salvation of China, just as the generation before had labored under the delusion that China was superior to the West in everything but methods of warfare.
The students at Tokyo in those days were mostly interested in subjects that led to profitable jobs when they went back to China—in politics, law, police administration, and more rarely science and technology. They could not see why Lusin chose to follow so useless a pursuit as literature. His efforts to launch in Tokyo a literary magazine to be known as New Life ended in failure and his essays calling attention to the spiritual aspects of Western civilization went unnoticed.
Undoubtedly, however, these essays will be regarded as the most important documents in the history of the intellectual revolution in China. For here we have the first indication of a Chinese appreciation of the spiritual aspects of European civilization. The first essay was an exposition of the philosophy of Haeckel; the second a survey of the history of Western science. The third is perhaps the most important, because it furnishes a clue to Lusin's fundamental intellectual skepticism and sets forth at the same time Lusin's fundamental belief in the fostering and development of individual genius. Having outlined China's complacency in the past, due to her cultural isolation, and her rude awakening after defeat in the hands of the foreign powers, he goes on to point out that materialism, industrial development, and political democracy—panaceas recommended by reformers of the time—were by no means the ultimate or the currently accepted philosophies of the West, but only phases in its historical development. Since civilization is built upon the past, he argues, it is always in a state of flux and always subject to change and improvement. The materialistic character of nineteenth-century civilization in the West represented, he tells us, an
