That the intrusion into the ancient culture of Japan of these various elements of Western civilization has deep import for Japanese morality cannot be made a matter of doubt. In the new environment, so different from that in the midst of which the ancient ideal of goodness was developed, this ideal must inevitably undergo important changes. Some of those qualities of character which have so long held high places in the ideal of excellence will cease to evoke the old-time homage, while other qualities at present assigned low places in the standard will be exalted. Virtues now practically unrecognized by the Japanese as virtues, but which among us are highly esteemed moral qualities, will certainly be incorporated in the modified ideal, giving it a new cast, yet probably without changing fundamentally the type; for the moral life of the Japanese people is too virile and too essentially sound to permit us to think that the new influences now coming in will produce such radical changes in the ethical feelings and convictions of the race as to result in a repetition of what happened upon the entrance of Christianity into the morally decadent Greco-Roman world—the displacement of the old ideal of character by a new and essentially different ideal.
CHAPTER VII
THE ETHICAL IDEALS OF INDIA
PART I. THE ETHICS OF BRAHMANISM—A CLASS MORALITY
I. Historical and Speculative Basis of the System
The conception of the First Cause— Brahma
As in Judea so in India the conception formed of the Supreme Being reacted potently upon morality. Hence in naming the influences under which the moral ideal of Brahmanism was molded we must speak first of the Indian conception of the First Cause.
The Aryan conquerors of India originally held notions of the gods in general like those held by their kinsmen, the early Greeks and Romans. When they entered India they were ancestor worshipers and polytheists. They had earth gods and sky gods. The gods of the celestial phenomena gradually acquired ascendancy. Then, as in Egypt, there came a tendency toward unity. The various gods came to be looked upon by the loftier minds as merely different manifestations of one primal being.[225]
It is right at this point that we find the great antithesis between Indian modes of thought and those of all or almost all other peoples. When the thinkers of Egypt, of the Semitic lands, of Persia, of Greece and Rome, had at last through reflection evolved the lofty conception of a single great First Cause, they endowed this cause with conscious personal life. This mode of thought is our heritage from the past. It is to us almost or quite impossible to conceive of conscious personal life as springing from an unconscious impersonal cause. Hence we place behind the manifold phenomena of the universe a conscious personal being as the origin and source of all things and all life.[226]
It is wholly different with the thinkers of India. They seem to be able to postulate as the beginning of things an impersonal cause, a cause without perception, thought, or consciousness. They affirm that out of unconsciousness consciousness arises. They teach that out of Brahma, the unconscious, impersonal, passionless One, emanate all material worlds and sentient beings, gods as well as men.
How profoundly this conception of the First Cause has reacted on the ethical speculations of the Hindu sages and on the moral life of India will appear a little further on.