This, as you will see, explains why we have failed to produce any original thinkers; this is why we have to recognise our indebtedness for almost all the important ideas which have brought about social innovation either to China or to India, or else to the modern Western nations; and this notwithstanding so many national idiosyncrasies and characteristics which are to be found in the productions of our art and in our life and ways, and which are even as handfuls of grain gathered in foreign fields and brewed into a national drink of utterly Japanese flavour. We are, I think, a people of the Present and the Tangible, of the broad Daylight and the plainly Visible. The undeniable proclivity of our mind in favour of determination and action, as contrasted with deliberation and calm, makes it an uncongenial ground for the sublimity and grandeur of that 'loathed melancholy, of Cerberus and blackest midnight born,' to take deep root in it. Pure reasoning as such has had for us little value beyond the help it affords us in harbouring our drifting thought in some nearest port, where we can follow any peaceful occupation rather than be fighting what we should call a useless fight with troubled billows and unfathomable depths. Such, according to my personal view, are the facts about our mentality considered generally. And now it is necessary to speak of the main waves of cult and culture that successively washed our shores. The first mention in our history of the introduction of the Chinese learning into the imperial household places it in the reign of the fifteenth emperor Ô-jin, in the year 284 after Christ according to the earliest native records, but according to more trustworthy recent computation[6] considerably later than that date. We are told that a certain prince was put under the tutorship of a learned Corean scholar of Chinese, who, at the request of the emperor, came over to Japan with the _Confucian Analects_ (_Iun-yü_) and some other Chinese classics as a tribute from the King of Kudara. But long before the learning of the Celestial Empire found its way through Corea into our imperial court, it had in all probability been making its silent influence felt here and there among the Japanese people. Great swarms of immigrants had sought a final place of rest in our sea-girt country from many parts of China, where raging tyranny and menacing despotism made life intolerable even for Chinese meekness; these, and the bands of daring invaders which Japan sent out from time to time to the Corean and Chinese coasts, had given us many opportunities of coming into contact with the learning prevalent among our continental neighbours. In this manner Chinese literature, with its groundwork of Confucian ethics, surrounded by the strange lore derived from Taoism, and perhaps also from Hindu sources, had been gradually but surely attracting the ever-increasing attention of our warlike forefathers, who were to become in course of time its devoted admirers.