Kokoro | Page 9

circles, especially, the rapidity of such
changes has been phenomenal There have been five different ministers
of education in my own time, and more than five different educational
policies The twenty-six thousand public schools are so related in their
management to the local assemblies that, even were no other influences
at work, constant change would be inevitable because of the changes in
the assemblies. Directors and teachers keep circling from post to post;
there are men little more than thirty years old who have taught in
almost every province of the country. That any educational system
could have produced any great results under these conditions seems
nothing short of miraculous.
We are accustomed to think that some degree of stability is necessary
to all real progress, all great development. But Japan has given proof
irrefutable that enormous development is possible without any stability
at all. The explanation is in the race character,--a race character in more

ways than one the very opposite of our own. Uniformly mobile, and
thus uniformly impressionable, the nation has moved unitedly in the
direction of great ends, submitting the whole volume of its forty
millions to be moulded by the ideas of its rulers, even as sand or as
water is shaped by wind. And this submissiveness to reshaping belongs
to the old conditions of its soul life,--old conditions of rare
unselfishness and perfect faith. The relative absence from the national
character of egotistical individualism has been the saving of an empire;
has enabled a great people to preserve its independence against
prodigious odds. Wherefore Japan may well be grateful to her two great
religions, the creators and the preservers of her moral power to Shinto,
which taught the individual to think of his Emperor and of his country
before thinking either of his own family or of himself; and to Buddhism,
which trained him to master regret, to endure pain, and to accept as
eternal law the vanishing of things loved and the tyranny of things
hated.
To-day there is visible a tendency to hardening,--a danger of changes
leading to the integration of just such an officialism as that which has
proved the curse and the weakness of China. The moral results of the
new education have not been worthy of the material results. The charge
of want of "individuality," in the accepted sense of pure selfishness,
will scarcely be made against the Japanese of the next century. Even
the compositions of students already reflect the new conception of
intellectual strength only as a weapon of offense, and the new
sentiment of aggressive egotism. "Impermanency," writes one, with a
fading memory of Buddhism in his mind, "is the nature of our life. We
see often persons who were rich yesterday, and are poor to-day. This is
the result of human competition, according to the law of evolution. We
are exposed to that competition. We must fight each other, even if we
are not inclined to do so. With what sword shall we fight? With the
sword of knowledge, forged by education."
Well, there are two forms of the cultivation of Self. One leads to the
exceptional development of the qualities which are noble, and the other
signifies something about which the less said the better. But it is not the
former which the New Japan is now beginning to study. I confess to

being one of those who believe that the human heart, even in the
history of a race, may be worth infinitely more than the human intellect,
and that it will sooner or later prove itself infinitely better able to
answer all the cruel enigmas of the Sphinx of Life. I still believe that
the old Japanese were nearer to the solution of those enigmas than are
we, just because they recognized moral beauty as greater than
intellectual beauty. And, by way of conclusion, I may venture to quote
from an article on education by Ferdinand Brunetiere:--
"All our educational measures will prove vain, if there be no effort to
force into the mind, and to deeply impress upon it, the sense of those
fine words of Lamennais: 'Human society is based upon mutual giving,
or upon the sacrifice of man for man, or of each man for all other men;
and sacrifice is the very essence of all true society.' It is this that we
have been unlearning for nearly a century; and if we have to put
ourselves to school afresh, it will be in order that we may learn it again.
Without such knowledge there can be no society and no education,--not,
at least, if the object of education be to form man for society.
Individualism is to-day the enemy of education, as it is also the enemy
of social order. It has not been so always; but it has so