HERBERT SPENCER

Timaru Herald, Volume CLVIII, Issue 23321, 3 October 1945, Page 6

HERBERT SPENCER

Idol Of Japanese A Revered Philosopher Whoever would understand the Japanese mind of to-day ought to consider carefully the u apanese attitude to Herbert Spencer, writes Robert H. Neil in an English exchange. He is the one mind in the Western World which has nrofoundlv impressed the Japanese intellect. The agnostic mind of Japan took most kindly to the Spencerian philosophy, partly because it is exceedingly prosaic and partly because it puts forward a rather arrogant pretension to finality.

Hie Japanese mind is intensely matter-of-fact, which is by no means the same as being practical and which may be, indeed, the reverse of oractical. Thus, a Japanese engineer, in giving an estimate for a factory or for a railroad, will often state the cost to a fraction of a penny, and in the end prove inaccurate by hundreds of thousands of pounds. This trait is by no means connected with stupidity, it is part of the character of a people W’holly in love with formality and dominated by a tyrannical nassion for neatness of arrangement. The Japanese loves to pack his ideas and dovetail them one into another with the same precision with which he makes two dozen lacquer boxes fit into one, or constructs a house to hold exactly 820 floor mats of just the same size, without an inch to spare Messages To Japanese It is easy now, with thi clue, to see just what has enchanted the Japanese in the Spencerian philosophy. It is his solemn way of assuming that the heavens and the earth and all that in them is. all space, all time, all life, all humanity, can be measured and reckoned to the tiniest fraction by his particular philosophical abacus. Thus the Herbert Spencer school became potent in Japan. At the head of it stood Prince Fukuzawa, who. more than anv other, is responsible for supplying the moral and philosophical basis of the new Japanese civilisation Occasionally Spencer favoured his Oriental disciples with an encyclical, applauding them for their skill in keeping the European at bav. and giving them, hints as to how best to realise a perfect morality’ unalloyed with that of the West. At one time Spencer had >reat hopes that Japan might realise his ideal of the State in which men are guided wholly by reason—a State untainted with imperialism, militarism, aristocratic prejudice or ecclesiastical fadism. Japan's subsequent essays in self-revelation are a sufficient commentary on these facts. Borrowed and Adapted In one sense Japan may still be called a Spencerian country. The philosopher is still conned by hundreds of thousands of eager students in the Nipponese Empire. He has been expanded and adopted by a whole succession of native pedants. Japan still admires the synthetic philosophy, bu! remains aristocratic, bureaucratic, imperialistic and militarist. Most truly she does not co"" the West., but makes what she borrows her own. Herbert Spencer, who was really not far from an anarchist, has been converted into one of the chief buttresses of the State. The leaders of the intellectual life n Japan desire a godless religion and a creedless faith, just as they are charmed with the most recent scientificinventions. They reiect all Christian doama as a superstition not less fantastic than the wildest perversions of Taoism. The Japanese idea is that Darwin and Spencer between them have solved the whole riddle of the universe.