little when we consider that in the one case it is his own classics
the student is reading, in the other the Chinaman's.

If he belong to the middle class, as soon as his schooling is over
he is set to learn his father's trade. To undertake to learn any
trade but his father's would strike the family as simply preposterous.
Why should he adopt another line of business? And, if he did, what
other business should he adopt? Is his father's occupation not
already there, a part of the existing order of things; and is he not
the son of his father and heir therefore of the paternal skill?
Not that such inherited aptness is recognized scientifically; it is
simply taken for granted instinctively. It is but a halfhearted
intuition, however, for the possibility of an inheritance from the
mother's side is as out of the question as if her severance from her
own family had an ex post facto effect. As for his individual
predilection in the matter, nature has considerately conformed to
custom by giving him none. He becomes a cabinet-maker, for instance,
because his ancestors always have been cabinet-makers. He inherits
the family business as a necessary part of the family name. He is
born to his trade, not naturally selected because of his fitness for it.
But he usually is amply qualified for the position, for generations
of practice, if only on one side of the house, accumulate a vast
deal of technical skill. The result of this system of clan guilds
in all branches of industry is sufficiently noticeable. The almost
infinite superiority of Japanese artisans over their European
fellow-craftsmen is world-known. On the other hand the tendency of
the occupation in the abstract to swallow up the individual in the
concrete is as evident to theory as it is patent in practice.
Eventually the man is lost in the manner. The very names of trades
express the fact. The Japanese word for cabinet-maker, for example,