Multitudes of Chinese scholars know next to nothing about matters directly in the line of their studies, and in regard to which we should consider ignorance positively disgraceful.  A venerable teacher remarked to the writer with a charming naivete that he had never understood the allusions in the Trimetrical Classic (which stands at the very threshold of Chinese study) until at the age of sixty he had an opportunity to read a Universal History prepared by a missionary, in which for the first time Chinese history was made accessible to him.[267]

Add to this that the whole of their higher learning, corresponding to our university system, consists in writing essays and always more essays on the Chinese classics, and “it is impossible,” as Mr. Smith points out, “not to marvel at the measure of success which has attended the use of such materials in China."[268] But when this people is in possession of the technique of the western world—­a logic, general ideas, and experimentation—­we cannot reasonably doubt that they will be able to work the western system as their cousins, the Japanese, are doing, and perhaps they, too, may better the instruction.

White effectiveness is probably due to a superior technique acting in connection with a superior body of knowledge and sentiment.  Of two groups having equal mental endowment, one may outstrip the other by the mere dominance of incident.  It is a notorious fact that the course of human history has been largely without prevision or direction.  Things have drifted and forces have arisen.  Under these conditions an unusual incident—­the emergence of a great mind or a forcible personality, or the operation of influences as subtle as those which determine fashions in dress—­may establish social habits and duties which will give a distinct character to the modes of attention and mental life of the group.  The most significant fact for Aryan development is the emergence among the Greeks of a number of eminent men who developed logic, the experimental method, and philosophic interest, and fixed in their group the habit of looking behind the incident for the general law.  Mediaeval attention was diverted from these lines by a religious movement, and the race lost for a time the key to progress and got clean away from the Greek copies; but it found them again and took a fresh start with the revival of Greek learning.  It is quite possible to make a fetish of classical learning; but Sir Henry Maine’s remark, that nothing moves in the modern world that is not Greek in its origin, is quite just.

The real variable is the individual, not the race.  In the beginning—­perhaps as the result of a mutation or series of mutations—­a type of brain developed which has remained relatively fixed in all times and among all races.  This brain will never have any faculty in addition to what it now possesses, because as a type of structure it is as fixed as the species itself, and is indeed a mark