4. MENTAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE JAPANESE. There are few subjects where anything approaching scientific exactness is more difficult, or even impossible, than those which fall under the general title of °Race Psy chology" The very facts which might serve as the basis for a trustworthy conclusion are ex ceedingly abstruse and complex; they are in deed of such a character as to require for their detection and appreciation a trained and ex perienced observer. But supposing the facts to be admitted, there are then no well-established principles under the guidance of which the facts may receive a satisfactory theoretical treatment For there is no universal agreement as to the existence of definite race temperaments; while, with those observers who accept the theory of specific mental characteristics for different tribes and nations, the practical application of their theory to particular cases is not accus tomed to produce very notable results. Never theless, we are believers in the existence and predominating influence of temperament con sidered as manifesting itself in large collections of individuals who share the same admixture of blood, through long periods of time.
In applying this belief to any particular peo ple, however, one or two important considera tions can never be safely lost out of mind. The first and most important of these is the spiritual unity of all the different races in one human race. This fact of an essential spiritual unity, as enunciated and illustrated by anthropologists like Waits and others, may be accepted as a fundamental factor in the solution of all the psychological problems belonging to this class. As far back as we can go in history, and as far afield from the centres of race-culture to the extreme borders of barbarism and savagistn, human nature appears to be essentially the same. Even that mythical being called aprimitive man* is not exempt from this conclusion. And so long as we remain upon sound empirical grounds it must be admitted that a far wider gap exists between the lowest of the human species and the highest of the lower animals, than between the lowest and the highest of the genus homo, or the highest of this genus and its own most suc cessful efforts to picture the nature of the an gelic and the divine. In every large collection of individuals, moreover, while a certain aver age quality may be detected as belonging to the great majority, many important differences must be observed. Thus all the different tem peraments appear, in a more or less distinctly marked form, even among those peoples which are as a whole most definitely characterized by a so-called race temperament. And, finally, as the physical and social environment of any peo ple, however exclusively its temperamental mix ture may have remained, undergoes either slow or more rapid but important changes, the men tal characteristics of the race seem to become altered or obscured.
In attempting, then, to describe the mental characteristics of the Japanese it is assumed that they are in all essential respects like our selves — whether by °ourselves') be meant Amer icans, English, German, French, or, as well, the more important races of both the Near and the Far East. This consideration, however, serves rather to emphasize the further truth that a cer tain characteristic mixture of mental and moral qualities may be observed, which is quite worthy to be called the °Japanese temperament." Here human nature has attained a highly specialized type. In a word, there is probably no other one of the foremost and equally populous nations of the world whose mental characteristics, as de veloped on a basis of race temperament, are more strongly marked. And the reasons for this are not difficult to discover.
So far as the obscure problem of the race origins of the Japanese can be solved by mod ern ethnographic authority, the most probable conclusion may be stated in the following way. The modern Japanese race originated as a mix ture of Tartar or Mongolian (in the larger and somewhat looser, but not altogether inappro priate use of the latter term) and Malay immi grants with the Ainus and traces of other indig enous elements. It is a not improbable con jecture that the v-ried and conflicting character of the elements which thus became combined accounts for some of the more puzzling fea tures of that nitional temperament which has resulted from this mixture of races. Interest ing differences characterize the Mongolian and Malay peoples ; and both of these differ in im portant ways from what we know of the Ainus and other less-known tribes indigenous to Ja pan. As supremely important molding influ ences to determine the mental characteristics of the Japanese of to-day, three historical facts de mand our attention. However different, or even conflicting, the original elements may have been, they were welded into a common typical form by a long period of comparative isolation and exclusion of other admixture with foreign ele ments. Through generations, and even through centuries (for the educational and artistic in fluences from China and Korea did not modify the result in an important way, so far as this temperament was concerned), the process of specializing by combining and recombining the same elements went on without interruption from outside sources.