use, such as “hi,” “day,” “Nichirin,” “day-ball,” “Ten-to Sama,” “the god of heaven’s light;” and for “moon,” it has “tsuki,” “month,” “getsu-rin,” “month ball.”  The names given to her men-of-war also indicate a fanciful nature.  The torpedo destroyers are named “Dragon-fly,” “Full Moon,” “The Moon in the Cloud,” “Seabeach,” “Dawn of Day,” “Clustering Clouds,” “Break of Day,” “Ripples,” “Evening Mist,” “Dragon’s Lamp,” “Falcon,” “Magpie,” “White-naped Crane,” and “White Hawk.”  Surely, it cannot be maintained that the Japanese are utterly lacking in fancy.

Distinguishing between fancy as “the power of forming pleasing, graceful, whimsical, or odd mental images, or of combining them with little regard to rational processes of construction,” and imagination, in its more philosophical use, as “the act of constructive intellect in grouping the materials of knowledge or thought into new, original, and rational systems,” we assert without fear of successful contradiction, that the Japanese race is not without either of these important mental faculties.

In addition to the preceding illustrations of visionary and fanciful traits, let the reader reflect on the significance of the comic and of caricature in art.  Japanese Netsuke (tiny carvings of exquisite skill representing comical men, women, and children) are famous the world over.  Surely, the fancy is the most conspicuous mental characteristic revealed in this branch of Japanese art.  In Japanese poetry “a vast number of conceits, more or less pretty,” are to be found, likewise manifesting the fancy of both the authors who wrote and the people who were pleased with and preserved their writings.[AT] The so-called “impersonal habit of the Japanese mind,” with a corresponding “lack of personification of abstract qualities,” doubtless prevents Japanese literature from rising to the poetic heights attained by Western nations.  But this lack does not prove the Japanese mind incapable of such flights.  As describing the actual characteristics of the literature of the past the assertion of “a lack of imaginative power” is doubtless fairly correct.  But the inherent nature of the Japanese mind cannot be inferred from the deficiencies of its past literature, without first examining the relation between its characteristic features and the nature of the social order and the social inheritance.

Are the Japanese conspicuously deficient in imagination, in the sense of the definition given above?  The constructive imagination is the creator of civilization.  Not only art and literature, but, as already noted, science, philosophy, politics, and even the practical arts and prosaic farming are impossible without it.  It is the tap-root of invention, of discovery, of originality.

It is needless to repeat what has been said in previous chapters[AU] on Japanese imitation, invention, discovery, and originality.  Yet, in consideration of the facts there given, are we justified in counting the Japanese so conspicuously deficient in constructive, imagination as to warrant the assertion that such a lack is the fundamental characteristic of the race psychic nature?