is not a
passive but an active process.

Acquisition of generalized terms can only take place with the
development of a generalizing mind. Foreign terms may help, but they
do not cause that development.

In a study of the question whether or not the Japanese possess
independent powers of analysis and generalization, we must ever
remember the unique character of the social environment to which they
have been subjected. Always more or less of an isolated nation, they
have been twice or thrice suddenly confronted with a civilization much
superior to that which they in their isolation had developed. Under
such circumstances, adoption and modification of ideas and language as
well as of methods and machinery were the most rational and natural
courses.

The explanation usually given for the puerilities of Oriental science,
history, and religion has been short and simple, namely, the inherent
nature of the Oriental races, as if this were the final fact, needing
and admitting no further explanation. That the Orient has not
developed history or science is doubtless true, but the correct
explanation of this fact is, in my opinion, that the educational
method of the entire Orient has rested on mechanical memorization;
during the formative period of the mind the exclusive effort of
education has been to develop a memory which acts by arbitrary or
fanciful connections and relations. A Japanese boy of Old Japan, for
instance, began his education at from seven to eight years of age and
spent three or four years in memorizing the thousands of Chinese
hieroglyphic characters contained in the Shisho and Gokyo, nine of the
Chinese classics. This completed, his teacher would begin to explain
to him the meaning of the characters and sentences. The entire
educational effort was to develop the powers of observing and
memorizing accidental, superficial, or even purely artificial
relations. This double faculty of observing trifling and irrelevant
details, and of remembering them, became phenomenally and abnormally
developed.

Recent works on the psychology of education, however, have made plain
how an excessive development of a child's lower mental faculties may
arrest its later growth in all the higher departments of its
intellectual nature; the development of a mechanical memory is well
known as a serious obstacle to the higher activities of reason. Now
Japanese education for centuries, like Chinese, has developed such
memory. It trai