A plant cannot change its place, an animal cannot alter its conditions of existence except within very narrow bounds; man is free in the sense nothing else in the world is.
What is true of individuals has been true of races.

The most imaginative races have proved the greatest factors in the world's advance.
Now after this look at our own side of the world, let us turn to the other; for it is this very psychological fact that mental progression implies an ever-increasing individualization, and that imagination is the force at work in the process which Far Eastern civilization, taken in connection with our own, reveals.

In doing this, it explains incidentally its own seeming anomalies, the most unaccountable of which, apparently, is its existence.
We have seen how impressively impersonal the Far East is.

Now if individuality be the natural measure of the height of civilization which a nation has reached, impersonality should betoken a relatively laggard position in the race.

We ought, therefore, to find among these people certain other characteristics corroborative of a less advanced state of development.