ortunity
to read a Universal History prepared by a missionary, in which
for the first time Chinese history was made accessible to
him.[267]

Add to this that the whole of their higher learning, corresponding
to our university system, consists in writing essays and always more
essays on the Chinese classics, and "it is impossible," as Mr.
Smith points out, "not to marvel at the measure of success which
has attended the use of such materials in China."[268] But when this
people is in possession of the technique of the western world--a
logic, general ideas, and experimentation--we cannot reasonably doubt
that they will be able to work the western system as their cousins,
the Japanese, are doing, and perhaps they, too, may better the
instruction.

White effectiveness is probably due to a superior technique acting
in connection with a superior body of knowledge and sentiment. Of two
groups having equal mental endowment, one may outstrip the other by
the mere dominance of incident. It is a notorious fact that the course
of human history has been largely without prevision or direction.
Things have drifted and forces have arisen. Under these conditions
an unusual incident--the emergence of a great mind or a forcible
personality, or the operation of influences as subtle as those which
determine fashions in dress--may establish social habits and duties
which will give a distinct character to the modes of attention
and mental life of the group. The most significant fact for Aryan
development is the emergence among the Greeks of a number of eminent
men who developed logic, the experimental method, and philosophic
interest, and fixed in their group the habit of looking behind the
incident for the general law. Mediaeval attention was diverted from
these lines by a religious movement, and the race lost for a time the
key to progress and got clean away from the Greek copies; but it found
them again and took a fresh start with the revival of Greek learning.
It is quite possible to make a fetish of classical learning; but Sir
Henry Maine's remark, that nothing moves in the modern world that is
not Greek in its origin, is quite just.

The real variable is the individual, not the race. In the
beginning--perhaps as the result of a mutation or series of
mutations--a type of brain developed which has remained relatively
fixed in all times and among all races. This brain will never have
any faculty in addition to what it now p