Through contact with Westerners and the ideas they stand for, directness and reality are being assimilated and developed by the Japanese.  This would be impossible were the characteristic in question due to inherent race nature necessarily bequeathed from generation to generation by intrinsic heredity.

XIX

INTELLECTUALITY

Some writers hold that the Japanese are inherently deficient in the higher mental faculties.  They consider mediocre mentality to be an inborn characteristic of Japan and assert that it lies at the root of the civilizational differences distinguishing the East from the West.  The puerility of Oriental science in all its departments, the prevalence of superstition even among the cultivated, the lack of historical insight and interpretation of history are adduced as conclusive evidences of this view.

Foreign teachers in Japanese employ have told me that Japanese students, as compared with those of the West, manifest deficient powers of analysis and of generalization.  Some even assert that the Japanese have no generalizing ability whatever, their progress in civilization being entirely due to their remarkable power of clever imitation.  Mr. W.G.  Aston, in ascribing the characteristic features of Japanese literature to the fundamental nature of the race, says they are “hardly capable of high intellectual achievement."[AL]

While we may admit that the Japanese do not seem to have at present the same power of scientific generalization as Occidentals, we naturally ask ourselves whether the difference is due to natal deficiency, or whether it may not be due to difference in early training.  We must not forget that the youth who come under the observation of foreign teachers in Japanese schools are already products of the Japanese system of education, home and school, and necessarily are as defective as it is.

In a previous chapter a few instances of recent invention and important scientific discovery were given.

These could not have been made without genuine powers of analysis and generalization.  We need not linger to elaborate this point.

Another set of facts throwing light on our problem is the success of so many Japanese students, at home and in foreign lands, in mastering modern thought.  Great numbers have come back from Europe and America with diplomas and titles; not a few have taken high rank in their classes.  The Japanese student abroad is usually a hard worker, like his brother at home.  I doubt if any students in the new or the old world study more hours in a year than do these of Japan.  It has often amazed me to learn how much they are required to do.  This is one fair sign of intellectuality.  The ease too with which young Japan, educated in Occidental schools and introduced to Occidental systems of thought, acquires abstruse speculations, searching analyses, and generalized abstractions proves conclusively Japanese possession of the higher mental faculties, in spite of the long survival in their civilization of primitive puerility and superstitions and the lack of science, properly so called.