This, however, has been the experience of every race in certain stages of its development.  Such periods have been conspicuously deficient in powerful literature, progressive science, penetrating philosophy, or developing political life.  When a nation has once entered such a social order it becomes stagnant, its further development is arrested.  The activity of the higher faculties of the mind are in abeyance, but not destroyed.  It needs the electric shock of contact and conflict with foreign races to startle the race out of its fatal repose and start it on new lines of progress by demanding, on pain of death, or at least of racial subordination, the introduction of new elements into its social order by a renewed exercise of the constructive imagination.  For without such action of the constructive imagination a radical and voluntary modification of the dominant social order is impossible.

Old Japan experienced this electric shock and New Japan is the result.  She is thus a living witness to the inaccuracy of those sweeping generalizations as to her inherent deficiency of constructive imagination.

It is by no means our contention that Japanese imagination is now as widely and profoundly exercised as that of the leading Western nations.  We merely contend that the exercise of this mental faculty is intimately related to the nature of the whole social order; that under certain circumstances this important faculty may be so suppressed as to give the impression to superficial observers of entire absence, and that with a new environment necessitating a new social order, this faculty may again be brought into activity.

The inevitable conclusion of the above line of thought is that the activity and the manifestation of the higher faculties is so intimately related to the nature of the social order as to prevent our attributing any particular mental characteristics to a race as its inherent and unchangeable nature.  The psychic characteristics of a race at any given time are the product of the inherited social order.  To transform those characteristics changes in the social order, introduced either from without, or through individuals within the race, are alone needful.  This completes our specific study of the intellectual characteristics of the Japanese.  It may seem, as it undoubtedly is, quite fragmentary.  But we have purposely omitted all reference to those characteristics which the Japanese admittedly have in common with other races.  We have attempted the consideration of only the more outstanding characteristics by which they seem to be differentiated from other races.  We have attempted to show that in so far as they are different, the difference is due not to inherent psychic nature transmitted by organic heredity, but to the nature of the social order, transmitted by social heredity.

XXII

MORAL IDEALS