The reawakening of the high moral sense in the nation and the formation of compact self-constituted territories, virtually independent but amply liable to the influence of unifying forces, were the phenomena in the latter half of the Ashikaga period. That the country was slow in becoming nationalised and unified must be attributed to the insufficiency of that reawakening and the insolidity of those quasi-independent territories. The general culture of the time, which was humanistic in nature, was powerless for the moment to facilitate this movement which was national and moral at the same time. Humanistic as it was, it was able to pervade the provinces, and gave to Japan a uniform colour of culture. That was already, indeed, a stride forward on the way to national unification. Nay, it may be said that the impulse to that very unification was given by that very culture. Generally, however, the humanistic culture of any form has no particular state of things as its practical goal, and therefore cannot necessarily lead to an improvement in the morals of any particular nation, nor does it always stimulate the desire for the national unification of a certain country. On the contrary, it often counteracts these movements, and seemingly contributes toward accelerating the demoralisation and dismemberment of a nation, for individualism and selfishness get often the upper hand when such a culture becomes ascendant. The fruit which the Renaissance of the Quattrocento bore to Italians was just of this sort, and the direct influence which the humanistic culture of the later Ashikaga produced on Japan was not very much different from that. The culture, which had spread widely all over Japan, rather tended to loosen moral ties, and at least diminished the social stability. Persons, of a character morally most depraved, such as traitors, murderers, and so forth, were not infrequently men of high culture. Most of the rebellious servants of the Ashikaga Shogun were said to have been highly-accomplished literati. Some of them were addicted to the perusal of the sensational novels produced in the golden age of classical literature in Japan, such as the _Ise-_ and the _Genji-monogatari_, and others were composers of short poems fashionable in those days, rejoicing at their own display of flighty wit, while not a few of them were liberal patronisers of the contemporary art, especially of painting. What a striking parallelism to those Popes and their nephews, in the time of the Renaissance, whose patronising of arts is as renowned as their atrocious vices!