But inter-racial misunderstanding is not, after all, so very strange. Few things are more difficult than to accommodate one's self in speech, in methods of life, and even in thought, to an alien people; so identifying one's deepest interest with theirs as really to understand them. The minds of most men are so possessed by notions acquired in childhood and youth as to be unable to see even the plainest facts at variance with those notions. He who comes to Japan possessed with the idea that it is a dreamland and that its old social order was free from defects, is blind to any important facts invalidating that conception; while he who is persuaded that Japan, being Oriental, is necessarily pagan at heart, however civilized in form, cannot easily be persuaded that there is anything praiseworthy in her old civilization, in her moral or religious life, or in any of her customs.
If France fails in important respects to understand England; and England, Germany; and Germany, its neighbors; if even England and America can so misunderstand one another as to be on the verge of war over the boundary dispute of an alien country, what hope is there that the Occident shall understand the Orient, or the Orient the Occident?
Though the difficulty seems insurmountable, I am persuaded that the most fruitful cause of racial misunderstandings and of defective descriptions both of the West by Orientals, and of the East by Occidentals, is a well-nigh universal misconception as to the nature of man, and of society, and consequently of the laws determining their development. In the East this error arises from and rests upon its polytheism, and the accompanying theories of special national creation and peculiar national sanctity. On these grounds alien races are pronounced necessarily inferior. China's scorn for foreigners is due to these ideas.
Although this pagan notion has been theoretically abandoned in the West, it still dominates the thought not only of the multitudes, but also of many who pride themselves on their high education and liberal sentiments. They bring to the support of their national or racial pride such modern sociological theories as lend themselves to this view. Evolution and the survival of the fittest, degeneration and the arrest of development, are appealed to as justifying the arrogance and domineering spirit of Western nations.
But the most subtle and scholarly doctrine appealed to in support of national pride is the biological conception of society. Popular writers assume that society is a biological organism and that the laws of its evolution are therefore biological. This assumption is not strange, for until recent times the most advanced professional sociologists have been dominated by the same misconception. Spencer, for example, makes sociology a branch of biology. More recent sociological writers, however, such as Professors Giddings and Fairbanks, have taken special pains to assert the essentially psychic character of society; they reject the biological conception, as inadequate to express the real nature of society. The biological conception, they insist, is nothing more than a comparison, useful for bringing out certain features of the social life and structure, but harmful if understood as their full statement. The laws of psychic activity and development differ as widely from those of biologic activity and development as these latter do from those that hold in the chemical world. If the laws which regulate psychic development and the progress of civilization were understood by popular writers on Japan, and if the recent progress of Japan had been stated in the terms of these laws, there would not have been so much mystification in the West in regard to this matter as there evidently has been. Japan would not have appeared to have "jumped out of her skin," or suddenly to have escaped from the heredity of her past millenniums of development. This wide misunderstanding of Japan, then, is not simply due to the fact that "Japanese progress, traced to its causes and explained by reference to the means employed, is not nearly such fascinating reading as when represented in the guise of a fairy creation," but it is also due to the still current popular view that the social organism is biological, and subject therefore to the laws of biological evolution. On this assumption, some hold that the progress of Japan, however it may appear, is really superficial, while others represent it as somehow having evaded the laws regulating the development of other races. A nation's character and characteristics are conceived to be the product of brain-structure; these can change only as brain structure changes. Brain is held to determine civilization, rather than civilization brain. Hampered by this defective view, popular writers inevitably describe Japan to the West in terms that necessarily misrepresent her, and that at the same time pander to Occidental pride and prejudice.
But this misunderstanding of Japan reveals an equally profound misunderstanding in regard to ourselves. Occidental peoples are supposed to be what they are in civilization and to have reached their high attainments in theoretical and applied science, in philosophy and in practical politics, because of their unique brain-structures, brains secured through millenniums of biological evolution. The following statement may seem to be rank heresy to the average sociologist, but my studies have led me to believe that the main differences between the great races of mankind to-day are not due to biological, but to social conditions; they are not physico-psychological differences, but only socio-psychological differences. The Anglo-Saxon is what he is because of his social heredity, and the Chinaman is what he is because of his social heredity. The profound difference between social and physiological heredity and evolution is unappreciated except by a few of the most recent sociological writers. The part that association, social segregation, and social heredity take in the maintenance, not only of once developed languages and civilizations, but even in their genesis, has been generally overlooked.
But a still more important factor in the determination of social and psychic evolution, generally unrecognized by sociologists, is the nature and function of personality. Although in recent years it has been occasionally mentioned by several eminent writers, personality as a principle has not been made the core of any system of sociology. In my judgment, however, this is the distinctive characteristic of human evolution and of human association, and it should accordingly be the fundamental principle of social science. Many writers on the East have emphasized what they call its "impersonal" characteristics. So important is this subject that I have considered it at length in the body of this work.
Sociological phenomena cannot be fully expressed by any combination of exclusively physical, biological, and psychic terms, for the significant element of man and of society consists of something more than these—namely, personality. It is this that differentiates human from animal evolution. The unit of human sociology is a self-conscious, self-determinative being. The causative factor in the social evolution of man is his personality. The goal of that evolution is developed personality. Personality is thus at once the cause and the end of social progress. The conditions which affect or determine progress are those which affect or determine personality.
The biological evolution of man from the animal has been, it is true, frankly assumed in this work. No attempt is made to justify this assumption. Let not the reader infer, however, that the writer similarly assumes the adequacy of the so-called naturalistic or evolutionary origin of ethics, of religion, or even of social progress. It may be doubted whether Darwin, Wallace, Le Conte, or any exponent of biological evolution has yet given a complete statement of the factors of the physiological evolution of man. It is certain, however, that ethical, religious, and social writers who have striven to account for the higher evolution of man, by appealing to factors exclusively parallel to those which have produced the physiological evolution of man, have conspicuously failed. However much we may find to praise in the social interpretations of such eminent writers as Comte, Spencer, Ward, Fiske, Giddings, Kidd, Southerland, or even Drummond, there still remains the necessity of a fuller consideration of the moral and religious evolution of man. The higher evolution of man cannot be adequately expressed or even understood in any terms lower than those of personality.