read it carefully, making his notes in Japanese on the margin.  I asked him if he had read it through.  “Yes,” he replied, “three times.”  He also incidentally informed me that he had thought of entering our mission theological training class during the previous winter, but that he was then in the midst of the study of the philosophy of Kant, and had accordingly decided to defer entering until the autumn.  How thoroughly he had mastered these, the most profound and abstruse metaphysicians that the West can boast, I cannot state.  But this at least is clear; his interest in them was real and lasting.  And in his conversation he showed keen appreciation of philosophical problems.  It is to be noted also that he was a self-taught philosopher—­for he had attended no school since he studied elementary English, ten years before, while a lad of less than twenty.

As a sample of the kind of men I not infrequently meet, let me cite the case of a young business man who once called on me in the hotel at Imabari, popularly called “the little philosopher.”  He wished to talk about the problem of the future life and to ask my personal belief in the matter.  He said that he believed in God and in Jesus as His unique son and revealer, but that he found great difficulty in believing in the continued life of the soul after death.  His difficulty arose from the problems of the nature of future thinking; shall we continue to think in terms of sense perception, such as time, space, form, color, pleasure, and pain?  If not, how can we think at all?  And can we then remember our present life?  If we do, then the future life will not be essentially different from this, i.e., we must still have physical senses, and continue to live in an essentially physical world.  Here was a set of objections to the doctrine of the future life that I have never heard as much as mentioned by any Occidental youth.  Though without doubt not original with him, yet he must have had in some degree both philosophical ability and interest in order to appreciate their force and to seek their solution.

In conversation not long since with a Buddhist priest of the Tendai sect, after responding to his request for a criticism of Buddhism, I asked him for a similarly frank criticism of Christianity.  To my surprise, he said that while Christianity was far ahead of Buddhism in its practical parts and in its power to mold character, it was deficient in philosophical insight and interest.  This led to a prolonged conversation on Buddhistic philosophy, in which he explained the doctrines of the “Ku-ge-chu,” and the “Usa and Musa.”  Without attempting to explain them here, I may say that the first is amazingly like Hegel’s “absolute nothing,” with its thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, and the second a psychological distinction between volitional and spontaneous emotions.