For China and Japan, though they have had, and to a less extent still have, religion, are not, in the Indian sense, religious. The Chinese, in particular, strike one as secular and practical; quite as secular and practical as the English. They have had Buddhism, as we have had Christianity; but no one who can perceive and understand would say that their outlook is determined by Buddhism, any more than ours is by Christianity. It is Confucianism that expresses the Chinese attitude to life, whenever the Chinese soul, becoming aware of itself, looks out from the forest of animistic beliefs in which the mass of the people wander. And Confucianism is perhaps the best and purest expression of the practical reason that has ever been formulated. Family duty, social duty, political duty, these are the things on which it lays stress. And when the Chinese spirit seeks escape from these primary preoccupations, it finds its freedom in an art that is closer to the world of fact, imaginatively conceived, than that of any other race. Chinese art purifies itself from symbolism to become interpretation; whereas in India the ocean of symbolism never ceases to roll over the drowning surface of the phenomenal world. Chinese literature, again, has this same hold upon life. It is such as Romans or Englishmen, if equally gifted, might have written. Much of it, indeed, is stupidly and tediously didactic. But where it escapes into poetry it is a poetry like Wordsworth's, revealing the beauty of actual things, rather than weaving across them an embroidery of subjective emotions The outlook of China is essentially the outlook of the West, only more sane, more reasonable, more leisured and dignified. Positivism and Humanity, the dominant forms of thought and feeling in the West, have controlled Chinese civilisation for centuries. The Chinese have built differently from ourselves and on a smaller scale, with less violence and less power; but they have built on the same foundations.
And Japan, too, at bottom is secular. Her true religion is that of the Emperor and his divine ancestors. Her strongest passion is patriotism. A Japanese, like an Indian, is always ready to die. But he dies for the splendours and glories of this world of sense. It is not because he has so little hold on life, but because he has so much, that he so readily throws it away. The Japanese are unlike the Chinese and unlike the Europeans and Americans; but their outlook is similar. They believe in the world of time and change; and because of this attitude, they and the rest of the world stand together like a mountain in the sun, contemplating uneasily that other mysterious peak, shrouded in mist, which is India.