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For project Gutenburg, produced by Eric Hutton
[email protected]
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
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