Page:Path of Vision; pocket essays of East and West.djvu/162

 who are making an honest effort to keep abreast of the times, as in the straitlaced conservatives. Moreover, the psychology of the Orientals is essentially deductive. Which gives them, it is true, a certain sweep of vision, but deprives them of the faculty of coordination. They have yet to acquire the scientific habit of mind and to reconcile themselves to certain elemental truths about this planet, which have also a sociological and moral application. Evolution, conservation, even the law of gravity has not yet attained a decent footing among them. For they live not in the world; they live in the universe. They can see what is behind a mountain, but they can not see what is before their eyes. That is why, I think, they can better bear the burden of life. From the vantage of a sublimated resignation they see life as a whole. But that is why, too, when their vision fails or their resignation loses its divine support, they become irreconcilable, irrepressible, and absolutely irrational.