urprising, yet a slight examination will show
it to be a fact. Looked at a posteriori, we find that where the one
trait exists the other is most developed, while an absence of the second
seems to prevent the full growth of the first. This is true both in
general and in detail. Courtesy increases, as we travel eastward round
the world, coincidently with a decrease in the sense of self. Asia is
more courteous than Europe, Europe than America. Particular races show
the same concomitance of characteristics. France, the most impersonal
nation of Europe, is at the same time the most polite.

Considered a priori, the connection between the two is not far to seek.
Impersonality, by lessening the interest in one's self, induces one
to take an interest in others. Introspection tends to make of man a
solitary animal, the absence of it a social one. The more impersonal
the people, the more will the community supplant the individual in the
popular estimation. The type becomes the interesting thing to man, as
it always is to nature. Then, as the social desires develop, politeness,
being the means to their enjoyment, develops also.

A second omission in Japanese etymology is that of gender. That words
should be credited with sex is a verbal anthropomorphism that would seem
to a Japanese exquisitely grotesque, if so be that it did not strike him
as actually immodest. For the absence of gender is simply symptomatic
of a much more vital failing, a disregard of sex. Originally, as their
language bears witness, the Japanese showed a childish reluctance
to recognizing sex at all. Usually a single sexless term was held
sufficient for a given species, and did duty collectively for both
sexes. Only where a consideration of sex thrust itself upon them, beyond
the possibility of evasion, did they employ for the male and the female
distinctive expressions. The more intimate the relation of the object
to man, the more imperative the discriminating name. Hence human beings
possessed a fair number of such special appellatives; for a man is
a palpably different sort of person from his grandmother, and a
mother-in-law from a wife. But it is noteworthy that the artificial
affinities of society were as carefully differentiated as the
distinctions due to sex, while ancestral relationships were deemed more
important than either.

Animals, though treated individually most humanely, are vouchsafed but
scant recognition on the score of sex. With them, both