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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: continually to the sun, and those of the other peering eternally out
at the stars, some such difference as actually exists between
ourselves and our longitudinal antipodes. For our conception of the
cosmos is of a sunlit world throbbing with life, while their Nirvana
finds not unfit expression in the still, cold, fathomless awe of the
midnight sky. That we cannot thus directly account for the
difference in local coloring serves but to make that difference of
more human interest. The dissimilarity between the Western and the
Far Eastern attitude of mind has in it something beyond the effect
of environment. For it points to the importance of the part which
the principle of individuality plays in the great drama daily
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