Page:Occult Japan - Lovell.djvu/353

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NOUMENA.
331

tions of your habiliments, but clothed upon with your mannerisms and fitted with your very gait; his evident innocence of intent alone convincing you that this is not all some put-up caricature. Never had you full conception of how peculiar your peculiarities were till you saw them donned by another. Indeed, the reproduction of yourself is carried so far that from being putative father of your whole household by patriarchal custom, you begin to question whether in some antipodally ex post facto fashion you have not become its father in fact.

Lastly, the decorous demeanor of the whole nation betrays the lack of mental activity beneath. For it is not rules that make the character, but character that makes the rules. No energetic mind could be bound by so exquisitely exacting an etiquette. It must inevitably kick over the traces now and then till little or nothing of them were left. This a Japanese not only does not do, save as motived to foreign ways, but left to himself would have no desire to do. The stately quietism of all classes of old Japan is due, not to forms that make for tranquillity, but to that innate tranquillity of mind that