gains and gives external expression to the
reality of his inner nature, his freedom, his personality. True,
instead of bringing health and long life, knowledge and deep
enjoyment, they may become the means of bitterest curses. But the
lesson to learn from this fact is how to use these powers aright, not
how to forbid their use altogether. They are not to be branded as
hindrances to progress.

The defect of Occidental civilization to-day is hot its multiplicity
of machinery, but the defective view that still blinds the eyes of the
multitude as to the true nature and the legitimate goal of progress.
Individual, selfish happiness is still the ideal of too many men and
women to permit of the ideal which carries the Golden Rule into the
markets and factories, into the politics of parties and nations, which
is essential to the attainment of the highest progress. But no one who
casts his eyes over the centuries of struggle and effort through which
man has been slowly working his way upward from the rank of a beast to
that of a man, can doubt that progress has been made. The worth of
character has been increasingly seen and its possession desired. The
true end of effort and development was never more clear than it is at
the close of the nineteenth century. Never before were the conditions
of progress so bright, not only for the favored few in one or two
lands, but for the multitudes the world over. Isolation and separation
have passed from this world forever. Free social intercourse between
the nations permits wide dissemination of ideas and their application
to practical life in the form of social organization and mechanical
invention. This makes it possible for nations more or less backward in
social and civilizational development to gain in a relatively short
time the advantages won by advanced nations through ages of toil and
under favoring circumstances. Nation thus stimulates nation, each
furnishing the other with important variations in ideas, customs,
institutions, and mechanisms resulting from long-continued divergent
evolution. The advantages slowly gained by advanced peoples speedily
accrues through social heredity to any backward race really desiring
to enter the social heritage.

Thus does the paradox of Japan's recent progress become thoroughly
intelligible.

V

JAPANESE SENSITIVENESS TO ENVIRONMENT

With this chapter we begin a more detailed study of Japanese social
and psychic evolution. We shall