“Cross-breeding constitutes the only infallible means at our disposal of transforming in a fundamental manner the character of a people, heredity being the only force powerful enough to contend with heredity.  Cross-breeding allows of the creation of a new race, possessing new physical and psychological characteristics."[DM]

Such, then, being the opinion of travelers, residents, and professional sociologists, it is not to be lightly rejected.  Nor has it been lightly rejected by the writer.  For years he agreed with this view, but repeated study of the problem has convinced him of the fallacy of both the conception and the argument, and has brought him to the position maintained in this work.

The characteristics differentiating Occidental and

Oriental peoples and civilizations are undoubtedly great.  But they are differences of social evolution and rest on social, not on biological heredity.  Anatomical differences are natal, racial, and necessary.  Not so with social characteristics and differences.  These are acquired by each individual chiefly after birth, and depend on social environment which determines the education from infancy upward.  Furthermore, an entire nation or race, if subjected to the right social environment, may profoundly transform its institutions, beliefs, and arts, which in turn transform what Prof.  Le Bon and kindred writers call the invisible “race soul.”  Racial activity produces race character, for “Function produces organism.”  I cannot agree with these writers in the view that the race soul is a given fixed entity.  Social psychogenesis is a present and a progressive process.  Japan is a capital illustration of it.  In the development of races and civilizations involution is as continuous a process as evolution.  Evolution is, indeed, only one-half of the process.  Without involution, evolution is incomprehensible.  And involution is the more interesting half, as it is the more significant.  In modern discussion much that passes by the name of evolution is, in reality, a discussion of involution.

The attentive reader will have discovered that the real point of the discussion of Japanese characteristics given in the preceding chapters has been on the point of involution.  How have these characteristics arisen? has been our ever-recurring question.  The answer has invariably tried to show their relation to the social order.  In this way we have traversed a large number of leading characteristics of the Japanese.  We have seen how they arose, and also how they are now being transformed by the new Occidentalized social order.  We have seen that not one of the characteristics examined is inherent, that is, due to brain structure, to biological heredity.  We have concluded, therefore, that the psychical characteristics which differentiate races are all but wholly social.