The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Soul of the Far East, by Percival Lowell

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Title: The Soul of the Far East

Author: Percival Lowell

Posting Date: September 14, 2008 [EBook #1409]
Release Date: August, 1998

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SOUL OF THE FAR EAST ***

Produced by Eric Hutton

THE SOUL OF THE FAR EAST

By Percival Lowell

Contents

Chapter 1. Individuality

Chapter 2. Family

Chapter 3. Adoption

Chapter 4. Language

Chapter 5. Nature and Art

Chapter 6. Art

Chapter 7. Religion

Chapter 8. Imagination

Chapter 1. Individuality.

The boyish belief that on the other side of our globe all things are
of necessity upside down is startlingly brought back to the man when he
first sets foot at Yokohama. If his initial glance does not, to be sure,
disclose the natives in the every-day feat of standing calmly on their
heads, an attitude which his youthful imagination conceived to be a
necessary consequence of their geographical position, it does at least
reveal them looking at the world as if from the standpoint of that
eccentric posture. For they seem to him to see everything topsy-turvy.
Whether it be that their antipodal situation has affected their brains,
or whether it is the mind of the observer himself that has hitherto been
wrong in undertaking to rectify the inverted pictures presented by
his retina, the result, at all events, is undeniable. The world stands
reversed, and, taking for granted his own uprightness, the stranger
unhesitatingly imputes to them an obliquity of vision, a state of mind
outwardly typified by the cat-like obliqueness of their eyes.

If the inversion be not precisely of the kind he expected, it is none
the less striking, and impressibly more real. If personal experience has
definitely convinced him that the inhabitants of that under side of our
planet do not adhere to it head downwards, like flies on a ceiling,--his
early a priori deduction,--they still appear quite as antipodal,
mentally considered. Intellectually, at least, their attitude sets
gravity at defiance. For to the mind