Page:Path of Vision; pocket essays of East and West.djvu/172

 the place of the man of talent; the quaint bazaar is becoming a market-place of brummagem; the mould is destroying the spirit of invention; and uniformity will ultimately banish the creative genius of the race. It would be a pity, a calamity, indeed, if the soul of the Oriental, which he puts into his work, were to be destroyed by the hustling, strenuous, money-making spirit of the present day West. And it would be disastrous were we in the West to abandon that noble tradition of the mind, which is the heritage of scientific research, the fruit of intellectual evolution, in an effort to grasp and acquire the stuffy and oft times pernicious occultism of the Orient. Our intellectual emancipation, with its panoply of rationalism and its bulwarks of freedom, can be preserved, however, without having to go to the extremes of pragmatism or to become absolutely material.

Machinery, or the machine-made system of living is defeating of the higher purpose of life. And to impose it upon the Orient