Nothing remarkable has been done, however, in directions foreign
to the national genius. In the study, for example, of Western
music, Western art, Western literature, time would seem to have
been simply wasted(1). These things make appeal extraordinary to
emotional life with us; they make no such appeal to Japanese
emotional life. Every serious thinker knows that emotional
transformation of the individual through education is impossible.
To imagine that the emotional character of an Oriental race could
be transformed in the short space of thirty years, by the contact
of Occidental ideas, is absurd. Emotional life, which is older
than intellectual life, and deeper, can no more be altered
suddenly by a change of milieu than the surface of a mirror can
be changed by passing reflections. All that Japan has been able
to do so miraculously well has been done without any
self-transformation; and those who imagine her emotionally closer
to us to-day than she may have been thirty years ago ignore facts
of science which admit of no argument.

Sympathy is limited by comprehension. We may sympathize to the
same degree that we understand. One may imagine that he
sympathizes with a Japanese or a Chinese; but the sympathy can
never be real to more than a small extent outside of the simplest
phases of common emotional life,--those phases in which child and
man are at one. The more complex feelings of the Oriental have
been composed by combinations of experiences, ancestral and
individual, which have had no really precise correspondence in
Western life, and which we can therefore not fully know. For
converse reasons, the. Japanese cannot, even though they would,
give Europeans their best sympathy.