intensive culture of all the possibilities of thought.  We in the West have boggled towards the same end through centuries of crass political experiment.  Confucius, following his ancient models, ignored metaphysics altogether:  jumped the life to come, and made his be-all and his end-all here:—­in what was necessary, in deeds and thought and speech, to make individual, social, and political life staid, sincere, orderly, quiet, decent, and happy.  He died a broken-hearted failure; than whom perhaps no man except the Lord Buddha ever succeeded more highly.

Laotse is his complement.  Laotse’s aim is not the activity, but the quiescence of mind, self, intellect:  “in the NO THING seeking the lonely Way.”  You forgo everything—­especially selfhood;—­you give up everything; you enter upon the heritage of No Thing;—­and you find yourself heir to the Universe, to wonder, to magic.  You do with all your complicated egoity as the camel did with his cameltiness before he could enter the needle’s eye; then—­heigh presto!—­it is the Elixir of Life you have drunk; it is freedom you have attained of the roaming-place of Dragons!—­It amounts, truly, to the same thing as Aryan Theosophy; but where the latter travels through and illuminates immense realms of thought and metaphysic, Taoism slides gently into the Absolute; as who should laugh and say, You see how easy it is! And you do not hear of the Path of Sorrow, as with the Aryans; Tao is a path of sly laughter and delight.

Then from Japan we get Shinto; still less a system of metaphysics or dogma.  The Shinto temple, empty but for air, is symbolic of the creed whose keynotes are purity and simplicity.  Taoism, Confucianism, and Shinto are the three great native creations, in religion, of what I shall call the Altaic mind.  There have been, indeed, profound thinkers and metaphysicians both in Japan and China; but their mental activities have been for the most part fruitage from the Aryan seed of Buddhism.

A word here as to that phrase ‘Altaic mind.’  What business has one to class the Chinese and Japanese together, and to speak of them (as I shall) as ’Altaic’—­the Altaic Race? In the first place this term, like ‘Latin’ or ‘Anglo-Saxon,’ has the virtue of being quite meaningless.  It is utterly silly and inappropriate from every standpoint; but as I need a term to include China and all the peoples that have derived their historic culture from her, I shall beg leave to use it.  Neither Japanese nor Corean belong to the billiard-ball group of languages.  There is a syntactical likeness between these two, but none in vocabulary; where the Japanese vocabulary came from, Omniscience perhaps may know.—­A syntax outlasts a vocabulary by many ages:  you may hear Celts now talk English with a syntax that comes from the sub-race before our own:  Iberian, and not Aryan.  So we may guess here a race akin to the Coreans conquered at some time by a race whose vocables were Japanese—­whence they came,