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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: verbal imagery, embrace Mother Earth, with that subtle suggestion of
humanity which in Aryan speech the gender of the nouns hints without
expressing, is not due to any lack of poesy in the Far Oriental
speaker, but to the essential impersonality of his mind, embodied
now in the very character of the words he uses. A Japanese noun is
a crystallized concept, handed down unchanged from the childhood of
the Japanese race. So primitive a conception does it represent that
it is neither a total nor a partial symbol, but rather the outcome
of a first vague generality. The word "man," for instance, means to
them not one man, still less mankind, but that indefinite idea which
struggles for embodiment in the utterance of the infant.
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