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Rh idealism in the Japanese mind renders the life of even the most cultivated a mechanical, humdrum affair when compared with that of Westerns. The Japanese cannot understand why our controversialists should wax so fervent over psychological, ethical, religious, and philosophical questions, failing to perceive that this fervency is the result of the intense interest taken in such subjects. The charms that the cultured Western mind finds in the world of fancy and romance, in questions themselves, irrespective of their practical bearings, is for the most part unintelligible to the Japanese."

, in his elaborate essay on the Japanese ethical literature of the present day, complains of the want of thoroughness, of insight, and of original thought which inclines the leaders of Japanese opinion to a superficial eclecticism. They attack problems, says he, with a light heart, because not appreciating their true difficulty.

A careful and fair-minded writer says, speaking of the danger run by Japan from European aggression during the first years of renewed intercourse: "She was saved by the possession of a remarkable combination of national characteristics, the powers of observation, of appreciation, and of imitation. In a word, her sensitiveness to her environment and her readiness to respond to it proved to be her salvation," He also repeatedly asserts the Japanese to be "an emotional people." The whole trend of his argument however, goes to minimise racial divergences and special aptitudes or failings. "The differences," he writes, "which separate the Oriental from the Occidental mind are infinitesimal as compared with the likenesses which unite them." (, in Evolution of the Japanese.}

In discussing their Japanese neighbours, the foreign residents frequently advert to the matter-of-fact way of looking at things which characterises all the nations that have come under Chinese influence. The of the "" has drawn an acute distinction between the matter-of-fact Japanese and the practical European, instancing the calculations of a pamphleteer anent a