Note 379 — Chapter XVII

See, for instance, Mr R. B. Arnold's Scientific Fact and Metaphysical Reality, pp. 321-323. Professor William James, in his Varieties of Religious Experience, asks whether "the worship of material luxury and wealth, which constitutes so large a portion of the 'spirit' of our age" does not "make somewhat for effeminacy and unmanliness." He goes so far as to recommend, as a cure for some of our social diseases, the adoption of that form of asceticism which consisted in "the old monkish poverty-worship." Wealth-getting, he says, "enters as an ideal into the very bone and marrow of our generation." It is certain, he adds, that "the prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilisation suffers."—(Pp. 365-369.)

See also Professor W. R. Inge's Personal Idealism and Mysticism, especially pp. 175-176. I strongly recommend the reader who is interested in the pressing problems presented by the changing relations between the Occident and the Orient to read Dr Inge's book (especially Lectures IV. and VI.) in connection with Mr Percival Lowell's Soul of the Far East. Both are, as one would expect, able and well-written books, but they take diametrically opposite views of a very important question. Mr Lowell finds that the most notable characteristic of the East, and the secret of its fatal weakness, is what he calls its Impersonality, and that the peoples of the West, deriving an irresistible strength from the exact opposite—an intense Individualism—have nothing to fear from the impersonal civilisations of the East, which they will eventually overpower and crush. Dr Inge arrives independently at a similar belief as to the remarkable absence of individualism in the East, but so far from adopting Mr Lowell's interpretation of its results he finds in this Oriental Impersonality a very remarkable source of strength and permanence; while he prognosticates possible disaster to Western civilisation from the very fact that it is based on individualism. Already, he says, "it shows signs of breaking up from within." It seems possible that the events of the not-distant future will show that Dr Inge was right.