Yet these people are human beings; with all their eccentricities they
are men. Physically we cannot but be cognizant of the fact, nor mentally
but be conscious of it. Like us, indeed, and yet so unlike are they
that we seem, as we gaze at them, to be viewing our own humanity in
some mirth-provoking mirror of the mind,--a mirror that shows us our own
familiar thoughts, but all turned wrong side out. Humor holds the glass,
and we become the sport of our own reflections. But is it otherwise at
home? Do not our personal presentments mock each of us individually
our lives long? Who but is the daily dupe of his dressing-glass, and
complacently conceives himself to be a very different appearing person
from what he is, forgetting that his right side has become his left, and
vice versa? Yet who, when by chance he catches sight in like manner of
the face of a friend, can keep from smiling at the caricatures which the
mirror's left-for-right reversal makes of the asymmetry of that
friend's features,--caricatures all the more grotesque for being utterly
unsuspected by their innocent original? Perhaps, could we once see
ourselves as others see us, our surprise in the case of foreign peoples
might be less pronounced.
Regarding, then, the Far Oriental as a man, and not simply as
a phenomenon, we discover in his peculiar point of view a new
importance,--the possibility of using it stereoptically. For his
mind-photograph of the world can be placed side by side with ours, and
the two pictures combined will yield results beyond what either alone
could possibly have afforded. Thus harmonized, they will help us
to realize humanity. Indeed it is only by such a combination of two
different aspects that we ever perceive substance and distinguish
reality from illusion. What our two eyes make possible for material
objects, the earth's two hemispheres may enable us to do for mental
traits. Only the superficial never changes its expression; the
appearance of the solid varies with the standpoint of the observer.
In dreamland alone does everything seem plain, and there all is
unsubstantial.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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