Page:Oriental Religions - China.djvu/35

 THE CHINESE MIND,

HE civilized nations of the West, subject for ages to mutual friction and physical intermixture, afford very inadequate data for studying the distinctive capacities of races. They do not help us to determine how far

A study in Universal Religion

a separate ethnic growth can unfold the germs of universal principles in philosophy and faith. But in the Oriental world this opportunity is presented on a magnificent scale. The vast population of China, so uni- form in physical type that they seem free from foreign admixture, isolated by the ocean and by the loftiest moun- tain barriers in the world, have shaped for themselves a peculiar civilization, whose inveteracy proves it a genuine outgrowth of the race and soil; while its startling contrasts with other Asiatic forms render such common aspirations as shall be found to underlie this difference all the more impressive signs of Universal Religion.

In that division of the present work which treats of the Hindus, I have indicated their main difference General from the Chinese, by calling the mental quality distinctions of the one family cerebral, and that of the other, Lm"" muscular. There, we have an imaginative, meta- Hindus> physical race, who think away matter, and hate the physi-