flight to the Eternal. How this attitude has arisen I do not here
seek to determine; race, climate, social and political conditions, all
no doubt have played their part. The spiritual attitude is probably an
effect, rather than a cause, of an enfeebled grip on life. But no one, I
think, who knows India, would dispute that this attitude is a fact; and
it is a fact that distinguishes India not only from the West but from
the Far East.

For China and Japan, though they have had, and to a less extent still
have, religion, are not, in the Indian sense, religious. The Chinese, in
particular, strike one as secular and practical; quite as secular and
practical as the English. They have had Buddhism, as we have had
Christianity; but no one who can perceive and understand would say that
their outlook is determined by Buddhism, any more than ours is by
Christianity. It is Confucianism that expresses the Chinese attitude to
life, whenever the Chinese soul, becoming aware of itself, looks out
from the forest of animistic beliefs in which the mass of the people
wander. And Confucianism is perhaps the best and purest expression of
the practical reason that has ever been formulated. Family duty, social
duty, political duty, these are the things on which it lays stress. And
when the Chinese spirit seeks escape from these primary preoccupations,
it finds its freedom in an art that is closer to the world of fact,
imaginatively conceived, than that of any other race. Chinese art
purifies itself from symbolism to become interpretation; whereas in
India the ocean of symbolism never ceases to roll over the drowning
surface of the phenomenal world. Chinese literature, again, has this
same hold upon life. It is such as Romans or Englishmen, if equally
gifted, might have written. Much of it, indeed, is stupidly and
tediously didactic. But where it escapes into poetry it is a poetry like
Wordsworth's, revealing the beauty of actual things, rather than weaving
across them an embroidery of subjective emotions The outlook of China is
essentially the outlook of the West, only more sane, more reasonable,
more leisured and dignified. Positivism and Humanity, the dominant forms
of thought and feeling in the West, have controlled Chinese civilisation
for centuries. The Chinese have built differently from ourselves and on
a smaller scale, with less violence and less power; but they have built
on the same foundations.

And Japan, too, at bottom is secular