The units of the village community are not individuals but families. Nothing is more important for an understanding of the wonderfully stable and long-lived social system of China than this fact: that the social and the political unit are one and the same, and that this unit is not the individual but the family.[79]
It is well known that this family-system exists, or till recently existed, in nearly every Asiatic country; and that only within the present generation the advance of European influence and legal notions has in some parts of the Continent brought about a gradual tendency to Western individualism.[80]
But the European must not too hastily assume, when he sees individualism largely replacing the old family-system in such countries as Japan, that the wiser heads in those countries regard the change as being in all respects beneficial. Some of them are inclined to fear that the new system--though its adoption may possibly be necessary in order to supply their country with a certain brute strength which the old system lacked, and so to enable it to cope with European aggression--tends to the grievous injury of much that they believe to be essential to true civilisation. They do not welcome with enthusiasm the emergence above the social and political horizon of that strange new star--the self-contained individual. They contemplate with something like dismay the weakening or breaking of the old family bonds, which if they were sometimes a hindrance to personal advancement and had a cramping influence on the individual life, at least did much to keep within bounds the primitive instincts of selfishness and greed.
Even in Europe there are thinkers who have expressed doubts as to whether our Western individualism is not a terribly fragile and unstable foundation on which to build a vast social system; whether there are not already signs of decay in the very bases of our civilisation. The truth of the matter is that there are certain profound social problems which have never yet been solved either by the East or by the West. We are all yet in various experimental stages of social progress. It may be that if Western theories and ideals have soared to greater heights, Eastern theories and ideals have aimed at producing a greater fundamental solidity;[81] and that, the essential differences being so great, it is inadvisable for either hemisphere to press its ideals too persistently on the other, and dangerous for either to abandon its own ideals too hastily in deference to the other's teaching or example.