Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/744

 720 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

For example, here are Japanese producing a feudal system peculiarly strong and reacting under it to an exceptional degree, and learning from neighbors as most other peoples, even under like conditions, have failed to do, and at the same time avoiding the vices of those neighbor- teachers, such as opium-smoking and foot-binding among the Chinese. They now astonish everyone by an eclecticism never practiced by people before nor now, not only adapting but adopting every best quality from the world over. Only the Greeks approximated this achievement ; and when Galton credits them, in consequence, with the highest ability yet possessed by mankind, what does that mean except that their "personality" or mind had differentiated under congenital variation into a specific nature not since attained by any people, until the Japanese came to sight? The author decries prehistory as the " com- mon dumping-ground" for sociologists; but does not his undifferen- tiated but "plastic" (p. 445) personality serve the same purpose, namely, to dispose of difficulties? Thus, it allows him to use such a phrase as "strong personalities" (p. 443) without assigning any ground for them. He admits, however, that "it may perhaps be an open question" whether the lowest races are such because of social differences only or also because of defective psychic heredity. While all Japanese traits appear to proceed from the Japanese "social order" the exceptionally fine results imply a good scholar as well as a good school. This scholar is compact partly of Malay and partly of Mongolian congenital heredity, and hence his marked variaiton in body and mind from the Chinese that he has always first copied and then criticised and is now goading into progress. Besides the bodily marks of this variation from westerners are his less nervous sensitivity, so that his minor surgical operations are performed without anesthetic, and a mental trait that impels him to perform certain acts in a way that seems unnatural to us, as when he pulls plane and saw, turns locks and screws to the left in order to fasten them, mounts a horse from the right, beaches a boat stern first, eats sweets before meats, and begins his books at the that is, our end. These singular traits cannot be explained by the "social order," and are left unnoticed by Mr. Gulick. Other such traits are the absence of the active play-instinct among the boys no Japanese boy climbs a tree for fun and, per contra, the prominence of death, the perceptive and con- structive sense manifested in the incomparable Japanese decorative art Richard Neuther ranks them first among all peoples. And whence the unique Japanese asymmetry in art, which has yet proved acceptable among all other culture-peoples?