We conclude, then, that the only thoroughgoing interpretation of the differences characterizing Eastern and Western psychic nature is a social one, and that social differences can be adequately expressed only by contrasting the fundamental ideas ruling their respective social orders, namely, communalism for the East and individualism for the West.

The unity that pervades the Orient, if it is not due to the inheritance of a common psychic nature, to what is it due?  Surely to the possession of a common civilization and social order.  It would be hard to prove that Japanese, Koreans, Chinese, Siamese, Burmese, Hindus (and how many distinct races does the ethnologist find in India), Persians, and Turks are all descendants from a common ancestry and are possessed therefore by physical heredity of a common racial psychic nature.  Yet such is the requirement of the theory we are opposing.  That the races inhabiting the Asiatic continent have had from ancient times mutual social intercourse, whereby the civilization, mental, moral, and spiritual, of the most developed has passed to the other nations, so that China has dominated Eastern Asia, and India has profoundly influenced all the races inhabiting Asia, is an indisputable fact.  The psychic unity of the Orient is a civilizational, a social unity, as is also the psychic unity of the Occident.  The reason why the Occident is so distinct from the Orient in social, in psychic, and in civilizational characteristics is because these two great branches of the human race have undergone isolated evolution.  Isolated biological evolution has produced the diverse races.  These are now fixed physical types, which can be modified only by intermarriage.  But although isolated social evolution has produced diverse social and psychic characteristics these are not fixed and unalterable.  To transform psychic and social characteristics, intimate social intercourse, under special conditions, is needful alone.

If the characteristics differentiating the Eastern from the Western peoples are only social, it might be supposed that the results of association would be mutual, the East influencing the West as much as the West influences the East, both at last finding a common level.  Such a result, however, is impossible, from the laws regulating psychic and social intercourse.  The less developed psychic nature can have no appreciable effect on the more highly developed, just as undeveloped art cannot influence highly developed art, nor crude science and philosophy highly developed science and philosophy.  The law governing the relations of diverse civilizations when brought into contact is not like the law of hydrostatics, whereby two bodies of water of different levels, brought into free communication, finally find a common level, determined by the difference in level and their respective masses.  In social intercourse the higher civilization is unaffected by the lower, in any important way, while the lower