rest
On their mother's breast
As she dances about the sun,'

would appear to them ridiculously overcharged with metaphor, if not
absolutely unintelligible."[AR]

On the other hand, some writers have called attention to the contrary
element of Japanese mental nature. Prof. Ladd, for instance, maintains
that the characteristic mental trait of the Japanese is their
sentimentality. He has shown how their lives are permeated with and
regulated by sentiment. Ancestral worship, patriotism, Imperial
apotheosis, friendship, are fashioned by idealizing sentiment. In our
chapters on the emotional elements of Japanese character we have
considered how widespread and powerful these ideals and sentiments
have been and still are.

Writers who compare the Chinese with the Japanese remark the practical
business nature of the former and the impractical, visionary nature of
the latter.

For a proper estimate of our problem we should clearly distinguish
between the various forms of imagination. It reveals itself not merely
in art and literature, in fantastic conception, in personification and
metaphor, but in every important department of human life. It is the
tap-root of progress, as Mr. Lowell well points out. It pictures an
ideal life in advance of the actual, which ideal becomes the object of
effort. The forms of imagination may, therefore, be classified
according to the sphere of life in which it appears. In addition to
the poetic fancy and the idealism of art and literature generally, we
must distinguish the work of imagination in the aesthetic, in the
moral, in the religious, in the scientific, and in the political life.
The manifestation of the imaginative faculty in art and in literature
is only one part of the aesthetic imagination.

In studying Japanese aesthetic characteristics, we noted how unbalanced
was the development of their aesthetic sense. This proposition of
unbalanced development applies with equal force to the imaginative
faculty as a whole. Conspicuously lacking in certain directions, it is
as conspicuously prominent in others. Rules of etiquette are the
products of the aesthetic imagination, and in what land has etiquette
been more developed than in feudal Japan? Japanese imagination has
been particularly active in the political world. The passionate
loyalty of retainers to their lord, of samurai to their daimyo, of all
to their "kuni," or clan, in ancient times, and now, of the people