In its first and most unintelligible form morality shows itself as _habit_. To act according to the habit and usage (_morem_) of one's country--is to be moral there. Therefore pure moral action, clear, unadulterated morality, is most straightforwardly practised in China; they keep to the old habit and usage, and hate each innovation as a crime worthy of death. For _innovation_ is the deadly enemy of _habit_, of the _old_, of _permanence_. In fact, too, it admits of no doubt that through habit man secures himself against the obtrusiveness of things, of the world, and founds a world of his own in which alone he is and feels at home, _i. e._ builds himself a _heaven_. Why, heaven has no other meaning than that it is man's proper home, in which nothing alien regulates and rules him any longer, no influence of the earthly any longer makes him himself alien; in short, in which the dross of the earthly is thrown off, and the combat against the world has found an end,--in which, therefore, nothing is any longer _denied_ him. Heaven is the end of _abnegation_, it is _free enjoyment_. There man no longer denies himself anything, because nothing is any longer alien and hostile to him. But now habit is a "second nature," which detaches and frees man from his first and original natural condition, in securing him against every casualty of it. The fully elaborated habit of the Chinese has provided for all emergencies, and everything is "looked out for"; whatever may come, the Chinaman always knows how he has to behave, and does not need to decide first according to the circumstances; no unforeseen case throws him down from the heaven of his rest. The morally habituated and inured Chinaman is not surprised and taken off his guard; he behaves with equanimity (i. e. with equal spirit or temper) toward everything, because his temper, protected by the precaution of his traditional usage, does not lose its balance. Hence, on the ladder of culture or civilization humanity mounts the first round through habit; and, as it conceives that, in climbing to culture, it is at the same time climbing to heaven, the realm of culture or second nature, it really mounts the first round of the--ladder to heaven. If Mongoldom has settled the existence of spiritual beings,--if it has created a world of spirits, a heaven,--the Caucasians have wrestled for thousands of years with these spiritual beings, to get to the bottom of them. What were they doing, then, but building on Mongolian ground? They have not built on sand, but in the air; they have wrestled with Mongolism, stormed the Mongolian heaven, Tien. When will they at last annihilate this heaven? When will they at last become _really Caucasians_, and find themselves? When will the "immortality of the soul," which in these latter days thought it was giving itself still more security if it presented itself as "immortality of mind," at last change to the _mortality of mind_?