Curious labor for a mind, that of devoting all its strength to the thinking itself out of existence! Not content with being born impersonal, a Far Oriental is constantly striving to make himself more so.
We have seen, then, how in trying to understand these peoples we are brought face to face with impersonality in each of those three expressions of the human soul, speech, thought, yearning.

We have looked at them first from a social standpoint.

We have seen how singularly little regard is paid the individual from his birth to his death.

How he lives his life long the slave of patriarchal customs of so puerile a tendency as to be practically impossible to a people really grown up.
How he practises a wholesale system of adoption sufficient of itself to destroy any surviving regard for the ego his other relations might have left.

How in his daily life he gives the minimum of thought to the bettering himself in any worldly sense, and the maximum of polite consideration to his neighbor.