Suddenly in the seventeenth century the intellect of Japan, all ready for new surprises in the profound peace inaugurated by Iyeyas[)u], received, as it were, an electric thrill.  The great warrior, becoming first a unifier by arms and statecraft, determined also to become the architect of the national culture.  Gathering up, from all parts of the country, books, manuscripts, and the appliances of intellectual discipline, he encouraged scholars and stimulated education.  Under his supervision the Chinese classics were printed, and were soon widely circulated.  A college was established in Yedo, and immediately there began a critical study of the texts and principal commentaries.  The fall of the Ming dynasty in China, and the accession of the Manchiu Tartars, became the signal for a great exodus of learned Chinese, who fled to Japan.  These received a warm welcome, both at the capital and in Yedo, as well as in some of the castle towns of the Daimi[=o]s, among whom stand illustrious those of the province of Mito.[2]

These men from the west brought not only ethics but philosophy; and the fertilizing influences of these scholars of the Dispersion, may be likened to those of the exodus of the Greek learned men after the capture of Constantinople by the Turks.  Confucian schools were established in most of the chief provincial cities.  For over two hundred years this discipline in the Chinese ethics, literature and history constituted the education of the boys and men of Japan.  Almost every member of the Samurai classes was thoroughly drilled in this curriculum.  All Japanese social, official, intellectual and literary life was permeated with the new spirit.  Their “world” was that of the Chinese, and all outside of it belonged to “barbarians.”  The matrices of thought became so fixed and the Japanese language has been so moulded, that even now, despite the intense and prolonged efforts of thirty years of acute and laborious scholarship, it is impossible, as we have said, to find English equivalents for terms which were used for a century or two past in every-day Japanese speech.  Those who know most about these facts, are most modest in attempting with English words to do justice to Japanese thought; while those who know the least seem to be most glib, fluent and voluminous in showing to their own satisfaction, that there is little difference between the ethics of Chinese Asia and those of Christendom.

Survey of the Intellectual History of China.

The Confucianism of the last quarter-millennium in Japan is not that of her early centuries.  While the Japanese for a thousand years only repeated and recited—­merely talking aloud in their intellectual sleep but not reflecting—­China was awake and thinking hard.  Japan’s continued civil wars, which caused the almost total destruction of books and manuscripts, secured also the triumph of Buddhism which meant the atrophy of the national intellect.  When, after the long feuds and battles of the middle