Japan -- Foreign relations -- Korea; Korea; Korea -- Foreign relations -- Japan
A just appreciation of the mental and moral characteristics of alien
races is a delicate and difficult task to achieve, even for the
experienced student of such subjects. From others it is scarcely fair, no
matter how favorable the opportunities for observation may have been, to
expect any large measure of real success in the accomplishment of this
task. The more important reasons for the failure of most attempts in
race psychology may be resolved into the following two: a limitation of
the observer’s own experiences, which prevents sympathy and, therefore,
breadth of interpretation; and the inability to rise above the more
strictly personal point of view. In both these respects, women are on
the whole decidedly inferior to men; accordingly, their account of the
ethnic peculiarities—of the ideas, motives, and morals—of foreign peoples
is customarily less trustworthy. The inquirer after a judicial estimate
of the native character will find this fact amply illustrated in Korea.
But what is more weighty in its influence as bearing upon such a problem
as that now under discussion is this: all the inherent difficulties
are enhanced when it is required to understand and appreciate an
Oriental race by a member of a distinctively Western civilization.
It is without doubt true that all men, of whatever race or degree of
civilization, are essentially alike; they constitute what certain
authorities in anthropology have fitly called “a spiritual unity.” But
for the individual who cannot expect to find within himself whatever
is necessary to understand and interpret this unity, and especially
for the observer who does not care even to detect and recognize the
existence of such a unity, the difference between Orient and Occident is
a puzzle—perpetually baffling and seemingly insoluble.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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