Still further.  Once let the idea be firmly grounded in an individual that he has no freedom of belief, of choice, or of act, and in the vast majority of cases, as a matter of fact, he will have none.  “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.”  “According to your faith be it unto you.”  This doctrine of individual freedom is one of those that cannot be forced on a man who does not choose to believe it.  In a true sense, it is my belief that I am free that makes me free.  As Prof.  James well says, the doctrine of the freedom of the will cannot be rammed down any man’s intellectual throat, for that very act would abridge his real freedom.  Man’s real freedom is proved by his freedom to reject even the doctrine of his freedom.  But so long as he rejects it, his freedom is only potential.  Because of his belief in his bondage he is in bondage.  Now this doctrine of fate has been the warp and woof of the thinking of the bulk of the Japanese people in their efforts to explain all the vicissitudes of life.  Not only, therefore, has it failed to stimulate the volitional element of the psychic nature, but in the psychology of the Orient little if any attention has been given to this faculty.  Oriental psychology practically knows nothing of personality because it has failed to note one of its central elements, the freedom of the will.  The individual, therefore, has not been appealed to to exercise his free moral choice, one of the highest prerogatives of his nature.  Moral responsibility has not been laid on his individual shoulders.  A method of moral appeal fitted to develop the deepest element of his personality has thus been precluded.

It thus resulted that although philosophic Buddhism developed a high degree of self-consciousness, yet because it failed to discover personal freedom it did not deliver popular Buddhism from its grinding doctrine of fate, rather it fastened this incubus of social progress more firmly upon it.  Philosophic and popular Buddhism alike thus threw athwart the course of human and social evolution the tremendous obstacle of fatalism, which the Orient has never discovered a way either to surmount or evade.  Buddhism teaches the impotence of the individual will; it destroys the sense of moral responsibility; it thus fails to understand the real nature of man, his glory and power and even his divinity, which the West sums up in the term personality.  In this sense, then, the influence of Buddhism and the condition of the Orient may be called “impersonal,” but it is the impersonality of a defective religious psychology, and of communalism in the social order.  Whether it is right to call this feature of Japan “impersonality,” I leave with the reader to judge.

We draw this chapter to a close with a renewed conception of the inadequacy of the “impersonal” theory to explain Japanese religious and social phenomena.  Further considerations, however, still merit attention ere we leave this subject.