A certain outward idleness, a semi-idleness, as Nietzsche said, is the necessary condition for a real religious life, for a real æsthetic life, for any life on the spiritual plane. The noisy, laborious, pushing, "progressive" life we traditionally associate with the West is essentially alien to the higher ends of living, as has been intuitively recognized and acted on by all those among us who have sought to pursue the higher ends of living. It was so that the nineteenth-century philosophers of Europe, of whom Schopenhauer was in this matter the extreme type, viewed the matter. But when we seek to measure the tendency of the chief countries of the West, led by France, England, and Germany, and the countries of the East led by Japan, in the light of this strictly measurable test of vital statistics, may we not, perhaps, trace the approach of a revolutionary transposition? Japan, entering on the road we have nearly passed through, in which the perpetual clash of a high birth-rate and a high death-rate involves social disorder and misery, has flung to the winds the loftier ideals it once pursued so successfully and has lost its fine æsthetic perceptions, its insight into the most delicate secrets of the soul.
6And while Japan, certainly to-day voicing the aspirations of the East, is concerned to become a great military and industrial power, we in the West are growing weary of war, and are coming to look upon commerce as a necessary routine no longer adequate to satisfy the best energies of human beings. We are here moving towards the fine quiescence involved by a delicate equipoise of life and of death; and this economy sets free an energy we are seeking to expend in a juster social organization, and in the realization of ideals which until now have seemed but the imagination of idle dreamers. Asia, as an anonymous writer has recently put it, is growing crude, vulgar, and materialistic; Europe, on the other hand, is growing to loathe its own past grossness.