We have already seen, in discussing the culture histories of India, China, and Moslem Persia, how ancient elements of rationalism continue to germinate more or less obscurely in the unpropitious soils of Asiatic life. Ignorance is in most oriental countries too immensely preponderant to permit of any other species of survival. But sociology, while recognizing the vast obstacles to the higher life presented by conditions which with a fatal facility multiply the lower, can set no limit to the possibilities of upward evolution. The case of Japan is a sufficient rebuke to the thoughtless iterators of the formula of the “unprogressiveness of the East.” While a cheerfully superstitious religion is there still normal among the mass, the transformation of the political ideals and practice of the nation under the influence of European example is so great as to be unparalleled in human history; and it has inevitably involved the substitution of rationalism for supernaturalism among the great majority of the educated younger generation. The late Yukichi Fukuzawa, who did more than any other man to prepare the Japanese mind for the great transformation effected in his time, was spontaneously a freethinker from his childhood;340 and through a long life of devoted teaching he trained thousands to a naturalist way of thought. That they should revert to Christian or native orthodoxy seems as impossible as such an evolution is seen to be in educated Hindostan, where the higher orders of intelligence are probably not relatively more common than among the Japanese. The final question, there as everywhere, is one of social reconstruction and organization; and in the enormous population of China the problem, though very different in degree of imminence, is the same in kind. Perhaps the most hopeful consideration of all is that of the ever-increasing inter-communication which makes European and American progress tend in every succeeding generation to tell more and more on Asiatic life.
As to Japan, Professor B. H. Chamberlain pronounced twenty years ago that the Japanese “now bow down before the shrine of Herbert Spencer” (Things Japanese, 3rd ed. 1898, p. 321. Cp. Religious Systems of the World, 3rd ed. p. 103), proceeding in another connection (p. 352) to describe them as essentially an undevotional people. Such a judgment would be hard to sustain. The Japanese people in the past have exhibited the amount of superstition normal in their culture stage (cp. the Voyages de C. P. Thunberg au Japon, French tr. 1796, iii, 206); and in our own day they differ from Western peoples on this side merely in respect of their greater general serenity of temperament. There were in Japan in 1894 no fewer than 71,831 Buddhist temples, and 190,803 Shinto temples and shrines; and the largest temple of all, costing “several million dollars,” was built in the last dozen years of the nineteenth century. To the larger shrines there are habitual pilgrimages, the numbers annually visiting one leading Buddhist shrine reaching from 200,000 to 250,000, while at the Shintô shrine of Kompira the pilgrims are said to number about 900,000 each year. (See The Evolution of the Japanese, 1903, by L. Gulick, an American missionary organizer.)
Professor Chamberlain appears to have construed “devotional” in the light of a special conception of true devotion. Yet a Christian observer testifies, of the revivalist sect of Nichirenites, “the Ranters of Buddhism,” that “the wildest excesses that seek the mantle of religion in other lands are by them equalled if not excelled” (Griffis, The Mikado’s Empire, 1876, p. 163); and Professor Chamberlain admits that “the religion of the family binds them [the Japanese in general, including the ‘most materialistic’] down in truly sacred bonds”; while another writer, who thinks Christianity desirable for Japan, though he apparently ranks Japanese morals above Christian, declares that in his travels he was much reassured by the superstition of the innkeepers, feeling thankful that his hosts were “not Agnostics or Secularists,” but devout believers in future punishments (Tracy, Rambles through Japan without a Guide, 1892, pp. 131, 276, etc.).
A third authority with Japanese experience, Professor W. G. Dixon, while noting a generation ago that “among certain classes in Japan not only religious earnestness but fanaticism and superstition still prevail,” decides that “at the same time it remains true that the Japanese are not in the main a very religious people, and that at the present day religion is in lower repute than probably it has ever been in the country’s history. Religious indifference is one of the prominent features of new Japan” (The Land of the Morning, 1882, p. 517). The reconciliation of these estimates lies in the recognition of the fact that the Japanese populace is religious in very much the same way as those of Italy and England, while the more educated classes are rationalistic, not because of any “essential” incapacity for “devotion,” but because of enlightenment and lack of countervailing social pressure. To the eye of the devotional Protestant the Catholics of Italy, with their regard to externals, seem “essentially” irreligious; and vice versâ. Such formulas miss science. Two hundred years ago Charron, following previous schematists, made a classification in which northerners figured as strong, active, stupid, warlike, and little given to religion; the southerners as slight, abstinent, obstinate, unwarlike, and superstitious; and the “middle” peoples as between the two. La Sagesse, liv. i, ch. 42. The cognate formulas of to-day are hardly more trustworthy. Buddhism triumphed over Shintôism in Japan both in ancient and modern times precisely because its lore and ritual make so much more appeal to the devotional sense. (Cp. Chamberlain, pp. 358–62; Dixon, ch. x; Religious Systems of the World, pp. 103, 111; Griffis, p. 166.) But the æsthetically charming cult of the family, with its poetic recognition of ancestral spirits (as to which see Lafcadio Hearn, Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation, 1904), seems to hold its ground as well as any.
So universal is sociological like other law that we find in Japan, among some freethinkers, the same disposition as among some in Europe to decide that religion is necessary for the people. Professor Chamberlain (p. 352) cites Fukuzawa, “Japan’s most representative thinker and educationist,” as openly declaring that “It goes without saying that the maintenance of peace and security in society requires a religion. For this purpose any religion will do. I lack a religious nature, and have never believed in any religion. I am thus open to the charge that I am advising others to be religious while I am not so. Yet my conscience does not permit me to clothe myself with religion when I have it not at heart.... Of religions there are several kinds—Buddhism, Christianity, and what not. From my standpoint there is no more difference between those than between green tea and black.... See that the stock is well selected and the prices cheap....” (Japan Herald, September 9, 1897). To this view, however, Fukuzawa did not finally adhere. The Rev. Isaac Dooman, a missionary in Japan who knew him well, testifies to a change that was taking place in his views in later life regarding the value of religion. In an unpublished letter to Mr. Robert Young, of Kobe, Mr. Dooman says that on one occasion, when conversing on the subject of Christianity, Fukuzawa remarked: “There was a time when I advocated its adoption as a means to elevate our lower classes; but, after finding out that all Christian countries have their own lower classes just as bad, if not worse than ours, I changed my mind.” Further reflection, marked by equal candour, may lead the pupils of Fukuzawa to see that nations cannot be led to adore any form of “tea” by the mere assurance of its indispensableness from leaders who confess they never take any. His view is doubtless shared by those priests concerning whom “it may be questioned whether in their fundamental beliefs the more scholarly of the Shinshiû priests differ very widely from the materialistic agnostics of Europe” (Dixon, p. 516). In this state of things the Christian thinks he sees his special opportunity. Professor Dixon writes (p. 518), in the manner of the missionary, that “decaying shrines and broken gods are to be seen everywhere. Not only is there indifference, but there is a rapidly-growing skepticism.... The masses too are becoming affected by it.... Shintôism and ... Buddhism are doomed. What is to take their place?... It must be either Christianity or Atheism. We have the brightest hopes that the former will triumph in the near future....”
The American missionary before cited, Mr. Gulick, argues alternately that the educated Japanese are religious and that they are not, meaning that they have “religious instincts,” while rejecting current creeds. The so-called religious instinct is in fact simply the spirit of moral and intellectual seriousness. Mr. Gulick’s summing-up, as distinct from his theory and forecast, is as follows: “For about three hundred years the intelligence of the nation has been dominated by Confucian thought, which rejects active belief in supra-human beings.... The tendency of all persons trained in Confucian classics was towards thoroughgoing skepticism as to divine beings and their relation to this world. For this reason, beyond doubt, has Western agnosticism found so easy an entrance into Japan.... Complete indifference to religion is characteristic of the educated classes of to-day. Japanese and foreigners, Christians and non-Christians alike, unite in this opinion. The impression usually conveyed by this statement, however, is that agnosticism is a new thing in Japan. In point of fact, the old agnosticism is merely reinforced by ... the agnosticism of the West” (The Evolution of the Japanese, pp. 286–87). This may be taken as broadly accurate. Cp. the author’s paper on “Freethought in Japan” in the Agnostic Annual for 1906. Professor E. H. Parker notes (China and Religion, 1905, p. 263) that “the Japanese in translating Western books are beginning, to the dismay of our missionaries, to leave out all the Christianity that is in them.”
But a very grave danger to the intellectual and moral life of Japan has been of late set up by a new application of Shintôism, on the lines of the emperor-worship of ancient Rome. A recent pamphlet by Professor Chamberlain, entitled The Invention of a New Religion (R. P. A.; 1912), incidentally shows that the Japanese temperament is so far from being “essentially” devoid of devotion as to be capable of building up a fresh cultus to order. It appears that since the so-called Restoration of 1868, when the Imperial House, after more than two centuries of seclusion in Kyoto, was brought from its retirement and the Emperor publicly installed as ruler by right of his divine origin, the sentiment of religious devotion to the Imperial House has been steadily inculcated, reaching its height during the Russo-Japanese War, when the messages of victorious generals and admirals piously ascribed their successes over the enemy to the “virtues of the Imperial Ancestors.” In every school throughout the Empire there hangs a portrait of the emperor, which is regarded and treated as is a sacred image in Russia and in Catholic countries. The curators of schools have been known on occasion of fire and earthquake to save the imperial portrait before wife or child; and their action has elicited popular acclamation. On the imperial birthday teachers and pupils assemble, and passing singly before the portrait, bow in solemn adoration. The divine origin of the Imperial House and the grossly mythical history of the early emperors are taught as articles of faith in Japanese schools precisely as the cosmogony of Genesis has been taught for ages in the schools of Christendom. Some years ago a professor who exposed the absurdity of the chronology upon which the religion is based was removed from his post, and a teacher who declined to bow before a casket containing an imperial rescript was dismissed. His life was, in fact, for some time in danger from the fury of the populace. So dominant has Mikado-worship become that some Japanese Christian pastors have endeavoured to reconcile it with Christianity, and to be Mikado-worshippers and Christ-worshippers at the same time.341 All creeds are nominally tolerated in Japan, but avowed heresy as to the divine origin of the Imperial House is a bar to public employment, and exposes the heretic to suspicion of treason. The new religion, which is merely old Shintôism revised, has been invented as a political expedient, and may possibly not long survive the decease of Mutsu Hito, the late emperor, who continued throughout his reign to live in comparative seclusion, and has been succeeded by a young prince educated on European lines. But the cult has obtained a strong hold upon the people; and by reason of social pressure receives the conventional support of educated men exactly as Christianity does in England, America, Germany, and Russia.
Thus there is not “plain sailing” for freethought in Japan. In such a political atmosphere neither moral nor scientific thought has a good prognosis; and if it be not changed for the better much of the Japanese advance may be lost. Rationalism on any large scale is always a product of culture; and culture for the mass of the people of Japan has only recently begun. Down till the middle of the nineteenth century nothing more than sporadic freethought existed.342 Some famous captains were irreverent as to the omens; and in a seventeenth-century manual of the principles of government, ascribed to the great founder of modern feudalism, Iyéyasu, the sacrifices of vassals at the graves of their lords are denounced, and Confucius is even cited as ridiculing the burial of effigies in substitution.343 But, as elsewhere under similar conditions, such displays of originality were confined to the ruling caste.344 I have seen, indeed, a delightful popular satire, apparently a product of mother-wit, on the methods of popular Buddhist shrine-making; but, supposing it to be genuine and vernacular, it can stand only for that measure of freethought which is never absent from any society not pithed by a long process of religious tyranny. Old Japan, with its intense feudal discipline and its indurated etiquette, exhibited the social order, the grace, the moral charm, and the intellectual vacuity of a hive of bees. The higher mental life was hardly in evidence; and the ethical literature of native inspiration is of no importance.345 To this day the educated Chinese, though lacking in Japanese “efficiency” and devotion to drill of all kinds, are the more freely intellectual in their habits of mind. The Japanese feudal system, indeed, was so immitigably ironbound, so incomparably destructive of individuality in word, thought, and deed, that only in the uncodified life of art and handicraft was any free play of faculty possible. What has happened of late is the rapid and docile assimilation of western science. Another and a necessarily longer step is the independent development of the speculative and critical intelligence; and in the East, as in the West, this is subject to economic conditions.
A similar generalization holds good as to the other Oriental civilizations. Analogous developments to those seen in the latter-day Mohammedan world, and equally marked by fluctuation, have been noted in the mental life alike of the non-Mohammedan and the Mohammedan peoples of India; and at the present day the thought of the relatively small educated class is undoubtedly much affected by the changes going on in that of Europe, and especially of England. The vast Indian masses, however, are far from anything in the nature of critical culture; and though some system of education for them is probably on the way to establishment,346 their life must long remain quasi-primitive, mentally as well as physically. Buddhism is theoretically more capable of adaptation to a rationalist view of life than is Christianity; but its intellectual activities at present seem to tend more towards an “esoteric” credulity than towards a rational or scientific adjustment to life.
Of the nature of the influence of Buddhism in Burmah, where it has prospered, a vivid and thoughtful account is given in the work of H. Fielding, The Soul of a People, 1898. At its best the cult there deifies the Buddha; elsewhere, it is interwoven with aboriginal polytheism and superstition (Davids, Buddhism, pp. 207–211; Max Müller, Anthro. Rel., P. 132).
Within Brahmanism, again, there have been at different times attempts to set up partly naturalistic reforms in religious thought—e.g. that of Chaitanya in the sixteenth century; but these have never been pronouncedly freethinking, and Chaitanya preached a “surrender of all to Krishna,” very much in the manner of evangelical Christianity. Finally he has been deified by his followers. (Müller, Nat. Rel. p. 100; Phys. Rel. p. 356.)
More definitely freethinking was the monotheistic cult set up among the Sikhs in the fifteenth century, as the history runs, by Nanak, who had been influenced both by Parsees and by Mohammedans, and whose ethical system repudiated caste. But though Nanak objected to any adoration of himself, he and all his descendants have been virtually deified by his devotees, despite their profession of a theoretically pantheistic creed. (Cp. De la Saussaye, Manual of the Science of Religion, Eng. tr. pp. 659–62; Müller, Phys. Rel. p. 355.) Trumpp (Die Religion der Sikhs, 1881, p. 123) tells of other Sikh sects, including one of a markedly atheistic character belonging to the nineteenth century; but all alike seem to gravitate towards Hinduism.
Similarly among the Jainas, who compare with the Buddhists in their nominal atheism as in their tenderness to animals and in some other respects, there has been decline and compromise; and their numbers appear steadily to dwindle, though in India they survived while Buddhism disappeared. Cp. De la Saussaye, Manual, pp. 557–63; Rev. J. Robson, Hinduism, 1874, pp. 80–86; Tiele, Outlines, p. 141. Finally, the Brahmo-Somaj movement of the nineteenth century appears to have come to little in the way of rationalism (Mitchell, Hinduism, pp. 224–46; De la Saussaye, pp. 669–71; Tiele, p. 160).
The principle of the interdependence of the external and the internal life, finally, applies even in the case of Turkey. The notion that Turkish civilization in Europe is unimprovable, though partly countenanced by despondent thinkers even among the enlightened Turks,347 had no justification in social science, though bad politics may ruin the Turkish, like other Moslem States; and although Turkish freethinking has not in general passed the theistic stage,348 and its spread is grievously hindered by the national religiosity,349 which the age-long hostility of the Christian States so much tends to intensify, a gradual improvement in the educational and political conditions would suffice to evolve it, according to the observed laws of all civilization. It may be that a result of the rationalistic evolution in the other European States will be to make them intelligently friendly to such a process, where at present they are either piously malevolent towards the rival creed or merely self-seeking as against each other’s influence on Turkish destinies.
In any case, it cannot seriously be pretended that the mental life of Christian Greece in modern times has yielded, apart from services to simple scholarship, a much better result to the world at large than has that of Turkey. The usual reactions in individual cases of course take place. An American traveller writing in 1856 notes how illiterate Greek priests glory in their ignorance, “asserting that a more liberal education has the effect of making atheists of the youth.” He adds that he has “known several deacons and others in the University [of Athens] that were skeptics even as to the truth of religion,” and would gladly have become laymen if they could have secured a livelihood.350 But there was then and later in the century no measurable movement of a rationalistic kind. At the time of the emancipation the Greek priesthood was “in general at once the most ignorant and the most vicious portion of the community”;351 and it remained socially predominant and reactionary. “Whatever progress has been made in Greece has received but little assistance from them.”352 Liberal-minded professors in the theological school were mutinied against by bigoted students,353 a type still much in evidence at Athens; and the liberal thinker Theophilus Kaïres, charged with teaching “atheistic doctrines,” and found guilty with three of his followers, died of jail fever while his appeal to the Areopagus was pending.354
Thus far Christian bigotry seems to have held its own in what once was Hellas. On the surface, Greece shows little trace of instructed freethought; while in Bulgaria, by Greek testimony, school teachers openly proclaim their rationalism, and call for the exclusion of religious teaching from the schools.355 Despite the political freedom of the Christian State, there has thus far occurred there no such general fertilization by the culture of the rest of Europe as is needed to produce a new intellectual evolution of any importance. The mere geographical isolation of modern Greece from the main currents of European thought and commerce is probably the most retardative of her conditions; and it is hard to see how it can be countervailed. Italy, in comparison, is pulsating with original life, industrial and intellectual. But, given either a renascence of Mohammedan civilization or a great political reconstruction such as is latterly on foot, the whole life of the nearer East may take a new departure; and in such an evolution Greece would be likely to share.