【１】明快に外界へ延びて行く道具とは反対に、芸術は複雑に凝縮して、人間の手もとで無限の外界を予感させる象徴となった。手仕事の現実的な効果ではなく、そのプロセスそのものが、一タッチ一タッチの痕跡を積みあげて小宇宙をつくった。【２】外界とは相対的に独立して、芸術はそれ自体の内部に自立し得る小世界を作った。外界がどこまでも見とどけ得ない暗闇であるとするならば、人間はせめて掌のなかに、すみずみまで見つくすことのできる完結した世界を必要としたのである。
　【３】そのとき以来、道具の制作と芸術の制作とは、車の両輪のように手仕事のパラドクシカルな両面をそれぞれに代表した。道具はもちろん、それ自身のしかたで現実についての情報量をふやしたが、人間は依然として小宇宙としての芸術の制作をやめなかった。【４】道具が現実についてプラスの情報をもたらしたとすれば、芸術は譬喩的な意味でマイナスの情報をもたらしたといえる。道具は人間がなにを知り得るかを教えたが、芸術はなにを知り得ないかを教えたといいなおしてもよい。【５】われわれの先祖は、現実にむかって量的な距離を刻々に縮めながら、一方で、なおそのかなたに拡がる無限の「沈黙」に測深器をおろしていたのである。
　【６】われわれがみずからの手の宿命的な短さと、その短さの積極的な意味を見失ったのは、いつのことであったか確かではない。近代にはいって道具が機械へと飛躍的な発展をとげたのちにも、われわれは依然としてあの無力な手仕事をやめなかったからである。
　【７】地理学が発展し、望遠鏡が発達し、ひとつの山の裏表まで知りつくされたのちに、人間はなおその山を肉眼で見ることをやめなかった。有限な肉眼で眺めた山を、有限な画布の大きさに描きとどめることをやめなかった。【８】情報の量的な大きさからいえば、山の地理学と山の風景画とは誰の眼にも比較にもならない。だが、それにもかかわらず、画家はあきもせずに、巨大な山を手のなかの小宇宙におさめる作業を続けたのである。【９】われわれはこの「徒労」の意味を、いくら反省しても多すぎるということはない。手仕事の徒労によって、画家は初めて情報の量的な蒐集から離れられたのであり、一塊の山の捉えがたさを観念ではなく知り得たのではないだ∵ろうか。【０】それと同時に、彼は手仕事がすみずみまでとどいた山の模型に、なにものかを確実に手もとに置き得た安心を味わったにちがいない。そこでもまた人間の「自己」は、無限の可能性としてよりは、現実にたいする不適合状態として耐えられていたはずなのである。
　けれども、いつとは知れないうちに、われわれはそうした不適合存在としての「自己」を見失ってしまった。あたかも道具や機械と同じように、人間は芸術をも、「自己」の無限の可能性を証明する手段に変えてしまった。一方で、機械によって情報を量的に拡大しながら、われわれはさらに芸術さえ、その機械と同じレヴェルで競争させる地位に置いたのである。
　たとえば近代絵画を大きく変えた動機として、われわれはつねに写真機の発明ということを思い出す。写真機はその手軽さと写実能力の高さによって、当時の写実的な絵画を根底から脅やかした。絵画がそれによって方向を変えたのは当然だが、しかしそのときとられた対応策は、まさに機械と芸術の特色についての完全な誤解のうえに立っていた。すなわち、近代人は機械の最大の弱点は空想力の貧困にあり、芸術はみずからのイメージの多彩さによって機械と競争し得ると考えたのである。

（山崎（）正和「劇的なる日本人」より）

In 1858 Fukuzawa's own hard work bore fruit of a practical kind, for he was ordered by the clan authorities to proceed to Edo, there to start a school for teaching Dutch to the young clan samurai. This small school, quartered in the clan's nakayashiki or secondary mansion at Teppozu and equipped in the most rudimentary way, was later to grow into what is now Keio University.
But it was not long before Fukuzawa came to realise that a knowledge of Dutch alone would be entirely inadequate to meet the needs of the times. Soon after he arrived in Edo he walked down to Yokohama to visit the primitive foreign settlement which had sprung up there as a result of the Five Nation Treaties concluded the year before. He found to his dismay that his efforts to speak Dutch were not understood.

Nobody understood a word I said, and naturally I understood nothing of what they were saying. I couldn't read the signboards or the labels on the bottles. Nowhere could I see a single familiar word.... When I got back it wasn't my weary legs that I minded, but the bitter disappointment of knowing that all my years of desperate efforts to learn Dutch had gone for nothing...But I knew that it was no time to despair. The language used must be either English or French and I had heard before that English was the language used all over the world. So the day after I got back from Yokohama I made up my mind that I would have to learn English.

He tells us that he made some progress with the aid of a Dutch-English dictionary and a few visits to shipwrecked Japanese sailors who had been picked up in British boats.
In 1860 he contrived to be taken on a voyage to America, in the capacity of personal servant to the captain of the Kanrin Maru, a Japanese vessel acting as escort to the battleship Powhattan which was carrying three Japanese envoys to Washington for the purpose of ratifying the Treaty of 1858. The crew of the Kanrin Maru went no further than San Francisco, but there Fukuzawa was able to see such wonders of science as the town could boast at the time, and, even stranger, wonders of western everyday life such as had never appeared in textbooks of physics, medicine or astronomy.

The Americans were very kind in explaining about the telegraph and the process of galvanising , and how the process of boiling in a sugar refinery could be speeded up by producing a vacuum in the cauldron -- and they obviously thought they were showing us things the like of which we had never even dreamed of. But in fact we already knew all about speeding up boiling by means of a vacuum, and how to refine sugar by straining it through bone-charcoal....

Far stranger were the horse-drawn carriages, the carpets on the floors of the hotel and the curious spectacle of ladies and gentlemen dancing.
Fukuzawa's second voyage to the West was made in 1862 in the capacity of 'translator' to the delegation sent to Europe to negotiate for the postponement of the opening of the ports of Hyogo and Niigata to foreign trade and of Edo and Osaka to foreign residence. The delegation visited France, England, Holland, Germany, Russia and Portugal, their hosts in each of the capital cities taking pains to show them the most impressive examples of western civilisation that their country could muster.
Fukuzawa lost no opportunity for learning all he could, particularly in the fields of politics and economics and the small things of daily life which the westerners considered too obvious to write down in books. 'They probably thought us very stupid', he recalled, 'to ask so many questions about ordinary everyday things which they understood perfectly, but for us it was these very ordinary everyday things which were the most difficult to understand.' Things like Life Insurance Companies, for example, were very difficult, and, he recalled, 'I shall never forget the terrible trouble I had in understanding how the postal system worked.' And as for the party system and the election law, 'it was often five or ten days before it finally dawned on me what they meant.'
Fukuzawa was an indefatigable note-taker. 'Whenever I met anyone whom I thought to be of any consequence', he wrote in his autobiography, 'I did my best to learn something from him. I would ask questions and put down everything he said in a notebook .... If I visited a hospital, for instance, I would ask who paid the expenses and how. If I visited a bank I would ask how the money was paid in and out .... 'One of his notebooks has been preserved. It is crammed with information in Japanese, English and Dutch on such varied subjects as the cost per mile of building a railway, the number of students in King's College, London, and the correct process for hardening wood
The information he collected on this tour later went to form the basis of the book which first made him famous as an authority on the West --Seiyo Jijo, or Conditions in the West. Seiyo Jijo was indeed an epoch-making work. Of the first volume alone, which appeared in 1866, 150,000 copies were sold almost at once and pirated editions soon raised the number to 250,000. Its success was largely due to the fact that it contained precisely the kind of information which the Japanese at that time were needing to substantiate their shadowy vision of the western lands -- namely, simple, concise accounts of everyday social institutions such as hospitals, schools, newspapers, workhouses, taxation, museums and lunatic asylums. The book's success was due also to its literary style, which was so simple and lucid as to be easily comprehensible by any Japanese of any degree of literacy. It was a style which, contrary as it was to all the canons of scholarly writing of the day, Fukuzawa cultivated consciously and at first painfully, with the object of enabling his works to be read by as wide a public as possible. Indeed, to test the comprehensibility of his writings Fukuzawa would sometimes make his housemaid read his manuscripts through, and would alter any word or phrase which she did not understand.
During the upheaval of the Restoration of 1868 Fukuzawa continued quietly writing and teaching in his school. He remained strictly neutral throughout the disturbances partly, he tells us, because he had no sympathy with either of the two contending parties and partly because he had no personal ambitions which might have been furthered by supporting either side.
The Bakufu he had always disliked. Nor did the supporters of the Emperor seem to Fukuzawa any better; if anything they were worse in so far as they seemed even more fanatically anti-foreign than the Bakufu. Hence, during the time of crisis preceding the Restoration he scarcely left his school, even though the numbers of the students were much depleted and though the rest of the city 'was in tumult, everyone, not only samurai but also doctors, long-sleeved scholars and priests, doing nothing but talk politics as though they were mad or drunk.' Even after the Imperial Army had pushed its way into Edo and the battle of Ueno was in progress, Fukuzawa continued to lecture on Wayland's Elements of Political Economy to the few students that remained.