find if our diagnosis be correct.
If the evolving force be less active in one race than in another,

three relative results should follow. In the first place, the race
in question will at any given moment be less advanced than its

fellow; secondly, its rate of progress will be less rapid; and
lastly, its individual members will all be nearer together, just as

a stream, in falling from a cliff, starts one compact mass, then
gradually increasing in speed, divides into drops, which, growing

finer and finer and farther and farther apart, descend at last as
spray. All three of these consequences are visible in the career of

the Far Eastern peoples. The first result scarcely needs to be
proved to us, who are only too ready to believe it without proof.

It is, nevertheless, a fact. Viewed unprejudicedly, their
civilization is not so advanced a one as our own. Although they

are certainly our superiors in some very desirable particulars,
their whole scheme is distinctly more aboriginal fundamentally.

It is more finished, as far as it goes, but it does not go so far.
Less rude, it is more rudimentary. Indeed, as we have seen, its

surface-perfection really shows that nature has given less thought
to its substance. One may say of it that it is the adult form of a

lower type of mind-specification.
The second effect is scarcely less patent. How slow their progress

has been, if for centuries now it can be called progress at all, is
world-known. Chinese conservatism has passed into a proverb.

The pendulum of pulsation in the Middle Kingdom long since came to a
stop at the medial point of rest. Centre of civilization, as they

call themselves, one would imagine that their mind-machinery had got
caught on their own dead centre, and now could not be made to move.

Life, which elsewhere is a condition of unstableequilibrium, there
is of a fatally stable kind. For the Chinaman's disinclination to

progress is something more than vis inertiae; it has become an
ardent devotion to the status quo. Jostled, he at once settles back

to his previous condition again; much as more materially, after a
lifetime spent in California, at his death his body is punctiliously

embalmed and sent home across five thousand miles of sea for burial.
With the Japanese the condition of affairs is somewhat different.

Their tendency to stand still is of a purelypassive kind. It is a
state of neutralequilibrium, stationary of itself but perfectly

responsive to an impulse from without. Left to their own devices,
they are conservative enough, but they instantly copy a more

advancedcivilization the moment they get a chance. This proclivity
on their part is not out of keeping with our theory. On the

contrary, it is precisely what was to have been expected; for we see
the very same apparentcontradiction in characters we are thrown

with every day. Imitation is the natural substitute for originality.
The less strong a man's personality the more prone is he to adopt

the ideas of others, on the same principle that a void more easily
admits a foreign body than does space that is already occupied; or

as a blank piece of paper takes a dye more brilliantly for not being
already tinted itself.

The third result, the remarkable homogeneity of the people, is not,
perhaps, so universally" target="_blank" title="ad.普遍地">universally appreciated, but it is equallyevident on

inspection, and no less weighty in proof. Indeed, the Far Eastern
state of things is a kind of charade on the word; for humanity there

is singularly uniform. The distance between the extremes of
mind-development in Japan is much less than with us. This lack of

divergence exists not simply in certain lines of thought, but in all
those characteristics by which man is parted from the brutes.

In reasoning power, in artistic sensibility, in delicacy of perception,
it is the same story. If this were simply the impression at first

sight, no deductions could be drawn from it, for an impression of
racial similarity invariably marks the first stage of acquaintance

of one people by another. Even in outward appearance it is so.
We find it at first impossible to tell the Japanese apart; they find it

equally impossible to differentiate us. But the present resemblance
is not a matter of first impressions. The fact is patent historically.

The men whom Japan reveres are much less removed from the common
herd than is the case in any Western land. And this has been so

from the earliest times. Shakspeares and Newtons have never existed
there. Japanese humanity is not the soil to grow them.

The comparativeabsence of genius is fully paralleled by the want of
its opposite. Not only are the paths of preeminence untrodden; the

purlieus of brutish ignorance are likewise unfrequented. On neither
side of the great medial line is the departure of individuals far or

frequent. All men there are more alike;--so much alike, indeed,
that the place would seem to offer a sort of forlorn hope for

disappointed socialists. Although religious missionaries have not
met with any marked success among the natives, this less deserving

class of enthusiastic disseminators of an all-possessing belief
might do well to attempt it. They would find there a very virgin

field of a most promisingly dead level. It is true, human
opposition would undoubtedly prevent their tilling it, but Nature,

at least, would not present quite such constitutional obstacles as
she wisely does with us.

The individual's mind is, as it were, an isolated bit of the race
mind. The same set of traits will be found in each. Mental

characteristics there are a sort of common property, of which a
certain undifferentiated portion is indiscriminately allotted to

every man at birth. One soul resembles another so much, that in
view of the patriarchal system under which they all exist, there

seems to the stranger a peculiar appropriateness in so strong a
family likeness of mind. An idea of how little one man's brain

differs from his neighbor's may be gathered from the fact, that
while a common coolie in Japan spends his spare time in playing a

chess twice as complicated as ours, the most advanced philosopher
is still on the blissfully ignorant side of the pons asinorum.

We find, then, that in all three points the Far East fulfils what
our theory demanded.

There is one more considerationworthy of notice. We said that the
environment had not been the deus ex materia in the matter; but that

the soul itself possessed the germ of its own evolution. This fact
does not, however, preclude another, that the environment has helped

in the process. Change of scene is beneficial to others besides
invalids. How stimulating to growth a different habitat can prove,

when at all favorable, is perhaps sufficiently shown in the case of
the marguerite, which, as an emigrant called white-weed, has usurped

our fields. The same has been no less true of peoples. Now these
Far Eastern peoples, in comparison with our own forefathers, have

travelled very little. A race in its travels gains two things:
first it acquires directly a great deal from both places and peoples

that it meets, and secondly it is constantly put to its own
resources in its struggle for existence, and becomes more personal

as the outcome of such strife. The changed conditions, the hostile
forces it finds, necessitatementalingenuity to adapt them and

influence it unconsciously. To see how potent these influences
prove we have but to look at the two great branches of the Aryan

family, the one that for so long now has stayed at home, and the one
that went abroad. Destitute of stimulus from without, the Indo-Aryan

mind turned upon itself and consumed in dreamy metaphysics the
imagination which has made its cousins the leaders in the world's

progress to-day. The inevitablenumbness of monotony crept over the
stay-at-homes. The deadly sameness of their surroundings produced

its unavoidable effect. The torpor of the East, like some
paralyzing poison, stole into their souls, and they fell into a

drowsy slumber only to dream in the land they had formerly wrested
from its possessors. Their birthright passed with their cousins

into the West.
In the case of the Altaic races which we are considering, cause and

effect mutually strengthened each other. That they did not travel
more is due primarily to a lack of enterpriseconsequent upon a lack

of imagination, and then their want of travel told upon their
imagination. They were also unfortunate in their journeying. Their

travels were prematurely brought to an end by that vast geographical
Nirvana the Pacific Ocean, the great peaceful sea as they call it