We find the first germs of the new creative principle of personality in the Platonic figure of Socrates who, first of all, conceived the idea of a higher spiritual love, blended it with the love of ideas and separated it sharply from base desire.  Though his conception was not yet personal love in the true sense, it was nevertheless a spiritual divine love.  The Greek State could not tolerate him, and sentenced him to death.  But this same Socrates also said (in “Crito”) that man was indebted to the State for his existence.  “Did not thy father, in obedience to the law, take thy mother to wife and beget thee?” This sentiment was as antique as it could well be, and the death of Socrates—­as related by Plato—­was the most magnificent confirmation of the Greek idea that the individual, even the wisest, was entirely subordinate to the community.

The civilisations of China and Japan are impersonal even to a greater extent than the civilisation of ancient Greece.  Percival Lowell maintains that the diverse manifestations of the spirit of those countries can only be understood if regarded from the standpoint of absolute impersonality.  He sees in a “pronounced impersonality the most striking characteristic of the Far East”, “the foundation on which the Oriental character is built up.”  It is very instructive to observe how it determines the individual’s conception of birth and marriage, thoughts and acts, life and death.  It is carried to so great an extreme that special terms for “I,” “you,” “he,” do not even exist in the Japanese language, and have to be replaced by objective circumlocutions.  Not content with the fact of having been born impersonal, it is the ambition of the inhabitant of the Far East to become more and more so as his life unfolds itself.  Witness the heroic exploits of Japanese soldiers during the last war:  individual soldiers frequently went to their death for the sake of a small advantage to their group.  We Europeans regard this in the light of heroism—­and it would be heroism in the case of a European.  But with the sacrifice of his individual life in the interest of the community, the Japanese instinctively yields the smaller value.  In the same way Greeks and Romans did not attach very much importance to life; suicide was very common, and frequently committed without any special motive.  As true love is based on personality, it is impossible for the modern East-Asiatic to know love in our sense.  Lowell agrees with this:  “Love, as we understand it, is an unknown feeling in the East.”  He reports that Japanese women will appear before strangers entirely nude, without the least trace of embarrassment—­as would Greek women!—­because they are innocent of that other aspect of personality—­the feeling of shame.  To be ashamed implies the desire of concealing something individual and intimate; where this is not the case, there can be no feeling of shame.  Finally, I should like to point out that the perversity and sexual refinement peculiar to China and Japan are attributable simply to the fact that the limits of sexuality cannot be overstepped, and that sexuality is therefore dependent on vice and perversity to satisfy its craving for variety.