interest.  It shows itself in their religions.  Abnormal stones are often objects of religious devotion.  Although I cannot affirm that such objects are worshiped in Japan to-day, yet I can say that they are frequently set up in temple grounds and dedicated with suitable inscriptions.  Where nature can be made to produce the abnormal, there the interest is still greater.  It is a living miracle.  Witness the cocks of Tosa, distinguished by their two or three tail feathers reaching the extraordinary length of ten or even fifteen feet, the product of ages of special breeding.

According to the ordinary use of the term, aesthetics has to do with art alone.  Yet it also has intimate relations with both speech and conduct.  Poetry depends for its very existence on aesthetic considerations.  Although little conscious regard is paid to aesthetic claims in ordinary conversation, yet people of culture do, as a matter of fact, pay it much unconscious attention.  In conduct too, aesthetic ideas are often more dominant than we suppose.  The objection of the cultured to the ways of the boorish rests on aesthetic grounds.  This is true in every land.  In the matter of conduct it is sometimes hard to draw the line between aesthetics and ethics, for they shade imperceptibly into one another; so much so that they are seen to be complementary rather than contradictory.  Though it is doubtless true that conduct aesthetically defective may not be defective ethically, still is it not quite as true that conduct bad from the ethical is bad also from the aesthetical standpoint?

In no land have aesthetic considerations had more force in molding both speech and conduct than in Japan.  Not a sentence is uttered by a Japanese but has the characteristic marks of aestheticism woven into its very structure.  By means of “honorifics” it is seldom necessary for a speaker to be so pointedly vulgar as even to mention self.  There are few points in the language so difficult for a foreigner to master, whether in speaking himself, or in listening to others, as the use of these honorific words.  The most delicate shades of courtesy and discourtesy may be expressed by them.  Some writers have attributed the relative absence of the personal pronouns from the language to the dominating force of impersonal pantheism.  I am unable to take this view for reasons stated in the later chapters on personality.

Though the honorific characteristics of the language seem to indicate a high degree of aesthetic development, a certain lack of delicacy in referring to subjects that are ruled out of conversation by cultivated people in the West make the contrary impression upon the uninitiated.  Such language in Japan cannot be counted impure, for no such idea accompanies the words.  They must be described simply as aesthetically defective.  Far be it from me to imply that there is no impure conversation in Japan.  I only say that the particular usages to which I refer are not necessarily a proof of moral tendency.  A realistic baldness prevails that makes no effort to conceal even that which is in its nature unpleasant and unaesthetic.  A spade is called a spade without the slightest hesitation.  Of course specific illustrations of such a point as this are out of place.  AEsthetic considerations forbid.