



Produced by Eric Hutton





THE SOUL OF THE FAR EAST

By Percival Lowell


Contents

     Chapter 1. Individuality

     Chapter 2. Family

     Chapter 3. Adoption

     Chapter 4. Language

     Chapter 5. Nature and Art

     Chapter 6. Art

     Chapter 7. Religion

     Chapter 8. Imagination




Chapter 1. Individuality.

The boyish belief that on the other side of our globe all things are
of necessity upside down is startlingly brought back to the man when he
first sets foot at Yokohama. If his initial glance does not, to be sure,
disclose the natives in the every-day feat of standing calmly on their
heads, an attitude which his youthful imagination conceived to be a
necessary consequence of their geographical position, it does at least
reveal them looking at the world as if from the standpoint of that
eccentric posture. For they seem to him to see everything topsy-turvy.
Whether it be that their antipodal situation has affected their brains,
or whether it is the mind of the observer himself that has hitherto been
wrong in undertaking to rectify the inverted pictures presented by
his retina, the result, at all events, is undeniable. The world stands
reversed, and, taking for granted his own uprightness, the stranger
unhesitatingly imputes to them an obliquity of vision, a state of mind
outwardly typified by the cat-like obliqueness of their eyes.

If the inversion be not precisely of the kind he expected, it is none
the less striking, and impressibly more real. If personal experience has
definitely convinced him that the inhabitants of that under side of our
planet do not adhere to it head downwards, like flies on a ceiling,--his
early a priori deduction,--they still appear quite as antipodal,
mentally considered. Intellectually, at least, their attitude sets
gravity at defiance. For to the mind's eye their world is one huge,
comical antithesis of our own. What we regard intuitively in one way
from our standpoint, they as intuitively observe in a diametrically
opposite manner from theirs. To speak backwards, write backwards, read
backwards, is but the a b c of their contrariety. The inversion extends
deeper than mere modes of expression, down into the very matter of
thought. Ideas of ours which we deemed innate find in them no home,
while methods which strike us as preposterously unnatural appear to
be their birthright. From the standing of a wet umbrella on its handle
instead of its head to dry to the striking of a match away in place
of toward one, there seems to be no action of our daily lives, however
trivial, but finds with them its appropriate reaction--equal but
opposite. Indeed, to one anxious of conforming to the manners and
customs of the country, the only road to right lies in following
unswervingly that course which his inherited instincts assure him to be
wrong.

Yet these people are human beings; with all their eccentricities they
are men. Physically we cannot but be cognizant of the fact, nor mentally
but be conscious of it. Like us, indeed, and yet so unlike are they
that we seem, as we gaze at them, to be viewing our own humanity in
some mirth-provoking mirror of the mind,--a mirror that shows us our own
familiar thoughts, but all turned wrong side out. Humor holds the glass,
and we become the sport of our own reflections. But is it otherwise at
home? Do not our personal presentments mock each of us individually
our lives long? Who but is the daily dupe of his dressing-glass, and
complacently conceives himself to be a very different appearing person
from what he is, forgetting that his right side has become his left, and
vice versa? Yet who, when by chance he catches sight in like manner of
the face of a friend, can keep from smiling at the caricatures which the
mirror's left-for-right reversal makes of the asymmetry of that
friend's features,--caricatures all the more grotesque for being utterly
unsuspected by their innocent original? Perhaps, could we once see
ourselves as others see us, our surprise in the case of foreign peoples
might be less pronounced.

Regarding, then, the Far Oriental as a man, and not simply as
a phenomenon, we discover in his peculiar point of view a new
importance,--the possibility of using it stereoptically. For his
