age, must of necessity be deficient in the sense
of personality? And if the verbs in large numbers are impersonal, does
not that clinch the matter? But further consideration of the argument
and its illustrations gradually shows its weakness. At present I must
confess that the argument seems to me utterly fallacious, and for the
sufficient reason that the personal element is introduced, if not
always explicitly yet at least implicitly, in almost every sentence
uttered. The method of its expression, it is true, is quite different
from that adopted by Western languages, but it is none the less there.
It is usually accomplished by means of the titles, "honorific"
particles, and honorific verbs and nouns. "Honorable shoes" can't by
any stretch of the imagination mean shoes that belong to me; every
Japanese would at once think "your shoes"; his attention is not
distracted by the term "honorable" as is that of the foreigner; the
honor is largely overlooked by the native in the personal element
implied. The greater the familiarity with the language the more clear
it becomes that the impressions of "impersonality" are due to the
ignorance of the foreigner rather than to the real "impersonal"
character of the Japanese thought or mind. In the Japanese methods of
linguistic expression, politeness and personality are indeed,
inextricably interwoven; but they are not at all confused. The
distinctions of person and the consciousness of self in the Japanese
_thought_ are as clear and distinct as they are in the English
thought. In the Japanese _sentence_, however, the politeness and the
personality cannot be clearly separated. On that account, however,
there is no more reason for denying one element than the other.

So far from the deficiency of personal pronouns being a proof of
Japanese "impersonality," _i.e._, of lack of consciousness of self,
this very deficiency may, with even more plausibility, be used to
establish the opposite view. Child psychology has established the fact
that an early phenomenon of child mental development is the emphasis
laid on "meum" and "tuum," mine and yours. The child is a
thoroughgoing individualist in feelings, conceptions, and language.
The first personal pronoun is ever on his lips and in his thought.
Only as culture arises and he is trained to see how disagreeable in
others is excessive emphasis on the first person, does he learn to
moderate his own excessive egoistic tendency. Is it not a fact tha