Prof.
James well says, the doctrine of the freedom of the will cannot be
rammed down any man's intellectual throat, for that very act would
abridge his real freedom. Man's real freedom is proved by his freedom
to reject even the doctrine of his freedom. But so long as he rejects
it, his freedom is only potential. Because of his belief in his
bondage he is in bondage. Now this doctrine of fate has been the warp
and woof of the thinking of the bulk of the Japanese people in their
efforts to explain all the vicissitudes of life. Not only, therefore,
has it failed to stimulate the volitional element of the psychic
nature, but in the psychology of the Orient little if any attention
has been given to this faculty. Oriental psychology practically knows
nothing of personality because it has failed to note one of its
central elements, the freedom of the will. The individual, therefore,
has not been appealed to to exercise his free moral choice, one of
the highest prerogatives of his nature. Moral responsibility has not
been laid on his individual shoulders. A method of moral appeal fitted
to develop the deepest element of his personality has thus been
precluded.

It thus resulted that although philosophic Buddhism developed a high
degree of self-consciousness, yet because it failed to discover
personal freedom it did not deliver popular Buddhism from its grinding
doctrine of fate, rather it fastened this incubus of social progress
more firmly upon it. Philosophic and popular Buddhism alike thus threw
athwart the course of human and social evolution the tremendous
obstacle of fatalism, which the Orient has never discovered a way
either to surmount or evade. Buddhism teaches the impotence of the
individual will; it destroys the sense of moral responsibility; it
thus fails to understand the real nature of man, his glory and power
and even his divinity, which the West sums up in the term personality.
In this sense, then, the influence of Buddhism and the condition of
the Orient may be called "impersonal," but it is the impersonality of
a defective religious psychology, and of communalism in the social
order. Whether it is right to call this feature of Japan
"impersonality," I leave with the reader to judge.

We draw this chapter to a close with a renewed conception of the
inadequacy of the "impersonal" theory to explain Japanese religious
and social phenomena. Further considerations, however, still merit
attention ere we leave t