Page:The Spirit of the Chinese People.djvu/60

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this happy union of soul with intellect, which has enabled them as a race and nation to live a life of perpetual youth? The answer, of course, is that they got it from their civilisation. Now you will not expect me to give you a lecture on Chinese civilisation within the time at my disposal. But I will try to tell you something of the Chinese civilisation which has a bearing on our present subject of discussion.

Let me first of all tell you that there is, it seems to me, one great fundamental difference between the Chinese civilisation and the civilisation of modern Europe. Here let me quote an admirable saying of a famous living art critic, Mr. Bernard Berenson. Comparing European with Oriental art, Mr. Berenson says:—"Our European art has the fatal tendency to become science and we hardly possess a masterpiece which does not bear the marks of having been a battlefield for divided interests." Now what I want to say of the European civilisation is that it is, as Mr. Berenson says of European art, a battlefield for divided interests; a continuous warfare for the divided interests of science and art on the one hand, and of religion and philosophy on the other; in fact a terrible battlefield where the head and the heart—the soul and the intellect—come into constant conflict. In the Chinese civilisation, at least for the fast 2,400 years, there is no such conflict. That, I say, is the one great fundamental difference between the Chinese civilisation and that of modern Europe.

In other words, what I want to say, is that in modern Europe, the people have a religion which