oreigners than in regard to their powers of imagination
and idealism. Unqualified generalizations not only assert the entire
lack of these powers, but they consider this lack to be the
distinguishing inherent mental characteristic of the race. The
Japanese are called "prosaic," "matter-of-fact," "practical,"
"unimaginative."

Mr. Walter Dening, describing Japanese mental characteristics, says:

"Neither their past history nor their prevailing tastes show any
tendency to idealism. They are lovers of the practical and the
real; neither the fancies of Goethe nor the reveries of Hegel are
to their liking. Our poetry and our philosophy and the mind that
appreciates them are alike the results of a network of subtle
influences to which the Japanese are comparative strangers. It is
maintained by some, and we think justly, that the lack of idealism
in the Japanese mind renders the life of even the most cultivated a
mechanical, humdrum affair when compared with that of Westerners.
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."[AP]

Mr. Percival Lowell expends an entire chapter in his "Soul of the Far
East," in showing how important imagination is as a factor in art,
religion, science, and civilization generally, and how strikingly
deficient Japanese are in this faculty. "The Far Orientals," he
argues, "ought to be a particularly unimaginative set of people. Such
is precisely what they are. Their lack of imagination is a
well-recognized fact."[AQ]

Mr. Aston, characterizing Japanese literature, says:

"A feature which strikingly distinguishes the Japanese poetic muse
from that of Western nations is a certain lack of imaginative
power. The Japanese are slow to endow inanimate objects with life.
Shelley's 'Cloud,' for example, contains enough matter of this kind
for many volumes of Japanese verse. Such lines as:

'From my wings are shaken
The dews that waken
The sweet buds every one,
When rocked to