But the most subtle and scholarly doctrine appealed to in support of national pride is the biological conception of society.  Popular writers assume that society is a biological organism and that the laws of its evolution are therefore biological.  This assumption is not strange, for until recent times the most advanced professional sociologists have been dominated by the same misconception.  Spencer, for example, makes sociology a branch of biology.  More recent sociological writers, however, such as Professors Giddings and Fairbanks, have taken special pains to assert the essentially psychic character of society; they reject the biological conception, as inadequate to express the real nature of society.  The biological conception, they insist, is nothing more than a comparison, useful for bringing out certain features of the social life and structure, but harmful if understood as their full statement.  The laws of psychic activity and development differ as widely from those of biologic activity and development as these latter do from those that hold in the chemical world.  If the laws which regulate psychic development and the progress of civilization were understood by popular writers on Japan, and if the recent progress of Japan had been stated in the terms of these laws, there would not have been so much mystification in the West in regard to this matter as there evidently has been.  Japan would not have appeared to have “jumped out of her skin,” or suddenly to have escaped from the heredity of her past millenniums of development.  This wide misunderstanding of Japan, then, is not simply due to the fact that “Japanese progress, traced to its causes and explained by reference to the means employed, is not nearly such fascinating reading as when represented in the guise of a fairy creation,” but it is also due to the still current popular view that the social organism is biological, and subject therefore to the laws of biological evolution.  On this assumption, some hold that the progress of Japan, however it may appear, is really superficial, while others represent it as somehow having evaded the laws regulating the development of other races.  A nation’s character and characteristics are conceived to be the product of brain-structure; these can change only as brain structure changes.  Brain is held to determine civilization, rather than civilization brain.  Hampered by this defective view, popular writers inevitably describe Japan to the West in terms that necessarily misrepresent her, and that at the same time pander to Occidental pride and prejudice.