1894- NATURAL SCIENCE IN JAPAN. 193 



Kyoto and Gifu, many of the shopkeepers seem to find it an 

 advantage to write their names up in Roman letters. 



A greater hindrance to complete intercommunication of thought 

 than that presented by language may by many be found in the great 

 difference that we have already observed between our own and the 

 Japanese modes of thought. This does not entirely consist in a 

 different attitude of mind or a different temperament, but is to a 

 large extent a result of antecedent conditions. It is hard for us to 

 realise how largely all our Western religion, philosophy and science are 

 the outcome of history, how intimately the present is bound up with 

 the past. But in this past, the common heritage of all European 

 nations, the Japanese have no portion. The allusions, the associations 

 of ideas, the pregnant phrases, the postulated premises : all these 

 inseparable factors of our thought have for the far East no shadow of 

 a meaning. The inevitable to us is the impossible to them. 



Of course as the world becomes more of a unit, and as the terms 

 East and West come to have a merely relative significance, these 

 obstacles will gradually disappear; meanwhile it is possible to suggest 

 that they may after all be blessings in disguise. One cannot help 

 seeing that, however much we Westerns gain by our imaginative and 

 mythopoeic powers, we are seriously handicapped by this irresistible 

 tendency when we attempt to discuss things as they are. The gross 

 anthropomorphism of all religions that we have at different ages 

 affected finds its parallel in the realms of Science. The Japanese at 

 least are not likely to deify Nature or to make such fetish of a phrase 

 as we have done with " Natural Selection " and " Chemical Affinity." 

 Again, the burden of the past is sometimes as great an incumbrance 

 as ever delayed the progress of the pilgrim Christian, All men know 

 how the introduction of the new scientific methods and the advance of 

 the scientific spirit have perpetually had to struggle with the bonds 

 of ancient belief and to fight to the death with the phantoms of 

 superstition. The bitter feelings thus awakened, and the bigotry 

 thus begotten on both sides, can hardly have advantaged truth or 

 assisted the onward march of the world. Sadly and irresistibly have 

 these events brought home to us the danger of putting new wine into 

 old bottles. Here then is the opportunity of the Japanese, and it is 

 one that they themselves fully recognise. Ignorant of the bonds and 

 unpressed by the burden, they receive from us weapons forged in the 

 fires of controversy and, at last afcer many a vain experiment, 

 tempered to pierce the dense walls of matter which enshield the 

 secret soul of truth. 



F. A. Bather. 



