previous condition again;
much as more materially, after a lifetime spent in California, at his
death his body is punctiliously embalmed and sent home across five
thousand miles of sea for burial. With the Japanese the condition of
affairs is somewhat different. Their tendency to stand still is of a
purely passive kind. It is a state of neutral equilibrium, stationary
of itself but perfectly responsive to an impulse from without. Left to
their own devices, they are conservative enough, but they instantly
copy a more advanced civilization the moment they get a chance. This
proclivity on their part is not out of keeping with our theory. On the
contrary, it is precisely what was to have been expected; for we see the
very same apparent contradiction in characters we are thrown with every
day. Imitation is the natural substitute for originality. The less
strong a man's personality the more prone is he to adopt the ideas of
others, on the same principle that a void more easily admits a foreign
body than does space that is already occupied; or as a blank piece of
paper takes a dye more brilliantly for not being already tinted itself.

The third result, the remarkable homogeneity of the people, is not,
perhaps, so universally appreciated, but it is equally evident on
inspection, and no less weighty in proof. Indeed, the Far Eastern
state of things is a kind of charade on the word; for humanity there
is singularly uniform. The distance between the extremes of
mind-development in Japan is much less than with us. This lack of
divergence exists not simply in certain lines of thought, but in
all those characteristics by which man is parted from the brutes. In
reasoning power, in artistic sensibility, in delicacy of perception, it
is the same story. If this were simply the impression at first sight,
no deductions could be drawn from it, for an impression of racial
similarity invariably marks the first stage of acquaintance of one
people by another. Even in outward appearance it is so. We find it
at first impossible to tell the Japanese apart; they find it equally
impossible to differentiate us. But the present resemblance is not a
matter of first impressions. The fact is patent historically. The men
whom Japan reveres are much less removed from the common herd than is
the case in any Western land. And this has been so from the earliest
times. Shakspeares and Newtons have never existed there. Japanese
humanity is not the soil to grow