The poverty of poetic form is another point of Western criticism.  Mr. Aston has shown how this poverty is directly due to the phonetic characteristics of the language.  Diversities of both rhyme and rhythm are practically excluded from Japanese poetry by the nature of the language.  And this in turn has led to the “preference of the national genius for short poems.”  But language is manifestly the combined product of linguistic heredity and the social order, and can in no sense be ascribed to inherent race nature.  Thus directly are social heredity and social order determinative of the literary characteristics and aesthetic tastes of a nation.

Even more manifestly may Japanese architectural development be traced to the social heredity derived from China and India.  The needs of the developing internal civilization have determined its external manifestation.  So far as Japanese differs from Chinese architecture, it may be attributed to Japan’s isolation, to the different demands of her social order, to the difference of accessible building materials, and to the different social heredity handed down from prehistoric times.  That the distinguishing characteristics of Japanese architecture are due to the inherent race nature cannot for a moment be admitted.

We conclude that the Japanese are not possessed of a unique and inherent aesthetic taste.  In some respects they are as certainly ahead of the Occidental as they are behind him in other respects.  But this, too, is a matter of social development and social heredity, rather than of inherent race character, of brain structure.  If aesthetic nature were a matter of inherited brain structure, it would be impossible to account for rapid fluctuations in aesthetic judgment, for the great inequality of aesthetic development in the different departments of life, or for the ease of acquiring the aesthetic development of alien races.[X]

XVI

MEMORY—­IMITATION

The differences which separate the Oriental from the Occidental mind are infinitesimal as compared with the likenesses which unite them.  This is a fact that needs to be emphasized, for many writers on Japan seem to ignore it.  They marvel at the differences.  The real marvel is that the differences are so few and so superficial.  The Japanese are a race whose ancestors were separated from their early home nearly three thousand years ago; during this period they have been absolutely prevented from intermarriage with the parent stock.  Furthermore, that original stock was not the Indo-European race.  And no one has ventured to suggest how long before the migration of the ancestors of the Japanese to Japan their ancestors parted from those who finally became the progenitors of modern Occidental peoples.  For thousands of years, certainly, the Japanese and Anglo-Saxon races have had no ancestry in common.  Yet so similar is the entire structure and working of their minds