.

IV

What are the ideals of the stage of civilization we of the Western world
are now moving towards? We have here pushed as far as need be the
analysis of that declining birth-rate which has caused so much anxiety
to those amongst us who can only see narrowly and see superficially. We
have found that, properly understood, there is nothing in it to evoke
our pessimism. On the contrary, we have seen that, in the opinion of the
most distinguished authorities, the energy with which we move in our
present direction, through the exercise of an ever finer economy in
life, may be regarded as a "measure of civilization" in the important
sphere of vital statistics. As we now leave the question, some may ask
themselves whether this concomitant decline in birth-rates and
death-rates may not possibly have a still wider and more fundamental
meaning as a measure of civilization.

We have long been accustomed to regard the East as a spiritual world in
which the finer ends of living were counted supreme, and the merely
materialistic aspects of life, dissociated from the aims of religion and
of art, were trodden under foot. Our own Western world we have humbly
regarded as mainly absorbed in a feverish race for the attainment, by
industry and war, of the satisfaction of the impulses of reproduction
and nutrition, and the crudely material aggrandizement of which those
impulses are the symbol. A certain outward idleness, a semi-idleness, as
Nietzsche said, is the necessary condition for a real religious life,
for a real aesthetic life, for any life on the spiritual plane. The
noisy, laborious, pushing, "progressive" life we traditionally associate
with the West is essentially alien to the higher ends of living, as has
been intuitively recognized and acted on by all those among us who have
sought to pursue the higher ends of living. It was so that the
nineteenth-century philosophers of Europe, of whom Schopenhauer was in
this matter the extreme type, viewed the matter. But when we seek to
measure the tendency of the chief countries of the West, led by France,
England, and Germany, and the countries of the East led by Japan, in the
light of this strictly measurable test of vital statistics, may we not,
perhaps, trace the approach of a revolutionary transposition? Japan,
entering on the road we have nearly passed through, in which the
perpetual clash of a high birth-rate and a high death-rate involves
social disorder and misery, has fl