HINDOO AND CHINESE CIVILIZATION.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume VII, Issue 1897, 24 January 1885, Page 2

HINDOO AND CHINESE CIVILIZATION.

■■ 0 i Never did opposing qualities and defects establish a wider gulf between two races,. .During-the 4000 or 5000 years which make up her.history, China offers us the unique spectacle, as it seems to me of a Society founded upon a purely human •basis—without Prophet, without Messiah, without Revealer, without mythology, of a society oaloulatedfor temporal well being and the good organization of this world, and for ntohing elso. India, on the other hand, shows us a not less surprising spectacle of a race exclusively speculative, living by the ideal, building- its -religion and its literature in' the- clouds, without any intermingling elements drawn from history or reality, The characteristic feature of the Chinese mind is a negation of thesuparnatural; what it cannot understand does not exist for it, India, on the contrary, absorbed in the contemplation of the infinite, has exhausted her activity in the creation cj an exuberant mythology and of innumerable systems of meta' physic's. Nor has the study of nature, of man, or of history, ever seemed, to her worthy to check her thoughts for an instant, China is indisputably, of all countries, that which possesses the best ordered and. the more abundant archives. Since the twelfth century before the Christian era she has Btored up dynasty bv dynasty, and almost year by year, the official documents of-her history, the decrees of her sovereigns, the rules of the administration, India, so prodigiously fruitful in everything olse, has not a line of history. She has reached modern times without believing that the. real is ever worth writing dawn, This present lifo is for the Ohihose the only aim of human activity; For the Indian it is but an ■ episode in a series of existences, a passage betweon two etemitieß. On one side you have a bourgeois and reasonable race, narrow as' common is, narrow; on tl}e other a race to the infinite—dreamy, absorbed, and lost in its own imaginations. Nor are the physical characteristics of both less strikingly contrasted, The bright oblique eyo, the flat nose, the short neck, tlie cunning look qf the Chinese iudjoate tl}e man of common B.enpe, well trained in the affairs of this •world;-the noble outline of the Indian, his slim figure* his broad, calm brow, his deep, tranquil eye show us a raoe made for meditation,-and'destined, oven by --its 'very errors, to provide us witha measure of the speculative power of humanity.