The less strong a man's personality the more prone is he to adopt the ideas of others, on the same principle that a void more easily admits a foreign body than does space that is already occupied; or as a blank piece of paper takes a dye more brilliantly for not being already tinted itself.
The third result, the remarkable homogeneity of the people, is not, perhaps, so universally appreciated, but it is equally evident on inspection, and no less weighty in proof.

Indeed, the Far Eastern state of things is a kind of charade on the word; for humanity there is singularly uniform.

The distance between the extremes of mind-development in Japan is much less than with us.

This lack of divergence exists not simply in certain lines of thought, but in all those characteristics by which man is parted from the brutes.

In reasoning power, in artistic sensibility, in delicacy of perception, it is the same story.