new language to the philosophy of the new religions, that Japanese
civilization, language, and religion are markedly distinct from the
Chinese? Why is it that, though the Japanese so fell under the bondage
of the Chinese language as permanently to enslave and dwarf their own
beautiful tongue, expressing the dominant thought of every sentence
with characters (ideographs) borrowed from China, yet at the same time
so transformed what they borrowed that no Chinaman can read and
understand a Japanese book or newspaper?

The same questions recur at this new period of Japan's national life.
Why has she so easily turned from the customs of centuries? What are
the mental traits that have made her respond so differently from her
neighbor to the environment of the nineteenth-century civilization of
the West Why is it that Japan has sent thousands of her students to
these Western lands to see and study and bring back all that is good
in them, while China has remained in stolid self-satisfaction, seeing
nothing good in the West and its ways? To affirm that the difference
is due to the environment alone is impossible, for the environment
seems to be essentially the same. This difference of attitude and
action must be traced, it would seem, to differences of mental and
temperamental characteristics. Those who seek to understand the
secret of Japan's newly won power and reputation by looking simply at
her newly acquired forms of government, her reconstructed national
social structure, her recently constructed roads and railroads,
telegraphs, representative government, etc., and especially at her
army and navy organized on European models and armed with European
weapons, are not unlike those who would discover the secret of human
life by the study of anatomy.

This external view and this method of interpretation are, therefore,