Acquisition of generalized terms can only take place with the development of a generalizing mind. Foreign terms may help, but they do not cause that development.
In a study of the question whether or not the Japanese possess independent powers of analysis and generalization, we must ever remember the unique character of the social environment to which they have been subjected. Always more or less of an isolated nation, they have been twice or thrice suddenly confronted with a civilization much superior to that which they in their isolation had developed. Under such circumstances, adoption and modification of ideas and language as well as of methods and machinery were the most rational and natural courses.
The explanation usually given for the puerilities of Oriental science, history, and religion has been short and simple, namely, the inherent nature of the Oriental races, as if this were the final fact, needing and admitting no further explanation. That the Orient has not developed history or science is doubtless true, but the correct explanation of this fact is, in my opinion, that the educational method of the entire Orient has rested on mechanical memorization; during the formative period of the mind the exclusive effort of education has been to develop a memory which acts by arbitrary or fanciful connections and relations. A Japanese boy of Old Japan, for instance, began his education at from seven to eight years of age and spent three or four years in memorizing the thousands of Chinese hieroglyphic characters contained in the Shisho and Gokyo, nine of the Chinese classics. This completed, his teacher would begin to explain to him the meaning of the characters and sentences. The entire educational effort was to develop the powers of observing and memorizing accidental, superficial, or even purely artificial relations. This double faculty of observing trifling and irrelevant details, and of remembering them, became phenomenally and abnormally developed.
Recent works on the psychology of education, however, have made plain how an excessive development of a child's lower mental faculties may arrest its later growth in all the higher departments of its intellectual nature; the development of a mechanical memory is well known as a serious obstacle to the higher activities of reason. Now Japanese education for centuries, like Chinese, has developed such memory. It trained the lower and ignored the higher. Much of the Japanese education of to-day, although it includes mathematics, science, and history, is based on the mechanical memory method. The Orient is thus a mammoth illustration of the effects of over-development of the mechanical memory, and the consequent arrest of the development of the remaining powers of the mind.
Encumbered by this educational ideal and system, how could the ancient Chinese and Japanese men of education make a critical study of history, or develop any science worthy of the name? The childish physics and astronomy, the brutal therapeutics and the magical and superstitious religions of the Orient, are a necessary consequence of its educational system, not of its inherent lack of the higher mental powers.
If Japanese children brought up from infancy in American homes, and sent to American schools from kindergarten days onward, should still manifest marked deficiencies in powers of analysis and generalization, as compared with American children, we should then be compelled to conclude that this difference is due to diverse natal psychic endowment. Generalizations as to the inherent intellectual deficiencies of the Oriental are based on observations of individuals already developed in the Oriental civilization, whose psychic defects they accordingly necessarily inherit through the laws of social heredity. Such observations have no relevancy to our main problem. We freely admit that Oriental civilization manifests striking deficiencies of development of the higher mental faculties, although it is not nearly so great as many assert; but we contend that these deficiencies are due to something else than the inherent psychic nature of the Oriental individual. Innumerable causes have combined to produce the Oriental social order and to determine its slow development. These cannot be stated in a sentence, nor in a paragraph.
In the final analysis, however, the causes which produce the characteristic features of Japanese social order are the real sources of the differentiating intellectual traits now characterizing the Japanese. Introduce a new social heredity,—a new system of education,—one which relegates a mechanical memory to the background,—one which exalts powers of rational observation of the profound causal relations of the phenomena of nature, and which sets a premium on such observation, analysis, and generalization, and the results will show the inherent psychic nature of the Oriental to be not different from that of the Occidental.