g; you enter upon the heritage
of No Thing;--and you find yourself heir to the Universe, to
wonder, to magic. You do with all your complicated egoity as the
camel did with his cameltiness before he could enter the needle's
eye; then--heigh presto!--it is the Elixir of Life you have
drunk; it is freedom you have attained of the roaming-place
of Dragons!--It amounts, truly, to the same thing as Aryan
Theosophy; but where the latter travels through and illuminates
immense realms of thought and metaphysic, Taoism slides gently
into the Absolute; as who should laugh and say, _You see how
easy it is!_ And you do not hear of the Path of Sorrow, as with
the Aryans; Tao is a path of sly laughter and delight.

Then from Japan we get Shinto; still less a system of metaphysics
or dogma. The Shinto temple, empty but for air, is symbolic
of the creed whose keynotes are purity and simplicity. Taoism,
Confucianism, and Shinto are the three great native creations,
in religion, of what I shall call the Altaic mind. There
have been, indeed, profound thinkers and metaphysicians both
in Japan and China; but their mental activities have been
for the most part fruitage from the Aryan seed of Buddhism.

A word here as to that phrase 'Altaic mind.' What business has
one to class the Chinese and Japanese together, and to speak of
them (as I shall) as 'Altaic'--the _Altaic Race?_ In the first
place this term, like 'Latin' or 'Anglo-Saxon,' has the virtue of
being quite meaningless. It is utterly silly and inappropriate
from every standpoint; but as I need a term to include China and
all the peoples that have derived their historic culture from
her, I shall beg leave to use it. Neither Japanese nor Corean
belong to the billiard-ball group of languages. There is a
syntactical likeness between these two, but none in vocabulary;
where the Japanese vocabulary came from, Omniscience perhaps may
know.--A syntax outlasts a vocabulary by many ages: you may hear
Celts now talk English with a syntax that comes from the sub-race
before our own: Iberian, and not Aryan. So we may guess here a
race akin to the Coreans conquered at some time by a race whose
vocables were Japanese--whence they came, God knows. Only one
hears that in South America the Japanese pick up the Indian
languages a deal more easily than white folk do, or than they do
Spanish or English. But this is a divergence; we should be a
little more forward, perhaps, if we knew who w