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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: corresponding feeling in degree, and especially in universality
enough to merit the distinction. Their care for tree flowers is not
confined to a cultivation, it is a cult. It approaches to a sort of
natural nature-worship, an adoration in which nothing is personified.
For the emotion aroused in the Far Oriental is just as truly an
emotion as it was to the Greek; but whereas the Greek personified
its object, the Japanese admires that object for what it is.
To think of the cherry-tree, for instance, as a woman, would be to
his mind a conception transcending even the limits of the ludicrous.
Chapter 6. Art.
That nature, not man, is their beau ideal, the source of inspiration
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