“On the other hand, the Occidental, the man of the West, demands clearness and is impatient with mystery.  He loves a definite statement as much as his brother of the East dislikes it.  He insists on knowing what the eternal and infinite forces mean to his personal life, how they will make him personally happier and better, almost how they will build the house over his head, and cook the dinner on his hearth.  This is the difference between the East and the West, between man on the banks of the Ganges and man on the banks of the Mississippi.  Plenty of exceptions, of course, there are—­mystics in Boston and St. Louis, hard-headed men of facts in Bombay and Calcutta.  The two great dispositions cannot be shut off from one another by an ocean or a range of mountains.  In some nations and places—­as, for instance, among the Jews and in our own New England—­they notably commingle.  But in general they thus divide the world between them.  The East lives in the moonlight of mystery, the West in the sunlight of scientific fact.  The East cries out to the Eternal for vague impulses.  The West seizes the present with light hands, and will not let it go till it has furnished it with reasonable, intelligible motives.  Each misunderstands, distrusts, and in large degree despises the other.  But the two hemispheres together, and not either one by itself, make up the total world.”  Thus, in one of his sermons, spoke the great Unitarian preacher Phillips Brooks, late Bishop of Massachusetts (The Mystery of Iniquity and Other Sermons, sermon xvi.).

We might rather say that throughout the whole world, in the East as well as in the West, rationalists seek definition and believe in the concept, while vitalists seek inspiration and believe in the person.  The former scrutinize the Universe in order that they may wrest its secrets from it; the latter pray to the Consciousness of the Universe, strive to place themselves in immediate relationship with the Soul of the World, with God, in order that they may find the guarantee or substance of what they hope for, which is not to die, and the evidence of what they do not see.

And since a person is a will, and will always has reference to the future, he who believes, believes in what is to come—­that is, in what he hopes for.  We do not believe, strictly speaking, in what is or in what was, except as the guarantee, as the substance, of what will be.  For the Christian, to believe in the resurrection of Christ—­that is to say, in tradition and in the Gospel, which assure him that Christ has risen, both of them personal forces—­is to believe that he himself will one day rise again by the grace of Christ.  And even scientific faith—­for such there is—­refers to the future and is an act of trust.  The man of science believes that at a certain future date an eclipse of the sun will take place; he believes that the laws which have governed the world hitherto will continue to govern it.