real nature in the
language, literature, and customs of the people. Thus in our chapter
on the AEsthetic Characteristics of the Japanese[AV] we saw how the
higher forms of literature were dependent on the development of
manhood and on a realization of his nature. A communal social order
despising, or at least ignoring the individual, cannot produce the
highest forms of literature or art, because it does not possess the
highest forms of psychic development. Take from Western life all that
rests on or springs from the principles of individual worth, freedom,
and immortality, and how much of value or sublimity will remain? The
absence from Japanese literature and language of the higher forms of
fancy, metaphor, and personification on the one hand, and, on the
other, the presence of widespread prosaic matter-of-factness, are thus
intimately related to the communal nature of Japan's long dominant
social order.

Similarly, in regard to the constructive imagination, whose
conspicuous lack in Japan is universally asserted by foreign critics,
we reply first that the assertion is an exaggeration, and secondly,
that so far as it is fact, it is intimately related to the social
order. In our discussions concerning Japanese Intellectuality and
Philosophical Ability,[AW] we saw how intimate a relation exists
between the social order, particularly as expressed in its educational
system, and the development of the higher mental faculties. Now a
moment's reflection will show how the constructive imagination,
belonging as it does to the higher faculties, was suppressed by the
system of mechanical and superficial education required by the social
order. Religion apotheosized ancestral knowledge and customs, thus
effectively condemning all conscious use of this faculty. So far as it
was used, it was under the guise of reviving old knowledge or of
expounding it more completely.

This, however, has been the experience of every race in certain
stages of its development. Such periods have been conspicuously
deficient in powerful literature, progressive science, penetrating
philosophy, or developing political life. When a nation has once
entered such a social order it becomes stagnant, its further
development is arrested. The activity of the higher faculties of the
mind are in abeyance, but not destroyed. It needs the electric shock
of contact and conflict with foreign races to startle the race out of
its fatal repose and start it on new line