Furthermore, Japanese civilization, like that of the entire Orient, with its highly communalized social order, is an expression of passive submission to superior authority.  Although an incomplete characterization, there is still much truth in saying that the Orient is an expression of Fate, the Occident of Freedom.  We have seen that a better contrasted characterization is found in the terms communal and individual.  The Orient has known nothing of individualism.  It has not valued the individual nor sought his elevation and freedom.  In every way, on the contrary, it has repressed and opposed him.  The high development of the individual culminating in powerful personality has been an exceptional occurrence, due to special circumstances.  A communal social order, often repressing and invariably failing to evoke the higher human faculties, must express its real nature in the language, literature, and customs of the people.  Thus in our chapter on the AEsthetic Characteristics of the Japanese[AV] we saw how the higher forms of literature were dependent on the development of manhood and on a realization of his nature.  A communal social order despising, or at least ignoring the individual, cannot produce the highest forms of literature or art, because it does not possess the highest forms of psychic development.  Take from Western life all that rests on or springs from the principles of individual worth, freedom, and immortality, and how much of value or sublimity will remain?  The absence from Japanese literature and language of the higher forms of fancy, metaphor, and personification on the one hand, and, on the other, the presence of widespread prosaic matter-of-factness, are thus intimately related to the communal nature of Japan’s long dominant social order.

Similarly, in regard to the constructive imagination, whose conspicuous lack in Japan is universally asserted by foreign critics, we reply first that the assertion is an exaggeration, and secondly, that so far as it is fact, it is intimately related to the social order.  In our discussions concerning Japanese Intellectuality and Philosophical Ability,[AW] we saw how intimate a relation exists between the social order, particularly as expressed in its educational system, and the development of the higher mental faculties.  Now a moment’s reflection will show how the constructive imagination, belonging as it does to the higher faculties, was suppressed by the system of mechanical and superficial education required by the social order.  Religion apotheosized ancestral knowledge and customs, thus effectively condemning all conscious use of this faculty.  So far as it was used, it was under the guise of reviving old knowledge or of expounding it more completely.