I beg leave for a moment’s digression while I am on this subject, inasmuch as some of the noblest types of bushi were strongly influenced by the teachings of this sage.  Western readers will easily recognize in his writings many parallels to the New Testament.  Making allowance for the terms peculiar to either teaching, the passage, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you,” conveys a thought that may be found on almost any page of Wan Yang Ming.  A Japanese disciple[7] of his says—­“The lord of heaven and earth, of all living beings, dwelling in the heart of man, becomes his mind (Kokoro); hence a mind is a living thing, and is ever luminous:”  and again, “The spiritual light of our essential being is pure, and is not affected by the will of man.  Spontaneously springing up in our mind, it shows what is right and wrong:  it is then called conscience; it is even the light that proceedeth from the god of heaven.”  How very much do these words sound like some passages from Isaac Pennington or other philosophic mystics!  I am inclined to think that the Japanese mind, as expressed in the simple tenets of the Shinto religion, was particularly open to the reception of Yang Ming’s precepts.  He carried his doctrine of the infallibility of conscience to extreme transcendentalism, attributing to it the faculty to perceive, not only the distinction between right and wrong, but also the nature of psychical facts and physical phenomena.  He went as far as, if not farther than, Berkeley and Fichte, in Idealism, denying the existence of things outside of human ken.  If his system had all the logical errors charged to Solipsism, it had all the efficacy of strong conviction and its moral import in developing individuality of character and equanimity of temper cannot be gainsaid.

[Footnote 7:  Miwa Shissai.]

Thus, whatever the sources, the essential principles which Bushido imbibed from them and assimilated to itself, were few and simple.  Few and simple as these were, they were sufficient to furnish a safe conduct of life even through the unsafest days of the most unsettled period of our nation’s history.  The wholesome, unsophisticated nature of our warrior ancestors derived ample food for their spirit from a sheaf of commonplace and fragmentary teachings, gleaned as it were on the highways and byways of ancient thought, and, stimulated by the demands of the age, formed from these gleanings anew and unique type of manhood.  An acute French savant, M. de la Mazeliere, thus sums up his impressions of the sixteenth century:—­“Toward the middle of the sixteenth century, all is confusion in Japan, in the government, in society, in the church.  But the civil wars, the manners returning to barbarism, the necessity for each to execute justice for himself,—­these formed men comparable to those Italians of the sixteenth century, in whom Taine praises ’the vigorous