The defect of Occidental civilization to-day is hot its multiplicity of machinery, but the defective view that still blinds the eyes of the multitude as to the true nature and the legitimate goal of progress.  Individual, selfish happiness is still the ideal of too many men and women to permit of the ideal which carries the Golden Rule into the markets and factories, into the politics of parties and nations, which is essential to the attainment of the highest progress.  But no one who casts his eyes over the centuries of struggle and effort through which man has been slowly working his way upward from the rank of a beast to that of a man, can doubt that progress has been made.  The worth of character has been increasingly seen and its possession desired.  The true end of effort and development was never more clear than it is at the close of the nineteenth century.  Never before were the conditions of progress so bright, not only for the favored few in one or two lands, but for the multitudes the world over.  Isolation and separation have passed from this world forever.  Free social intercourse between the nations permits wide dissemination of ideas and their application to practical life in the form of social organization and mechanical invention.  This makes it possible for nations more or less backward in social and civilizational development to gain in a relatively short time the advantages won by advanced nations through ages of toil and under favoring circumstances.  Nation thus stimulates nation, each furnishing the other with important variations in ideas, customs, institutions, and mechanisms resulting from long-continued divergent evolution.  The advantages slowly gained by advanced peoples speedily accrues through social heredity to any backward race really desiring to enter the social heritage.

Thus does the paradox of Japan’s recent progress become thoroughly intelligible.

V

JAPANESE SENSITIVENESS TO ENVIRONMENT

With this chapter we begin a more detailed study of Japanese social and psychic evolution.  We shall take up the various characteristics of the race and seek to account for them, showing their origin in the peculiar nature of the social order which so long prevailed in Japan.  This is a study of Japanese psychogenesis.  The question to which we shall continually return is whether or not the characteristic under consideration is inherent and congenital and therefore inevitable.  Not only our interpretation of Japanese evolution, past, present, and future, but also our understanding of the essential nature of social evolution in general, depends upon the answer to this question.

We naturally begin with that characteristic of Japanese nature which would seem to be more truly congenital than any other to be mentioned later.  I refer to their sensitiveness to environment.  More quickly than most races do the Japanese seem to perceive and adapt themselves to changed conditions.