Perhaps it is not clear what I mean by “the mechanistic outlook.”  I mean something which exists equally in Imperialism, Bolshevism and the Y.M.C.A.; something which distinguishes all these from the Chinese outlook, and which I, for my part, consider very evil.  What I mean is the habit of regarding mankind as raw material, to be moulded by our scientific manipulation into whatever form may happen to suit our fancy.  The essence of the matter, from the point of view of the individual who has this point of view, is the cultivation of will at the expense of perception, the fervent moral belief that it is our duty to force other people to realize our conception of the world.  The Chinese intellectual is not much troubled by Imperialism as a creed, but is vigorously assailed by Bolshevism and the Y.M.C.A., to one or other of which he is too apt to fall a victim, learning a belief from the one in the class-war and the dictatorship of the communists, from the other in the mystic efficacy of cold baths and dumb-bells.  Both these creeds, in their Western adepts, involve a contempt for the rest of mankind except as potential converts, and the belief that progress consists in the spread of a doctrine.  They both involve a belief in government and a life against Nature.  This view, though I have called it mechanistic, is as old as religion, though mechanism has given it new and more virulent forms.  The first of Chinese philosophers, Lao-Tze, wrote his book to protest against it, and his disciple Chuang-Tze put his criticism into a fable[38]:—­

Horses have hoofs to carry them over frost and snow; hair, to protect them from wind and cold.  They eat grass and drink water, and fling up their heels over the champaign.  Such is the real nature of horses.  Palatial dwellings are of no use to them.

     One day Po Lo appeared, saying:  “I understand the management of
     horses.”

So he branded them, and clipped them, and pared their hoofs, and put halters on them, tying them up by the head and shackling them by the feet, and disposing them in stables, with the result that two or three in every ten died.  Then he kept them hungry and thirsty, trotting them and galloping them, and grooming, and trimming, with the misery of the tasselled bridle before and the fear of the knotted whip behind, until more than half of them were dead.

     The potter says:  “I can do what I will with clay.  If I want it
     round, I use compasses; if rectangular, a square.”

     The carpenter says:  “I can do what I will with wood.  If I want it
     curved, I use an arc; if straight, a line.”