to keep them in repair during the last few centuries, though
much zeal, possibly due to commerce on oil- or electricity-driven
wheels, is now being shown in this direction. They have built honorary
portals to chaste widows, pagodas, and arched bridges of great beauty,
not forgetting to surround each city with a high and substantial wall
to keep out unfriendly people. They have made innumerable implements
and weapons, from pens and fans and chopsticks to ploughs and carts
and ships; from fiery darts, 'flame elephants,' bows and spears,
spiked chariots, battering-rams, and hurling-engines to mangonels,
trebuchets, matchlocks of wrought iron and plain bore with long
barrels resting on a stock, and gingals fourteen feet long resting on
a tripod, cuirasses of quilted cotton cloth covered with brass knobs,
and helmets of iron or polished steel, sometimes inlaid, with neck-
and ear-lappets. And they have been content not to improve upon these
to any appreciable extent; but have lately shown a tendency to make
the later patterns imported from the West in their own factories.

They have produced one of the greatest and most remarkable
accumulations of literature the world has ever seen, and the finest
porcelain; some music, not very fine; and some magnificent painting,
though hardly any sculpture, and little architecture that will live.

CHAPTER II

On Chinese Mythology

Mythology and Intellectual Progress

The Manichaest, _yin-yang_ (dualist), idea of existence, to which
further reference will be made in the next chapter, finds its
illustration in the dual life, real and imaginary, of all the
peoples of the earth. They have both real histories and mythological
histories. In the preceding chapter I have dealt briefly with the
first--the life of reality--in China from the earliest times to the
present day; the succeeding chapters are concerned with the second--the
life of imagination. A survey of the first was necessary for a complete
understanding of the second. The two react upon each other, affecting
the national character and through it the history of the world.

Mythology is the science of the unscientific man's explanation
of what we call the Otherworld--itself and its denizens, their
mysterious habits and surprising actions both there and here, usually
including the creation of this world also. By the Otherworld he does
not necessarily mean anything distant or even invisible, though the
things he explains woul