in the guise of a fairy
creation," but it is also due to the still current popular view that
the social organism is biological, and subject therefore to the laws
of biological evolution. On this assumption, some hold that the
progress of Japan, however it may appear, is really superficial, while
others represent it as somehow having evaded the laws regulating the
development of other races. A nation's character and characteristics
are conceived to be the product of brain-structure; these can change
only as brain structure changes. Brain is held to determine
civilization, rather than civilization brain. Hampered by this
defective view, popular writers inevitably describe Japan to the West
in terms that necessarily misrepresent her, and that at the same time
pander to Occidental pride and prejudice.

But this misunderstanding of Japan reveals an equally profound
misunderstanding in regard to ourselves. Occidental peoples are
supposed to be what they are in civilization and to have reached their
high attainments in theoretical and applied science, in philosophy and
in practical politics, because of their unique brain-structures,
brains secured through millenniums of biological evolution. The
following statement may seem to be rank heresy to the average
sociologist, but my studies have led me to believe that the main
differences between the great races of mankind to-day are not due to
biological, but to social conditions; they are not
physico-psychological differences, but only socio-psychological
differences. The Anglo-Saxon is what he is because of his social
heredity, and the Chinaman is what he is because of his social
heredity. The profound difference between social and physiological
heredity and evolution is unappreciated except by a few of the most
recent sociological writers. The part that association, social
segregation, and social heredity take in the maintenance, not only of
once developed languages and civilizations, but even in their genesis,
has been generally overlooked.

But a still more important factor in the determination of social and
psychic evolution, generally unrecognized by sociologists, is the
nature and function of personality. Although in recent years it has
been occasionally mentioned by several eminent writers, personality as
a principle has not been made the core of any system of sociology. In
my judgment, however, this is the distinctive characteristic of human
evolution and of human assoc