which he endeavors to establish the position that the entire civilization of the Orient, in its institutions, such as the family and the state, in the structure of its language, in its conceptions of nature, in its art, in its religion, and finally in its inherent mental nature, is essentially impersonal.  One of the prominent and long resident missionaries in Japan once delivered a course of lectures on the influence of pantheism in the Orient, in which he contended, among other things, that the lack of personal pronouns and other phenomena of Japanese life and religion are due to the presence and power in this land of pantheistic philosophy preventing the development of personality.

The more I have examined these writings and their fundamental assumptions, the more manifest have ambiguities and contradictions in the use of terms become.  I have become also increasingly impressed with the failure of advocates of Japanese “impersonality” to appreciate the real nature of the phenomena they seek to explain.  They have not comprehended the nature or the course of social evolution, nor have they discovered the mutual relation existing between the social order and personality.  The arguments advanced for the “impersonal” view are more or less plausible, and this method of interpreting the Orient appeals for authority to respectable philosophical writers.  No less a philosopher than Hegel is committed to this interpretation.  The importance of this subject, not only for a correct understanding of Japan, but also of the relation existing between individual, social, and religious evolution, requires us to give it careful attention.  We shall make our way most easily into this difficult discussion by considering some prevalent misconceptions and defective arguments.  I may here express my indebtedness to the author of “The Soul of the Far East” for the stimulus received from his brilliant volume, differ though I do from his main thesis.  We begin this study with a few quotations from Mr. Lowell’s now classic work.

“Capability to evolve anything is not one of the marked characteristics of the Far East.  Indeed, the tendency to spontaneous variation, Nature’s mode of making experiments, would seem there to have been an enterprising faculty that was early exhausted.  Sleepy, no doubt, from having got up betimes with the dawn, these inhabitants of the land of the morning began to look upon their day as already far spent before they had reached its noon.  They grew old young, and have remained much the same age ever since.  What they were centuries ago, that at bottom they are to-day.  Take away the European influences of the past twenty years, and each man might almost be his own great-grandfather.  In race character, he is yet essentially the same.  The traits that distinguished these peoples in the past have been gradually extinguishing them ever since.  Of these traits, stagnating influences upon their career, perhaps the most important is the great quality of “impersonality."[CGa]