ons of the intellect. A peculiar
responsiveness to natural beauty, a sort of mental agreement with its
earthly environment, is a marked feature of the Japanese mind.
But appreciation, however intimate, is a very different thing from
originality. The one is commonly the handmaid of the other, but the
other by no means always accompanies the one.

So much for the cause; now for the effect which we might expect to find
if our diagnosis be correct.

If the evolving force be less active in one race than in another, three
relative results should follow. In the first place, the race in question
will at any given moment be less advanced than its fellow; secondly, its
rate of progress will be less rapid; and lastly, its individual members
will all be nearer together, just as a stream, in falling from a cliff,
starts one compact mass, then gradually increasing in speed, divides
into drops, which, growing finer and finer and farther and farther
apart, descend at last as spray. All three of these consequences are
visible in the career of the Far Eastern peoples. The first result
scarcely needs to be proved to us, who are only too ready to believe it
without proof. It is, nevertheless, a fact. Viewed unprejudicedly, their
civilization is not so advanced a one as our own. Although they are
certainly our superiors in some very desirable particulars, their whole
scheme is distinctly more aboriginal fundamentally. It is more finished,
as far as it goes, but it does not go so far. Less rude, it is more
rudimentary. Indeed, as we have seen, its surface-perfection really
shows that nature has given less thought to its substance. One may say
of it that it is the adult form of a lower type of mind-specification.

The second effect is scarcely less patent. How slow their progress
has been, if for centuries now it can be called progress at all,
is world-known. Chinese conservatism has passed into a proverb. The
pendulum of pulsation in the Middle Kingdom long since came to a stop
at the medial point of rest. Centre of civilization, as they call
themselves, one would imagine that their mind-machinery had got caught
on their own dead centre, and now could not be made to move. Life, which
elsewhere is a condition of unstable equilibrium, there is of a fatally
stable kind. For the Chinaman's disinclination to progress is something
more than vis inertiae; it has become an ardent devotion to the status
quo. Jostled, he at once settles back to his