e of intellect, at any rate.--No:
there is no question where the sheer brain force has been: it
has been in the West. But then, where was it more manifest, in
Pope or in Keats? In Pope most emphatically. But off with your
head if you say he gave the greater gift.--Or I will leave Pope,
and go to his betters; and say that Keats, when he caught in his
net of words the fleeting beauty of the world, was far nearer the
Spirit than was Bacon when with tremendous intellectual energy he
devised his philosophy: there was a much longer evolution behind
the ease and effortless attainment of the one, than behind the
other's titanic brain-effort. Yet, so far as the putting forth of
brain energies is concerned, there is no question: Bacon was
much the greater man.

So in all creative work, in all thought, we must call the West
incomparably greater in brain energy. And I am not making such a
foolish comparison as between modern or recent conditions in the
two races. You see it if you set the greatest Eastern ages, the
Han, the T'ang, the Sung, or the Fujiwara, against the Periclean,
Augustan, Medicean, Elizabethan, or Louis Quatorze. In the West,
the spiritual creative force came down and mingled itself more
forcefully with the human intellect: had a much more vigorous
basis in that, I think, to work in and upon. It has reached
lower into the material, and played on matter more powerfully--
and, be it said, on thought and intellection too.

We are so accustomed to thinking of spirituality as something
that, outside the plane of conduct, can only play through thought
and intellection, or perhaps religious emotion, that to speak of
the high spirituality of China will sound, to most, absurd. On
the whole, you must not go to China for thought or intellection.
Least of all you must go there for what we commonly understand by
religious emotion;--they don't readily gush over a personal god.
It will seem entirely far-fetched to say that in China the
creative forces have retained much more of their spirituality:
have manifested perhaps not less greatly than in the West, but on
planes less material, nearer their spiritual source. It will
seem so the more because until very recently China has been
constantly misrepresented to us. And yet I think it is pretty
much the truth.

In all their creative art the Spirit has been busy suggesting
itself, not through ideas, or the forms of intellection, but
through the more subtle perception