I quite admit the fact that many Japanese themselves are quite convinced that there is a great gulf fixed between the ideas and the philosophy of Europe and those of the East, their own country included. In a book dealing particularly with the art of Japan, written in English by a Japanese, he attempts to emphasise this matter. He remarks: "Asia is one. The Himalayas divide only to accentuate two mighty civilisations--the Chinese, with its communism of Confucius, and the Indian, with its individualism of the Vedas. But not even the snowy barriers can interrupt for one moment that broad expanse of love for the Ultimate and Universal which is the common-thought inheritance of every Asiatic race, enabling them to produce all the great religions of the world, and distinguishing them from those maritime people of the Mediterranean and the Baltic who loved to dwell on the particular, and to search out the means not the end of life." Indeed, the writer of this book appears to be in a condition of transcendentalism in reference to the East. In another portion of it he waxes eloquent in regard to what he terms the glory of Asia, in language which I will briefly quote. He remarks:-- "But the glory of Asia is something more positive than these. It lies in that vibration of peace that beats in every heart; that harmony which brings together emperor and peasant; that sublime intuition of oneness which commands all sympathy, all courtesy, to be its fruits, making Takakura, Emperor of Japan, remove his sleeping robes on a winter night because the frost lay cold on the hearths of his poor; or Taiso of Tang forego food because his people were feeling the pinch of famine; ... it lies in that worship of feeling which casts around poverty the halo of greatness, impresses his stern simplicity of apparel on the Indian prince, and sets up in China a throne whose imperial occupant--alone amongst the great secular rulers of the world--never wears a sword."