ABSTRACT
PART I.—INDIA THE first thing I have to note is that the East is not a unity, as implied in the familiar antithesis of East and West. Between India, on the one hand, and China or Japan, on the other, there is as great a difference as between India and any western country. The contrast that has struck me is that between India and the rest of the world. There I do feel a profound gulf. A Chinese, after all, is not so unlike an Englishman, and a Japanese not so unlike a Frenchman. But a Bengalee is strangely unlike anybody outside India. While, however, the East is not a unity, the modern West is. Throughout Europe and America there is the same civilisation, intellectual and economic; so that, to a philo-sophic observer, national boundaries there already begin to appear obsolete and irrelevant. On the other hand, this modern West is a very recent creation. And if one goes back in history one can find more analogy between East and West than now appears. Feudal Europe, for example, was in many respects similar to feudal Japan; and a mediæval Christian mystic hardly distinguishable from a contemporary Indian saint. If, therefore, we contrast East and West we shall find our contrast breaking down at every point, unless we confine the term East to India (which is absurd), and mean by the West (as of course, in fact, we do) the West of the last century only. And the contrast between that West and the West of the Middle Ages is perhaps as great as the contrast between the modern West and India. I think it best, therefore, not to attempt to characterise the East as a whole; but to deal separately with India, China, and Japan, and their reactions to the West, as they have shown themselves to me. I shall endeavour to characterise each of these civilisations, first, as they were before contact with the West; and afterwards to consider the effect upon them of that contact.
