inadequate to express the real nature of society. The biological
conception, they insist, is nothing more than a comparison, useful for
bringing out certain features of the social life and structure, but
harmful if understood as their full statement. The laws of psychic
activity and development differ as widely from those of biologic
activity and development as these latter do from those that hold in
the chemical world. If the laws which regulate psychic development and
the progress of civilization were understood by popular writers on
Japan, and if the recent progress of Japan had been stated in the
terms of these laws, there would not have been so much mystification
in the West in regard to this matter as there evidently has been.
Japan would not have appeared to have "jumped out of her skin," or
suddenly to have escaped from the heredity of her past millenniums of
development. This wide misunderstanding of Japan, then, is not simply
due to the fact that "Japanese progress, traced to its causes and
explained by reference to the means employed, is not nearly such
fascinating reading as when represented in the guise of a fairy
creation," but it is also due to the still current popular view that
the social organism is biological, and subject therefore to the laws
of biological evolution. On this assumption, some hold that the
progress of Japan, however it may appear, is really superficial, while
others represent it as somehow having evaded the laws regulating the
development of other races. A nation's character and characteristics
are conceived to be the product of brain-structure; these can change
only as brain structure changes. Brain is held to determine
civilization, rather than civilization brain. Hampered by this
defective view, popular writers inevitably describe Japan to the West
in terms that necessarily misrepresent her, and that at the same time
pander to Occidental pride and prejudice.