The Spirit of Japan

THE SPIRIT OF JAPAN

A LECTURE

BY

SIR RABINDRANATH TAGORE

Delivered for the Students of the Private Colleges

of Tokyo and the Members of the

Indo-Japanese Association, at the

Keio Gijuku University.

PUBLISHED BY THE INDO-JAPANESE

ASSOCIATION, TOKYO

JULY 2, 1916.

Copyrighted in U. S. A.

[Pg 1]

I am glad to have this opportunity once

more of speaking to you before I leave Japan.

My stay here has been so short that one may

think I have not earned my right to speak to

you about anything concerning your country. I

feel sure that I shall be told, that I am idealising

certain aspects, while leaving others unnoticed,

and that there are chances of my disillusionment,

if I remain here for long. For I have known

foreigners, whose long experience has made

them doubtful about your moral qualifications,—even

of your full efficiency in modern equipments

of progress.

But I am not going to be brow-beaten by

the authority of long experience, which is likely

to be an experience of blindness carried through

long years. I have known such instances in my

own country. The mental sense, by the help of

[Pg 2]

which we feel the spirit of a people, is like the

sense of sight, or of touch,—it is a natural gift.

It finds its objects, not by analysis, but by

direct apprehension. Those who have not this

vision, merely see events and facts, and not their

inner association. Those who have no ear for

music, hear sounds, but not the song. Therefore

when, by the mere reason of the lengthiness of

their suffering, they threaten to establish the fact

of the tune to be a noise, one need not be anxious

about music. Very often it is mistakes

that require longer time to develop their tangles,

while the right answer comes promptly.

You ask me how I can prove, that I am

right in my confidence that I can see. My

answer is, because I see something which is

positive. There are others, who affirm that they

see something contrary. It only shows, that I

am looking on the picture side of the canvas,

and they on the blank side. Therefore my short

view is of more value than their prolonged stare.

It is a truism to say that shadows accompany

light. What you feel, as the truth of a

[Pg 3]

people, has its numberless contradictions,—just as

the roundness of the earth is contradicted at

every step by its hills and hollows. Those who

can boast of a greater familiarity with your

country than myself, can bring before me loads

of contradictions, but I remain firm upon my

vision of a truth, which does not depend upon

its dimension, but upon its vitality.

At first, I had my doubts. I thought that

I might not be able to see Japan, as she is herself,

but should have to be content to see the Japan

that takes an acrobatic pride in violently appearing

as something else. On my first arrival in

this country, when I looked out from the balcony

of a house on the hillside, the town of Kobe,—that

huge mass of corrugated iron roofs,—appeared

to me like a dragon, with glistening

scales, basking in the sun, after having devoured

a large slice of the living flesh of the earth.

This dragon did not belong to the mythology of

the past, but of the present; and with its iron

mask it tried to look real to the children of the

age,—real as the majestic rocks on the shore, as

[Pg 4]

the epic rhythm of the sea-waves. Anyhow it

hid Japan from my view, and I felt myself like

the traveller, whose time is short, waiting for the

cloud to be lifted to have a sight of the eternal

snow on the Himalayan summit. I asked myself,—'Will

the dense mist of the iron age give

way for a moment, and let me see what is true

and abiding in this land?' I was enveloped in

a whirlwind of reception, but I had my misgivings

and thought that this might be a violent outbreak

of curiosity,—or that these people felt themselves

bound to show their appreciation of a man who

had won renown from Europe, thus doing honour

to the West in a vicarious form.

But the clouds showed rifts, and glimpses I

had of Japan where she is true and more human.

While travelling in a railway train I met, at a

wayside station, some Buddhist priests and devotees.

They brought their basket of fruits to me

and held their lighted incense before my face,

wishing to pay homage to a man who had come

from the land of Buddha. The dignified serenity

of their bearing, the simplicity of their devoutness,

[Pg 5]

seemed to fill the atmosphere of the busy

railway station with a golden light of peace.

Their language of silence drowned the noisy effusion

of the newspapers. I felt that I saw something

which was at the root of Japan's greatness.

And, since then, I have had other opportunities

of reaching the heart of the people; and I have

come to the conclusion, that the welcome which

flowed towards me, with such outburst of sincerity,

was owing to the fact that Japan felt the

nearness of India to herself, and realised that her

own heart has room to expand beyond her

boundaries and the boundaries of the modern

time.

I have travelled in many countries and have

met with men of all classes, but never in my

travels did I feel the presence of the human so

distinctly as in this land. In other great countries,

signs of man's power loomed large, and I

saw vast organisations which showed efficiency

in all their features. There, display and extravagance,

in dress, in furniture, in costly entertainments,

are startling. They seem to push you

[Pg 6]

back into a corner, like a poor intruder at a

feast; they are apt to make you envious, or take

your breath away with amazement. There, you

do not feel man as supreme; you are hurled

against the stupendousness of things that alienates.

But, in Japan, it is not the display of power, or

wealth, that is the predominating element. You

see everywhere emblems of love and admiration,

and not mostly of ambition and greed. You see

a people, whose heart has come out and scattered

itself in profusion in its commonest utensils of

everyday life in its social institutions, in its

manners, that are carefully perfect, and in its

dealings with things that are not only deft, but

graceful in every movement.

What has impressed me most in this country

is the conviction that you have realised nature's

secrets, not by methods of analytical knowledge,

but by sympathy. You have known her language

of lines and music of colours, the symmetry in

her irregularities, and the cadence in her freedom

of movements; you have seen how she leads her

immense crowds of things yet avoids all frictions;

[Pg 7]

how the very conflicts in her creations break out

in dance and music; how her exuberance has the

aspect of the fullness of self-abandonment, and not

a mere dissipation of display. You have discovered

that nature reserves her power in forms

of beauty; and it is this beauty which, like a

mother, nourishes all the giant forces at her breast,

keeping them in active vigour, yet in repose.

You have known that energies of nature save

themselves from wearing out by the rhythm of

a perfect grace, and that she with the tenderness

of her curved lines takes away fatigue from the

world's muscles. I have felt that you have been

able to assimilate these secrets into your life, and

the truth which lies in the beauty of all things

has passed into your souls. A mere knowledge

of things can be had in a short enough time,

but their spirit can only be acquired by centuries

of training and self-control. Dominating nature

from outside is a much simpler thing than making

her your own in love's delight, which is a work

of true genius. Your race has shown that genius,

not by acquirements, but by creations; not by

[Pg 8]

display of things, but by manifestation of its own

inner being. This creative power there is in all

nations, and it is ever active in getting hold of

men's natures and giving them a form according

to its ideals. But here, in Japan, it seems to

have achieved its success, and deeply sunk into

the minds of all men, and permeated their muscles

and nerves. Your instincts have become true,

your senses keen, and your hands have acquired

natural skill. The genius of Europe has given

her people the power of organisation, which has

specially made itself manifest in politics and commerce

and in coordinating scientific knowledge.

The genius of Japan has given you the vision of

beauty in nature and the power of realising it in

your life. And, because of this fact, the power

of organisation has come so easily to your help

when you needed it. For the rhythm of beauty

is the inner spirit, whose outer body is organisation.

All particular civilisation is the interpretation

of particular human experience. Europe seems

to have felt emphatically the conflict of things in

[Pg 9]

the universe, which can only be brought under

control by conquest. Therefore she is ever ready

for fight, and the best portion of her attention is

occupied in organising forces. But Japan has felt,

in her world, the touch of some presence, which

has evoked in her soul a feeling of reverent adoration.

She does not boast of her mastery of

nature, but to her she brings, with infinite care

and joy, her offerings of love. Her relationship

with the world is the deeper relationship of heart.

This spiritual bond of love she has established

with the hills of her country, with the sea and

the streams, with the forests in all their flowery

moods and varied physiognomy of branches; she

has taken into her heart all the rustling whispers

and sighing of the woodlands and sobbing of the

waves; the sun and the moon she has studied in

all the modulations of their lights and shades,

and she is glad to close her shops to greet the

seasons in her orchards and gardens and cornfields.

This opening of the heart to the soul of

the world is not confined to a section of your

privileged classes, it is not the forced product of

[Pg 10]

exotic culture, but it belongs to all your men

and women of all conditions. This experience of

your soul, in meeting a personality in the heart

of the world, has been embodied in your civilisation.

It is civilisation of human relationship.

Your duty towards your state has naturally

assumed the character of filial duty, your nation

becoming one family with your Emperor as its

head. Your national unity has not been evolved

from the comradeship of arms for defensive

and offensive purposes, or from partnership in

raiding adventures, dividing among each member

the danger and spoils of robbery. It is not an

outcome of the necessity of organisation for some

ulterior purpose, but it is an extension of the

family and the obligations of the heart in a wide

field of space and time. The ideal of "maitri"

is at the bottom of your culture,—"maitri" with

men and "maitri" with Nature. And the true

expression of this love is in the language of

beauty, which is so abundantly universal in this

land. This is the reason why a stranger, like

myself, instead of feeling envy or humiliation

[Pg 11]

before these manifestations of beauty, these creations

of love, feels a readiness to participate in

the joy and glory of such revealment of the

human heart.

And this has made me all the more apprehensive

of the change, which threatens Japanese

civilisation, as something like a menace to one's

own person. For the huge heterogeneity of the

modern age, whose only common bond is usefulness,

is nowhere so pitifully exposed against the

dignity and hidden power of reticent beauty, as

in Japan.

But the danger lies in this, that organised

ugliness storms the mind and carries the day by

its mass, by its aggressive persistence, by its

power of mockery directed against the deeper

sentiments of heart. Its harsh obtrusiveness makes

it forcibly visible to us, overcoming our senses,—and

we bring to its altar sacrifices, as does a

savage to the fetish which appears powerful because

of its hideousness. Therefore its rivalry to

things that are modest and profound and have

the subtle delicacy of life is to be dreaded.

[Pg 12]

I am quite sure that there are men in your

nation, who are not in sympathy with your

national ideals; whose object is to gain, and not

to grow. They are loud in their boast, that they

have modernised Japan. While I agree with

them so far as to say, that the spirit of the race

should harmonise with the spirit of the time, I

must warn them that modernising is a mere

affectation of modernism, just as affectation of

poesy is poetising. It is nothing but mimicry,

only affectation is louder than the original, and

it is too literal. One must bear in mind, that

those who have the true modern spirit need not

modernise, just as those who are truly brave are

not braggarts. Modernism is not in the dress of

the Europeans; or in the hideous structures,

where their children are interned when they take

their lessons; or in the square houses with flat

straight wall-surfaces, pierced with parallel lines

of windows, where these people are caged in

their lifetime; certainly modernism is not in their

ladies' bonnets, carrying on them loads of incongruities.

These are not modern, but merely

[Pg 13]

European. True modernism is freedom of mind,

not slavery of taste. It is independence of thought

and action, not tutelage under European schoolmasters.

It is science, but not its wrong application

in life,—a mere imitation of our science

teachers who reduce it into a superstition absurdly

invoking its aid for all impossible purposes.

Science, when it oversteps its limits and occupies

the whole region of life, has its fascination.

It looks so powerful because of its superficiality,—as

does a hippopotamus which is very

little else but physical. Science speaks of the

struggle for existence, but forgets that man's

existence is not merely of the surface. Man truly

exists in the ideal of perfection, whose depth and

height are not yet measured. Life based upon

science is attractive to some men, because it

has all the characteristics of sport; it feigns

seriousness, but is not profound. When you go

a-hunting, the less pity you have the better;

for your one object is to chase the game and

kill it, to feel that you are the greater animal,

that your method of destruction is thorough and

[Pg 14]

scientific. Because, therefore, a sportsman is only

a superficial man,—his fullness of humanity not

being there to hamper him,—he is successful in

killing innocent life and is happy. And the life of

science is that superficial life. It pursues success

with skill and thoroughness, and takes no account

of the higher nature of man. But even science

cannot tow humanity against truth and be successful;

and those whose minds are crude enough

to plan their lives upon the supposition, that man

is merely a hunter and his paradise the paradise

of sportsman, will be rudely awakened in the midst

of their trophies of skeletons and skulls. For man's

struggle for existence is to exist in the fullness

of his nature,—not by curtailing all that is best

in him and dwarfing his existence itself, but by

accepting all the responsibilities of his spiritual

life, even through death and defeat.

I do not for a moment suggest, that Japan

should be unmindful of acquiring modern weapons

of self-protection. But this should never be

allowed to go beyond her instinct of self-preservation.

She must know that the real power is not

[Pg 15]

in the weapons themselves, but in the man who

wields those weapons; and when he, in his eagerness

for power, multiplies his weapons at the

cost of his own soul, then it is he who is in

even greater danger than his enemies.

Things that are living are so easily hurt; therefore

they require protection. In nature, life protects

itself within in coverings, which are built with

life's own material. Therefore they are in harmony

with life's growth, or else when the time

comes they easily give way and are forgotten.

The living man has his true protection in his

spiritual ideals, which have their vital connection

with his life and grow with his growth. But, unfortunately,

all his armour is not living,—some of

it is made of steel, inert and mechanical. Therefore,

while making use of it, man has to be careful

to protect himself from its tyranny. If he is

weak enough to grow smaller to fit himself to his

covering, then it becomes a process of gradual

suicide by shrinkage of the soul. And Japan must

have a firm faith in the moral law of existence

to be able to assert to herself, that the Western

[Pg 16]

nations are following that path of suicide, where

they are smothering their humanity under the

immense weight of organisations in order to keep

themselves in power and hold others in subjection.

Therefore I cannot think that the imitation

of the outward aspects of the West, which is becoming

more and more evident in modern Japan, is

essential to her strength or stability. It is burdening

her true nature and causing weakness, which

will be felt more deeply as time goes on. The

habits, which are being formed by the modern

Japanese from their boyhood,—the habits of the

Western life, the habits of the alien culture,—will

prove, one day, a serious obstacle to the

understanding of their own true nature. And

then, if the children of Japan forget their past, if

they stand as barriers, choking the stream that

flows from the mountain peak of their ancient

history, their future will be deprived of the water

of life that has made her culture so fertile with

richness of beauty and strength.

What is still more dangerous for Japan is,

not this imitation of the outer features of the

[Pg 17]

West, but the acceptance of the motive force of

the Western civilisation as her own. Her social

ideals are already showing signs of defeat at the

hands of politics, and her modern tendency seems

to incline towards political gambling in which the

players stake their souls to win their game. I

can see her motto, taken from science, "Survival

of the Fittest," writ large at the entrance of

her present-day history—the motto whose meaning

is, "Help yourself, and never heed what it

costs to others"; the motto of the blind man,

who only believes in what he can touch, because

he cannot see. But those who can see, know

that men are so closely knit, that when you

strike others the blow comes back to yourself.

The moral law, which is the greatest discovery

of man, is the discovery of this wonderful truth,

that man becomes all the truer, the more he

realises himself in others. This truth has not

only a subjective value, but is manifested in every

department of our life. And nations, who sedulously

cultivate moral blindness as the cult of

patriotism, will end their existence in a sudden

[Pg 18]

and violent death. In past ages we had foreign

invasions, there had been cruelty and bloodshed,

intrigues of jealousy and avarice, but they never

touched the soul of the people deeply; for

the people, as a body, never participated in

these games. They were merely the outcome of

individual ambitions. The people themselves,

being free from the responsibilities of the baser

and more heinous side of those adventures, had

all the advantage of the heroic and the human

disciplines derived from them. This developed

their unflinching loyalty, their single-minded devotion

to the obligations of honour, their power of

complete self-surrender and fearless acceptance

of death and danger. Therefore the ideals, whose

seats were in the hearts of the people, would not

undergo any serious change owing to the policies

adopted by the kings or generals. But now,

where the spirit of the Western civilisation prevails,

the whole people is being taught from boyhood,

to foster hatreds and ambitions by all kinds

of means,—by the manufacture of half-truths and

untruths in history, by persistent misrepresentation

[Pg 19]

of other races and the culture of unfavourable

sentiments towards them, by setting up memorials

of events, very often false, which for the sake of

humanity should be speedily forgotten, thus continually

brewing evil menace towards neighbours

and nations other than their own. This is poisoning

the very fountain-head of humanity. It is

discrediting the ideals, which were born of the

lives of men, who were our greatest and best.

It is holding up gigantic selfishness as the one

universal religion for all nations of the world.

We can take anything else from the hands of

science, but not this elixir of moral death. Never

think for a moment, that the hurts you inflict

upon other races will not infect you, and the enmities

you sow around your homes will be a wall

of protection to you for all time to come. To

imbue the minds of a whole people with an

abnormal vanity of its own superiority, to teach

it to take pride in its moral callousness and ill-begotten

wealth, to perpetuate humiliation of

defeated nations by exhibiting trophies won from

war, and using these in schools in order to breed

[Pg 20]

in children's minds contempt for others, is imitating

the West where she has a festering sore,

whose swelling is a swelling of disease eating into

its vitality.

Our food crops, which are necessary for our

sustenance, are products of centuries of selection

and care. But the vegetation, which we have

not to transform into our lives, does not require

the patient thoughts of generations. It is not

easy to get rid of weeds; but it is easy, by process

of neglect, to ruin your food crops and let

them revert to their primitive state of wildness.

Likewise the culture, which has so kindly adapted

itself to your soil,—so intimate with life, so

human,—not only needed tilling and weeding in

past ages, but still needs anxious work and watching.

What is merely modern,—as science and

methods of organisation,—can be transplanted;

but what is vitally human has fibres so delicate,

and roots so numerous and far reaching, that it

dies when moved from its soil. Therefore I am

afraid of the rude pressure of the political ideals

of the West upon your own. In political civilisation,

[Pg 21]

the state is an abstraction and relationship

of men utilitarian. Because it has no roots in

sentiments, it is so dangerously easy to handle.

Half a century has been enough for you to master

this machine; and there are men among you,

whose fondness for it exceeds their love for the

living ideals which were born with the birth of

your nation and nursed in your centuries. It is like

a child, who, in the excitement of his play, imagines

he likes his playthings better than his mother.

Where man is at his greatest, he is unconscious.

Your civilisation, whose mainspring is

the bond of human relationship, has been nourished

in the depth of a healthy life beyond reach

of prying self-analysis. But a mere political relationship

is all conscious; it is an eruptive inflammation

of aggressiveness. It has forcibly burst

upon your notice. And the time has come, when

you have to be roused into full consciousness of

the truth by which you live, so that you may

not be taken unawares. The past has been God's

gift to you; about the present, you must make

your own choice.

[Pg 22]

So the questions you have to put to yourselves

are these,—"Have we read the world wrong,

and based our relation to it upon an ignorance of

human nature? Is the instinct of the West right,

where she builds her national welfare behind the

barricade of a universal distrust of humanity?"

You must have detected a strong accent

of fear, whenever the West has discussed the

possibility of the rise of an Eastern race. The

reason of it is this, that the power, by whose

help she thrives, is an evil power; so long as it is

held on her own side she can be safe, while the rest

of the world trembles. The vital ambition of the

present civilisation of Europe is to have the exclusive

possession of the devil. All her armaments

and diplomacy are directed upon this one

object. But these costly rituals for invocation of

the evil spirit lead through a path of prosperity

to the brink of cataclysm. The furies of terror,

which the West has let loose upon God's world,

come back to threaten herself and goad her into

preparations of more and more frightfulness; this

gives her no rest and makes her forget all else but

[Pg 23]

the perils that she causes to others, and incurs

herself. To the worship of this devil of politics

she sacrifices other countries as victims. She

feeds upon their dead flesh and grows fat upon

it, so long as the carcasses remain fresh,—but they

are sure to rot at last, and the dead will take

their revenge, by spreading pollution far and

wide and poisoning the vitality of the feeder.

Japan had all her wealth of humanity, her

harmony of heroism and beauty, her depth of

self-control and richness of self-expression; yet

the Western nations felt no respect for her, till

she proved that the bloodhounds of Satan are not

only bred in the kennels of Europe, but can also

be domesticated in Japan and fed with man's miseries.

They admit Japan's equality with themselves,

only when they know that Japan also possesses

the key to open the floodgate of hell-fire upon

the fair earth, whenever she chooses, and can

dance, in their own measure, the devil dance of

pillage, murder, and ravishment of innocent women,

while the world goes to ruin. We know

that, in the early stage of man's moral immaturity,

[Pg 24]

he only feels reverence for the god whose

malevolence he dreads. But is this the ideal of

man which we can look up to with pride? After

centuries of civilisation nations fearing each other

like the prowling wild beasts of the night time;

shutting their doors of hospitality; combining only

for purpose of aggression or defence; hiding in their

holes their trade secrets, state secrets, secrets of

their armaments; making peace offerings to the

barking dogs of each other with the meat which

does not belong to them; holding down fallen

races struggling to stand upon their feet; counting

their safety only upon the feebleness of the

rest of humanity; with their right hands dispensing

religion to weaker peoples, while robbing

them with their left,—is there anything in this

to make us envious? Are we to bend our knees

to the spirit of this civilisation, which is sowing

broadcast over all the world seeds of fear, greed,

suspicion, unashamed lies of its diplomacy, and

unctuous lies of its profession of peace and good-will

and universal brotherhood of Man? Can we

have no doubt in our minds, when we rush to

[Pg 25]

the Western market to buy this foreign product

in exchange for our own inheritance? I am

aware how difficult it is to know one's self; and

the man, who is intoxicated, furiously denies his

drunkenness; yet the West herself is anxiously

thinking of her problems and trying experiments.

But she is like a glutton, who has not the heart

to give up his intemperance in eating, and fondly

clings to the hope that he can cure his nightmares

of indigestion by medicine. Europe is not

ready to give up her political inhumanity, with all

the baser passions of man attendant upon it; she

believes only in modification of systems, and not

in change of heart.

We are willing to buy their machine-made

systems, not with our hearts, but with our brains.

We shall try them and build sheds for them,

but not enshrine them in our homes, or temples.

There are races, who worship the animals they

kill; we can buy meat from them, when we are

hungry, but not the worship which goes with the

killing. We must not vitiate our children's minds

with the superstition, that business is business,

[Pg 26]

war is war, politics is politics. We must know

that man's business has to be more than mere

business, and so have to be his war and politics.

You had your own industry in Japan; how scrupulously

honest and true it was, you can see by

its products,—by their grace and strength, their

conscientiousness in details, where they can hardly

be observed. But the tidal wave of falsehood has

swept over your land from that part of the world,

where business is business, and honesty is followed

in it merely as the best policy. Have you

never felt shame, when you see the trade advertisements,

not only plastering the whole town

with lies and exaggerations, but invading the green

fields, where the peasants do their honest labour,

and the hill-tops, which greet the first pure light

of the morning? It is so easy to dull our sense

of honour and delicacy of mind with constant

abrasion, while falsehoods stalk abroad with proud

steps in the name of trade, politics and patriotism,

that any protest against their perpetual intrusion

into our lives is considered to be sentimentalism,

unworthy of true manliness.

[Pg 27]

And it has come to pass, that the children

of those heroes, who would keep their word at

the point of death, who would disdain to cheat

men for vulgar profit, who even in their fight

would much rather court defeat than be dishonourable,

have become energetic in dealing with

falsehoods and do not feel humiliated by gaining

advantage from them. And this has been effected

by the charm of the word 'modern.' But if

undiluted utility be modern, beauty is of all ages;

if mean selfishness be modern, the human ideals

are no new inventions. And we must know for

certain, that however modern may be the proficiency,

which clips and cripples man for the

sake of methods and machines, it will never live

to be old.

When Japan is in imminent peril of neglecting

to realise where she is great, it is the duty

of a foreigner like myself to remind her, that she

has given rise to a civilisation which is perfect in

its form, and has evolved a sense of sight which

clearly sees truth in beauty and beauty in truth.

She has achieved something, which is positive

[Pg 28]

and complete. It is easier for a stranger to know

what it is in her, which is truly valuable for all

mankind,—what is there, which only she, of all

other races, has produced from her inner life and

not from her mere power of adaptability. Japan

must be reminded, that it is her sense of the

rhythm of life and of all things, her genius for

simplicity, her love for cleanliness, her definiteness

of thought and action, her cheerful fortitude,

her immense reserve of force in self-control, her

sensitiveness to her code of honour and defiance

of death, which have given her the power to resist

the cyclonic storm of exploitation that has

sprung from the shores of Europe circling round

and round the world. All these qualities are the

outcome of a civilisation, whose foundation is in

the spiritual ideals of life. Such a civilisation has

the gift of immortality; for it does not offend

against the laws of creation and is not assailed

by all the forces of nature. I feel it is an impiety

to be indifferent to its protection from the

incursion of vulgarity of power.

But while trying to free our minds from the

[Pg 29]

arrogant claims of Europe and to help ourselves

out of the quicksands of our infatuation, we may

go to the other extreme and blind ourselves with

a wholesale suspicion of the West. The reaction

of disillusionment is just as unreal as the first

shock of illusion. We must try to come to that

normal state of mind, by which we can clearly

discern our own danger and avoid it, without being

unjust towards the source of that danger.

There is always the natural temptation in us of

wishing to pay back Europe in her own coin,

and return contempt for contempt and evil for

evil. But that again would be to imitate Europe

in one of her worst features which comes out in

her behaviour to people whom she describes as

yellow or red, brown or black. And this is a

point on which we in the East have to acknowledge

our guilt and own that our sin has been as

great, if not greater, when we insulted humanity

by treating with utter disdain and cruelty men

who belonged to a particular creed, colour or

caste. It is really because we are afraid of our

own weakness, which allows itself to be overcome

[Pg 30]

by the sight of power, that we try to substitute

for it another weakness which makes itself blind

to the glories of the West. When we truly

know the Europe which is great and good, we

can effectively save ourselves from the Europe

which is mean and grasping. It is easy to be

unfair in one's judgment when one is faced with

human miseries,—and pessimism is the result of

building theories while the mind is suffering. To

despair of humanity is only possible, if we lose

faith in the power which brings to it strength,

when its defeat is greatest, and calls out new life

from the depth of its destruction. We must admit

that there is a living soul in the West which

is struggling unobserved against the hugeness of

the organisations under which men, women and

children are being crushed, and whose mechanical

necessities are ignoring laws that are spiritual

and human,—the soul whose sensibilities refuse

to be dulled completely by dangerous habits of

heedlessness in dealings with races for whom it

lacks natural sympathy. The West could never

have risen to the eminence she has reached, if

[Pg 31]

her strength were merely the strength of the

brute, or of the machine. The divine in her

heart is suffering from the injuries inflicted by

her hands upon the world,—and from this pain

of her higher nature flows the secret balm which

will bring healing to those injuries. Time after

time she has fought against herself and has undone

the chains, which with her own hands she

had fastened round helpless limbs; and though

she forced poison down the throat of a great nation

at the point of sword for gain of money, she

herself woke up to withdraw from it, to wash

her hands clean again. This shows hidden springs

of humanity in spots which look dead and barren.

It proves that the deeper truth in her nature,

which can survive such career of cruel cowardliness,

is not greed, but reverence for unselfish

ideals. It would be altogether unjust, both to us

and to Europe, to say that she has fascinated the

modern Eastern mind by the mere exhibition of

her power. Through the smoke of cannons and

dust of markets the light of her moral nature has

shone bright, and she has brought to us the ideal

[Pg 32]

of ethical freedom, whose foundation lies deeper

than social conventions and whose province of

activity is world-wide.

The East has instinctively felt, even through

her aversion, that she has a great deal to learn

from Europe, not merely about the materials of

power, but about its inner source, which is of

mind and of the moral nature of man. Europe

has been teaching us the higher obligations of

public good above those of the family and the

clan, and the sacredness of law, which makes

society independent of individual caprice, secures

for it continuity of progress, and guarantees justice

to all men of all positions in life. Above all

things Europe has held high before our minds

the banner of liberty, through centuries of martyrdom

and achievement,—liberty of conscience,

liberty of thought and action, liberty in the ideals

of art and literature. And because Europe has

won our deep respect, she has become so dangerous

for us where she is turbulently weak and

false,—dangerous like poison when it is served

along with our best food. There is one safety

[Pg 33]

for us upon which we hope we may count, and

that is, that we can claim Europe herself, as our

ally, in our resistance to her temptations and to

her violent encroachments; for she has ever carried

her own standard of perfection, by which we

can measure her falls and gauge her degrees of

failure, by which we can call her before her own

tribunal and put her to shame,—the shame which

is the sign of the true pride of nobleness.

But our fear is, that the poison may be more

powerful than the food, and what is strength in her

to-day may not be the sign of health, but the contrary;

for it may be temporarily caused by the

upsetting of the balance of life. Our fear is that

evil has a fateful fascination, when it assumes

dimensions which are colossal,—and though at last,

it is sure to lose its centre of gravity, by its abnormal

disproportion, the mischief which it creates before

its fall may be beyond reparation.

Therefore I ask you to have the strength of

faith and clarity of mind to know for certain, that

the lumbering structure of modern progress, riveted

by the iron bolts of efficiency, which runs

[Pg 34]

upon the wheels of ambition, cannot hold together

for long. Collisions are certain to occur; for

it has to travel upon organised lines, it is too

heavy to choose its own course freely; and once

it is off the rails, its endless train of vehicles is

dislocated. A day will come, when it will fall in

a heap of ruin and cause serious obstruction to

the traffic of the world. Do we not see signs of

this even now? Does not the voice come to us,

through the din of war, the shrieks of hatred, the

wailings of despair, through the churning up of

the unspeakable filth which has been accumulating

for ages in the bottom of this civilisation,—the

voice which cries to our soul, that the tower

of national selfishness, which goes by the name

of patriotism, which has raised its banner of treason

against heaven, must totter and fall with a

crash, weighed down by its own bulk, its flag

kissing the dust, its light extinguished? My brothers,

when the red light of conflagration sends

up its crackle of laughter to the stars, keep your

faith upon those stars and not upon the fire of

destruction. For when this conflagration consumes

[Pg 35]

itself and dies down, leaving its memorial

in ashes, the eternal light will again shine in the

East,—the East which has been the birth-place

of the morning sun of man's history. And who

knows if that day has not already dawned, and

the sun not risen, in the Easternmost horizon of

Asia? And I offer, as did my ancestor rishis,

my salutation to that sunrise of the East, which

is destined once again to illumine the whole

world.

I know my voice is too feeble to raise itself

above the uproar of this bustling time, and

it is easy for any street urchin to fling against

me the epithet of 'unpractical.' It will stick to

my coat-tail, never to be washed away, effectively

excluding me from the consideration of all respectable

persons. I know what a risk one runs

from the vigorously athletic crowds to be styled

an idealist in these days, when thrones have

lost their dignity and prophets have become an

anachronism, when the sound that drowns all

voices is the noise of the market-place. Yet

when, one day, standing on the outskirts of

[Pg 36]

Yokohama town, bristling with its display of

modern miscellanies, I watched the sunset in

your southern sea, and saw its peace and majesty

among your pine-clad hills,—with the great

Fujiyama growing faint against the golden horizon,

like a god overcome with his own radiance,—the

music of eternity welled up through the evening

silence, and I felt that the sky and the earth and

the lyrics of the dawn and the dayfall are with the

poets and idealists, and not with the marketsmen

robustly contemptuous of all sentiments,—that,

after the forgetfulness of his own divinity, man

will remember again that heaven is always in

touch with his world, which can never be abandoned

for good to the hounding wolves of the

modern era, scenting human blood and howling

to the skies.

Transcriber Notes:

On page 11, "sacrificesstet" was replaced with "sacrifices".

On page 20, "imitaing" was replaced with "imitating", and "its

vitality," was replaced with "its vitality.".