The explanation usually given for the puerilities of Oriental science, history, and religion has been short and simple, namely, the inherent nature of the Oriental races, as if this were the final fact, needing and admitting no further explanation.  That the Orient has not developed history or science is doubtless true, but the correct explanation of this fact is, in my opinion, that the educational method of the entire Orient has rested on mechanical memorization; during the formative period of the mind the exclusive effort of education has been to develop a memory which acts by arbitrary or fanciful connections and relations.  A Japanese boy of Old Japan, for instance, began his education at from seven to eight years of age and spent three or four years in memorizing the thousands of Chinese hieroglyphic characters contained in the Shisho and Gokyo, nine of the Chinese classics.  This completed, his teacher would begin to explain to him the meaning of the characters and sentences.  The entire educational effort was to develop the powers of observing and memorizing accidental, superficial, or even purely artificial relations.  This double faculty of observing trifling and irrelevant details, and of remembering them, became phenomenally and abnormally developed.

Recent works on the psychology of education, however, have made plain how an excessive development of a child’s lower mental faculties may arrest its later growth in all the higher departments of its intellectual nature; the development of a mechanical memory is well known as a serious obstacle to the higher activities of reason.  Now Japanese education for centuries, like Chinese, has developed such memory.  It trained the lower and ignored the higher.  Much of the Japanese education of to-day, although it includes mathematics, science, and history, is based on the mechanical memory method.  The Orient is thus a mammoth illustration of the effects of over-development of the mechanical memory, and the consequent arrest of the development of the remaining powers of the mind.

Encumbered by this educational ideal and system, how could the ancient Chinese and Japanese men of education make a critical study of history, or develop any science worthy of the name?  The childish physics and astronomy, the brutal therapeutics and the magical and superstitious religions of the Orient, are a necessary consequence of its educational system, not of its inherent lack of the higher mental powers.

If Japanese children brought up from infancy in American homes, and sent to American schools from kindergarten days onward, should still manifest marked deficiencies in powers of analysis and generalization, as compared with American children, we should then be compelled to conclude that this difference is due to diverse natal psychic endowment.  Generalizations as to the inherent intellectual deficiencies of the Oriental are based on observations of individuals already developed