he 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 ages, Confucianism stepped the second time into
the Land of _Brave_ Scholars, it was no longer with the simple rules of
conduct and ceremonial of the ancient days, nor was it as the ally of
Buddhism. It came like an armed man in full panoply of harness and
weapons. It entered to drive Buddhism out, and to defend the intellect
of the educated against the wiles of priestcraft. It was a full-blown
system of pantheistic rat