, so surely are these races of the
Far East, if unchanged, destined to disappear before the advancing
nations of the West. Vanish they will off the face of the earth and
leave our planet the eventual possession of the dwellers where the
day declines. Unless their newly imported ideas really take root,
it is from this whole world that Japanese and Koreans, as well as
Chinese, will inevitably be excluded. Their Nirvana is already
being realized; already it has wrapped Far Eastern Asia in its
winding-sheet, the shroud of those whose day was but a dawn, as if
in prophetic keeping with the names they gave their homes,--the Land
of the Day's Beginning, and the Land of the Morning Calm.

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