But the impression of these special instances is but one example of a more universal impression of the Asiatic atmosphere; and that atmosphere itself is only an example of something vaster still for which I am trying to find words.
Asia stands for something which the world in the West as well as the East is more and more feeling as a presence, and even a pressure.

It might be called the spiritual world let loose; or a sort of psychical anarchy; a jungle of mango plants.
And it is pressing upon the West also to-day because of the breaking down of certain materialistic barriers that have hitherto held it back.
In plain words the attitude of science is not only modified; it is now entirely reversed.

I do not say it with mere pleasure; in some ways I prefer our materialism to their spiritualism.
But for good or evil the scientists are now destroying their own scientific world.
The agnostics have been driven back on agnosticism; and are already recovering from the shock.

They find themselves in a really unknown world under really unknown gods; a world which is more mystical, or at least more mysterious.
For in the Victorian age the agnostics were not really agnostics.
They might be better described as reverent materialists; or at any rate monists.

They had at least at the back of their minds a clear and consistent concept of their rather clockwork cosmos; that is why they could not admit the smallest speck of the supernatural into their clockwork.