mphatic mode of introducing a fresh thought;
only that with them, the practice being the rule and not the exception,
no correspondingly abrupt effect is produced by it. Ousted thus from
the post of honor, the subject is not even permitted the second place.
Indeed, it usually fails to put in an appearance anywhere. You may
search through sentence after sentence without meeting with the
slightest suggestion of such a thing. When so unusual an anomaly as a
motive cause is directly adduced, it owes its mention, not to the fact
of being the subject, but because for other reasons it happens to be the
important word of the thought. The truth is, the Japanese conception of
events is only very vaguely subjective. An action is looked upon more
as happening than as being performed, as impersonally rather than
personally produced. The idea is due, however, to anything but
philosophic profundity. It springs from the most superficial of childish
conceptions. For the Japanese mind is quite the reverse of abstract. Its
consideration of things is concrete to a primitive degree. The language
reflects the fact. The few abstract ideas these people now possess are
not represented, for the most part, by pure Japanese, but by imported
Chinese expressions. The islanders got such general notions from their
foreign education, and they imported idea and word at the same time.

Summing up, as it were, in propria persona the impersonality of Japanese
speech, the word for "man," "hito," is identical with, and probably
originally the same word as "hito," the numeral "one;" a noun and a
numeral, from which Aryan languages have coined the only impersonal
pronoun they possess. On the one hand, we have the German "mann;" on
the other, the French "on". While as if to give the official seal to
the oneness of man with the universe, the word mono, thing, is applied,
without the faintest implication of insult, to men.

Such, then, is the mould into which, as children, these people learn
to cast their thought. What an influence it must exert upon their
subsequent views of life we have but to ask of our own memories to know.
With each one of us, if we are to advance beyond the steps of the last
generation, there comes a time when our growing ideas refuse any longer
to fit the childish grooves in which we were taught to let them run. How
great the wrench is when this supreme moment arrives we have all felt
too keenly ever to forget. We hesitate, we delay, to aba