ly
epochal to the man himself. In a community where next to no note is
ever taken of the anniversary of his birth, some doubt as to the special
significance of that red-letter day may not unnaturally creep into
his own mind. While in regard to his death, although it may be highly
flattering for him to know that he will certainly become somebody when
he shall have ceased, practically, to be anybody, such tardy recognition
is scarcely timely enough to be properly appreciated. Human nature is so
earth-tied, after all, that a post-mundane existence is very apt to seem
immaterial as well as be so.

With the old familiar landmarks of life obliterated in this wholesale
manner, it is to be doubted whether one of us, placed in the midst of
such a civilization, would know himself. He certainly would derive but
scanty satisfaction from the recognition if he did. Even Nirvana might
seem a happy limbo by comparison. With a communal, not to say a cosmic,
birthday, and a conventional wife, he might well deem his separate
existence the shadow of a shade and embrace Buddhism from mere force of
circumstances.

Further investigation would not shake his opinion. For a far-oriental
career is thoroughly in keeping with these, its typical turning-points.
From one end of its course to the other it is painfully impersonal.
In its regular routine as in its more salient junctures, life presents
itself to these races a totally different affair from what it seems to
us. The cause lies in what is taken to be the basis of socio-biology, if
one may so express it.

In the Far East the social unit, the ultimate molecule of existence, is
not the individual, but the family.

We occidentals think we value family. We even parade our pretensions so
prominently as sometimes to tread on other people's prejudices of a like
nature. Yet we scarcely seem to appreciate the inheritance. For with a
logic which does us questionable credit, we are proud of our ancestors
in direct proportion to their remoteness from ourselves, thus permitting
Democracy to revenge its insignificance by smiling at our self-imposed
satire. To esteem a man in inverse ratio to the amount of remarkable
blood he has inherited is, to say the least, bathetic. Others, again,
make themselves objectionable by preferring their immediate relatives
to all less connected companions, and cling to their cousins so closely
that affection often culminates in matrimony, nature's remonstrances
notwithst