have lost?  Li Po died a child at sixty:  a magical child:  always more or less naughty, if we are to believe all accounts, especially his own; but somehow never paying the penalty we pay for our naughtiness,—­exile from the wonder-world, and submersion in these intolerable personalities.  You read Milton, and are cleaned of your personality by the fierce exaltation of the Spirit beating through.  You read Li Po-type of hundreds of others his compatriots—­and you are also cleaned of your personality; but by gentle dews, by wonderment, by being carried up out of it into the diamond ether.  It seems to me that both affirmed the Divine Spirit.  Milton waged grand warfare in his affirmation.  Li Po merely said what he saw.

So I think that among the Aryans the Spirit has been fighting in and into the great turbid current of evolution; and that among the Chinese it has not been so much concerned with that stream, but rather to sing its own untrammeled expression.  A great drama or epic comes of the presence and energy of the Spirit working in a human mind.  A great lyric comes of the escape of the consciousness from the mind, and into the Spirit.  The West has produced all the great dramas and epics, and will persist in the view that the Spirit can have no other expression so high as in these forms.  Very likely the West is right; but I shall not think so next time I am reading Li Po or Ssu-k’ung T’u—­or Keats.

And I have seen small mild Japanese jujitsu men ’put it all over,’ as they say, big burly English wrestlers without seeming to exert themselves in any way, or forgoing their gentle methods and manner; and if you think of jujitsu rightly, it is, to our wrestling and boxing, much what Wu Taotse and Ku Kai-chih are to Rembrandt and Michelangelo, or the Chinese poets to ours.

If we go into the field of philosophy, we find much the same thing.  Take Confucianism.  It is inappropriate, in some ways, to call Confucius a great thinker (but we shall see that he was something very much more than that).  He taught no religion; illuminated in nowise the world of mind; though he enabled millions to illumine it for themselves.  He made hardly a ripple in his own day; and yet, so far as I can see, only the Buddha and Mohammed, of the men whose names we know, have marshaled future ages as greatly as he did. Flow his way! said he to history; and, in the main, it did.  He created an astral mold for about a quarter of humanity, which for twenty-four centuries has endured.  He did it by formulating a series of rules for the conduct of personal and national life; or rather, by showing what kind of rules they should be, and leaving others to formulate them;—­and so infused his doctrine with his will and example, that century after century flowed into the matrix he had made for them.  To create such a stable matrix, the Aryan mind, in India, worked through long spiritual-intellectual exploration of the world of metaphysics:  an