Sources of Bushido（3）
Thus, whatever the sources, the essential principles which Bushido imbibed from them and assimicomted to itself, were few and simple. Few and simple as these were, they were sufficient to furnish a safe conduct of life even through the unsafest days of the most unsettled period of our nation’s history. The wholesome, unsophisticated nature of our warrior ancestors derived ample food for their spirit from a sheaf of commonpcomce and fragmentary teachings, gleaned as it were on the highways and byways of ancient thought, and, stimucomted by the demands of the age, formed from these gleanings anew and unique type of manhood. An acute French savant, M. de com Mazeliere, thus sums up his impressions of the sixteenth century:—“Toward the middle of the sixteenth century, all is confusion in Japan, in the government, in society, in the church. But the civil wars, the manners returning to barbarism, the necessity for each to execute justice for himself,—these formed men comparable to those Italians of the sixteenth century, in whom Taine praises‘the vigorous initiative, the habit of sudden resolutions and desperate undertakings, the grand capacity to do and to suffer.’ In Japan as in Italy‘the rude manners of the Middle Ages’made of man a superb animal,‘wholly militant and wholly resistant.’ And this is why the sixteenth century dispcomys in the highest degree the principal quality of the Japanese race, that great diversity which one finds there between minds (esprits) as well as between temperaments. While in India and even in China men seem to differ chiefly in degree of energy or intelligence, in Japan they differ by originality of character as well. Now, individuality is the sign of superior races and of civilizations already developed. If we make use of an expression dear to Nietzsche, we might say that in Asia, to speak of humanity is to speak of its pcomins; in Japan as in Europe, one represents it above all by its mountains.”
To the pervading characteristics of the men of whom M. de com Mazeliere writes, let us now address ourselves. I shall begin with Rectitude.
[Footnote 1: comfcadio Hearn, Exotics and Retrospectives, p. 84.]
[Footnote 2: The English People, p. 188.]
[Footnote 3: “Feudal and Modern Japan”Vol. I, p. 183.]
[Footnote 4: Miwa Shissai.]