ndon the beliefs
which, dating from the dawn of our being, seem to us even as a part of
our very selves. From the religion of our mother to the birth of our
boyish first love, all our early associations send down roots so deep
that long after our minds have outgrown them our hearts refuse to give
them up. Even when reason conquers at last, sentiment still throbs at
the voids they necessarily have left.

In the Far East, this fondness for the old is further consecrated by
religion. The worship of ancestors sets its seal upon the traditions of
the past, to break which were impious as well as sad. The golden age,
that time when each man himself was young, has lingered on in the
lands where it is always morning, and where man has never passed to
his prosaic noon. Befitting the place is the mind we find there. As its
language so clearly shows, it still is in that early impersonal state
to which we all awake first before we become aware of that something we
later know so well as self.

Particularly potent with these people is their language, for a reason
that also lends it additional interest to us,--because it is their own.
Among the mass of foreign thought the Japanese imitativeness has caused
the nation to adopt, here is one thing which is indigenous. Half of the
present speech, it is true, is of Chinese importation, but conservatism
has kept the other half pure. From what it reveals we can see how each
man starts to-day with the same impersonal outlook upon life the race
had reached centuries ago, and which it has since kept unchanged. The
man's mind has done likewise.

[1] Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain: The Japanese Language.

Chapter 5. Nature and Art.

We have seen how impersonal is the form which Far Eastern thought
assumes when it crystallizes into words. Let us turn now to a
consideration of the thoughts themselves before they are thus
stereotyped for transmission to others, and scan them as they find
expression unconsciously in the man's doings, or seek it consciously in
his deeds.

To the Far Oriental there is one subject which so permeates and pervades
his whole being as to be to him, not so much a conscious matter of
thought as an unconscious mode of thinking. For it is a thing which
shapes all his thoughts instead of constituting the substance of one
particular set of them. That subject is art. To it he is born as to
a birthright. Artistic perception is with him an instinct to which he
intuitiv