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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: so as compared, not with us, but with the eventual possibilities of
humanity. As yet, neither system, Western nor Eastern, is perfect
enough to serve in all things as standard for the other. The light
of truth has reached each hemisphere through the medium of its own
mental crystallization, and this has polarized it in opposite ways,
so that now the rays that are normal to the eyes of the one only
produce darkness to those of the other. For the Japanese civilization
in the sense of not being savagery is the equal of our own. It is
not in the polish that the real difference lies; it is in the
substance polished. In politeness, in delicacy, they have as a
people no peers. Art has been their mistress, though science has
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