l 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 f