The explanation here offered for the development and decline of politeness is that they are due to the nature of the social order. Thoroughgoing feudalism long maintained, with its social ranks and free use of the sword, of necessity develops minute unwritten rules of etiquette; without the universal observance of these customs, life would be unbearable and precarious, and society itself would be impossible. Minute etiquette is the lubricant of a feudal social order. The rise and fall of Japan's phenomenal system of feudal etiquette is synchronous with that of her feudal system, to which it is due rather than to the asserted "impersonality" of the race mind. The impersonal theory is amazingly blind to adverse phenomena. Such a one is the marked sensitiveness of the middle and upper classes to the least slight or insult. The gradations of social rank are scrupulously observed, not only on formal occasions, but also in the homes at informal and social gatherings. Failure to show the proper attention, or the use of language having an insufficient number of honorific particles and forms, would be instantly interpreted as a personal slight, if not an insult.[CS] Now if profuse courtesy is a proof of "impersonality," as its advocates argue, what does morbid sensitiveness prove but highly developed personality? But then arises the difficulty of understanding how the same individuals can be both profusely polite and morbidly sensitive at one and the same time? Instead of inferring "impersonality" from the fact of politeness, from the two facts of sensitiveness and politeness we may more logically infer a considerable degree of personality. Yet I would not lay much stress on this argument, for oftentimes (or is it always true?) the weaker and more insignificant the person, the greater the sensitiveness. Extreme sensitiveness is as natural and necessary a product of a highly developed feudalism as is politeness, and neither is particularly due to the high or the low development of personality. Similarly with respect to the question of altruism, which is practically identified with politeness by expounders of Oriental "impersonality." They make this term (altruism) the virtual equivalent of "impersonality"--interest in others rather than in self, an interest due, according to their view, to a lack of differentiation of the individual minds; the individuals, though separate, still retain the universalism of the original mind-stuff. This use of the term altruism makes it a very different thing from the quality or characteristic which in the West is described by this term.