POSITION IN THE WEST 171 



whom Professor Pearson is addressing, are " not 

 only not provoked by the insult, but do not even 

 notice it." 



The history of the emotion of the ideal in the 

 West, in short, has been the same in all its principal 

 manifestations. When controlled by those who 

 have held power, especially when power has been 

 concentrated in few hands, it has ever tended to be 

 directed and dominated by the qualities of the 

 primitive heredity of the fight. In the propagandas 

 of parties and the marshalling and organizing of the 

 great forces of the day, the orientation of all the 

 arguments, of all the interests, is instinctively, as 

 just observed, towards the emotion of the ideal in 

 the general mind. But the failure of this effort in 

 every form is one of the most marked features of the 

 time. It is a fact that the mind of the West, on 

 the whole, has completely failed to understand the 

 emotion of the ideal. It has not grasped either 

 the nature, or the magnitude, or the management of 

 its function in the future of civilization. The only 

 medium through which it has hitherto attempted 

 to utilize collectively this transforming cause of the 

 future in imposing the cultural inheritance of civiliza- 

 tion on the general mind, on a universal scale, has 

 been through the primitive and characteristic 

 instinct of combativeness. 



