If, therefore, this trait is more marked in Japanese character than in that of many other nations, it may be easily traced to the social order that has ruled this land “from time immemorial.”  More than any other of her mental characteristics, impractical visionariness may be traced to the development of the nervous organization at the expense of the muscular.  This characteristic accordingly may be said to be more inherently a race characteristic than many others that have been mentioned.  Yet we should remember that the samurai constitute but a small proportion of the people.  According to recent statistics (1895) the entire class to-day numbers but 2,050,000, while the common people number over 40,000,000.  It is, furthermore, to be remembered that not all the descendants of the samurai are thus nervously organized.  Large numbers have a splendid physical endowment, with no trace of abnormal nervous development.  While the old feudal order, with its constant carrying of swords, and the giving of honor to the most impetuous, naturally tended to push the most high-strung individuals into the forefront and to set them up as models for the imitation of the young, the social order now regnant in Japan faces in the other direction.  Such visionary men are increasingly relegated to the rear.  Their approach to insanity is recognized and condemned.  Even this trait of character, therefore, which seems to be rooted in brain and nerve structure is, nevertheless, more subject to the prevailing social order than would at first seem possible.

Its rise we have seen was due to that order, and the setting aside of these characteristics as ideals at least, and thus the bringing into prominence of more normal and healthy ideals, is due to the coming in of a new order.

Japanese prosaic matter-of-factness may similarly be shown to have intimate relations to the nature of the social order.  Oppressive military feudalism, keeping the vast majority of the people in practical bondage, physical, intellectual, and spiritual, would necessarily render their lives and thoughts narrow in range and spiritless in nature.  Such a system crushes out hope.  From sunrise to sunset, “nembyaku nenju,” “for a hundred years and through all the year,” the humdrum duties of daily life were the only psychic stimuli of the absolutely uneducated masses.  Without ambition, without self-respect, without education or any stimulus for the higher mental life, what possible manifestation of the higher powers of the mind could be expected?  Should some “sport” appear by chance, it could not long escape the sword of domineering samurai.  Even though originally possessing some degree of imagination, cringing fear of military masters, with the continuous elimination by ruthless slaughter of the more idealizing, less submissive, and more self-assertive individuals of the non-military classes, would finally produce a dull, imitative, unimaginative, and matter-of-fact class such as we find in the hereditary laboring and merchant classes.