post-mundane existence is very apt to seem immaterial as well as be so.

With the old familiar landmarks of life obliterated in this
wholesale manner, it is to be doubted whether one of us, placed in
the midst of such a civilization, would know himself. He certainly
would derive but scanty satisfaction from the recognition if he did.
Even Nirvana might seem a happy limbo by comparison. With a communal,
not to say a cosmic, birthday, and a conventional wife, he might
well deem his separate existence the shadow of a shade and embrace
Buddhism from mere force of circumstances.

Further investigation would not shake his opinion. For a far-oriental
career is thoroughly in keeping with these, its typical turning-points.
From one end of its course to the other it is painfully impersonal.
In its regular routine as in its more salient junctures, life
presents itself to these races a totally different affair from what
it seems to us. The cause lies in what is taken to be the basis of
socio-biology, if one may so express it.

In the Far East the social unit, the ultimate molecule of existence,
is not the individual, but the family.

We occidentals think we value family. We even parade our
pretensions so prominently as sometimes to tread on other people's
prejudices of a like nature. Yet we scarcely seem to appreciate the
inheritance. For with a logic which does us questionable credit, we
are proud of our ancestors in direct proportion to their remoteness
from ourselves, thus permitting Democracy to revenge its
insignificance by smiling at our self-imposed satire. To esteem a
man in inverse ratio to the amount of remarkable blood he has