.]

[Footnote DA: Foot of chapter xxix.]

[Footnote DB: Chapter xxxiii. p. 498.]

[Footnote DC: It seems desirable to append a brief additional
statement on the doctrine of the "personality of God," and its
acceptability to the Japanese. I wish to make it clear, in the first
place, that the difficulties felt by the Japanese in adopting this
doctrine are not due primarily to the deficiency either of the
Japanese language or to the essential nature of the Japanese mind,
that is to say, because of its asserted structural "impersonality." We
have seen how the entire thought of the people, and even the direct
moral teachings, imply both the fact of personality in man, and also
its knowledge. The religious teachings, likewise, imply the
personality even of "Heaven."

That there are philosophical or, more correctly speaking, metaphysical
difficulties attending this doctrine, I am well aware; and that they
are felt by some few Japanese, I also know. But I maintain that these
difficulties have been imported from the West. The difficulties raised
by a sensational philosophy which results in denying the reality even
of man's psychic nature, no less than the difficulties due to a
thoroughgoing idealism, have both been introduced among educated
Japanese and have found no little response. I am persuaded that the
real causes of the doubt entertained by a few of the Christians in
Japan as to the personality of God are of foreign origin. These doubts
are to be answered in exactly the same way as the same difficulties
are answered in other lands. It must be shown that the sensational and
"positive" philosophies, ending in agnosticism as to all the great
problems of life and of reality, are essentially at fault in not
recognizing the nature of the mind that knows. The searching criticism
of these assumptions and methods made by T.H. Green and other careful
thinkers, and to which no answer has been made by the sensational and
agnostic schools of thought, needs to be presented in intelligible
Japanese for the fairly educated Japanese student and layman. So, too,
the discussions of such writers and philosophical thinkers as Seth,
and Illingworth, and especially Lotze, whose discussions of
"personality" are unsurpassed, should be presented to Japanese
thinkers in native garb. But, again I repeat, it seems to me that the
difficulty felt in Japan on these subjects is due not to the
"impersonality" of the language or the native mind, or to