Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER FIRST. The Oriental Type. When we speak of the Orient we have to imagine a huge cauldron in which are fermenting and germinating all the possibilities of the whole human race for all coming time. Asia seems to be the All-Mother of what has been, is, and will be. Europe has by no means exhausted the potentialities of the Orient, it has unfolded but a small part of them in the past few thousand years of its development. We may suppose that the destiny of our globe is to unfold the germs of the many unrealized civilizations which first budded in the great Rivcr-7"alleys of the East, and which are apparently still awaiting their turn in the cycle of the total evolution of our planet. For this reason Asia is called mysterious by the European; it is largely undeveloped, unspoken and unspeakable for our consciousness; very old it is, and yet the baby of this earth in spite of its ancient wisdom and hoary monuments. Especially is Asia the birth-place of Religion and of Religions, of quite all of them in fact, in so far as they rise above savagery. Europe has had for a long time substantially one Religion, and that came from Asia; also it has one fundamental language, which likewise goes back to the same source. Similarly Architecture, which is so profoundly connected with Religion in its origin, springs from the Orient. Associated Man there made the earliest worthy dwelling-place of the God who made him and endowed him with the power of association, and hence of building a temple. The religious Institution first called forth Architecture to erect its institutional home through human co-operation. The united nation builds a worthy abode for the God who has made it a united nation. This united nation is one form of associated Man, though not the only one; as the race unfolds ...