Each student adheres, by temperament and by habit, to the first or to
the second of these gods of the mind. By religion, he tends to unity;
by intellect, or by the senses, to the many. A too rapid unification,
and an excessive appliance to parts and particulars, are the twin
dangers of speculation.
To this partiality the history of nations corresponded. The country
of unity, of immovable institutions, the seat of a philosophy delighting
in abstractions, of men faithful in doctrine and in practice to the
idea of a deaf, unimplorable, immense fate, is Asia; and it realizes
this fate in the social institution of caste. On the other side, the
genius of Europe is active and creative; it resists caste by culture;
its philosophy was a discipline; it is a land of arts, inventions,
trade, freedom. If the East loved infinity, the West delighted in
boundaries.
European civility is the triumph of talent, the extension of system,
the sharpened understanding, adaptive skill, delight in forms, delight
in manifestation, in comprehensible results. Pericles, Athens, Greece,
had been working in this element with the joy of genius not yet chilled
by any foresight of the detriment of an excess.
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