radictions constantly springing from the
isolation and world-wide accessibility of an island environment; yet
underlying Japan's present receptivity of new ideas and her outwardly
indiscriminate adoption of western civilization is to be detected the
deep primal stamp of the Japanese character, and an instinctive
determination to preserve the core of that character intact.

[Sidenote: Islands as nurseries and disseminators of distinctive
civilizations.]

It is this marked national individuality, developed by isolation and
accompanied often by a precocious civilization, in combination with the
opposite fact of the imminent possibility of an expansive unfolding, a
brilliant efflorescence followed by a wide dispersal of its seeds of
culture and of empire, which has assigned to islands in all times a
great historical role. Rarely do these wholly originate the elements of
civilization. For that their area is too small. But whatever seed ripen
in the wide fields of the continents the islands transplant to their own
forcing houses; there they transform and perfect the flower. Japan
borrowed freely from China and Korea, as England did from continental
Europe; but these two island realms have brought Asiatic and European
civilization to their highest stage of development. Now the borrowers
are making return with generous hand. The islands are reacting upon the
continents. Japanese ideals are leavening the whole Orient from
Manchuria to Ceylon. English civilization is the standard of Europe.
"The Russian in his snows is aiming to be English," says Emerson.
"England has inoculated all nations with her civilization, intelligence
and tastes."[822]

[Sidenote: Ancient Cretan civilization.]

The recent discoveries in Crete show beyond doubt that the school of
Aegean civilization was in that island. Ancient Phoenicia, Argos, even
Mycenae and Tiryns put off their mask of age and appear as rosy boys
learning none too aptly of their great and elderly master. Borrowing the
seeds of culture from Asia and Egypt,[823] Crete nursed and tended them
through the Neolithic and Bronze Age, transformed them completely, much
as scientific tillage has converted the cotton tree into a low shrub.
The precocity of this civilization is clear. At early as 3000 B.C. it
included an impressive style of architecture and a decorative art
naturalistic and beautiful in treatment as that of modern Japan.[824]
From this date till the zenith of its development in