Whether it is intrinsically likely that so rude a race as the Early Japanese, and a race so little given to metaphysical speculation as the Japanese at all times of their history, should have commenced by a highly abstract worship which they afterwards completely abandoned, is a question which may better be left to those whose general knowledge of early peoples and early religious beliefs entitles their decisions to respect. Their assistance, likewise, even after the resolution of the Japanese mythology into its several component parts, must be called in by the specialist to help in deciding how much of this mythology should be interpreted according to the “solar” method now so popular in England, how much should be accepted as history more or less perverted, how much should be regarded as embodying attempts at explaining facts in nature, and what residue may be rejected as simple fabrication of the priesthood in comparatively late times.[1] Those who are personally acquainted with the Japanese character will probably incline to enlarge the area of the three latter divisions more than would be prudent in the case of the highly imaginative Aryans, and to point out that, though some few Japanese legends or portions of legends can be traced to false etymologies invented to account for names of places, and are therefore true myths in the strictest acceptation of the term, yet the kindred process whereby personality is ascribed to inanimate objects,—a process which lies at the very root of Aryan mythology,—is altogether alien to the Japanese genius, and indeed to the Far-Eastern mind in general. Mythology thus originated has been aptly described as a “disease of language.” But all persons are not liable to catch the same disease, neither presumably are all languages; and it is hard to see how a linguistic disease which consists in mistaking a metaphor for a reality can attack a tongue to which metaphor, even in its tamest shape, is an almost total stranger. Thus not only have Japanese Nouns no Genders and Japanese Verbs no Persons, but the names of inanimate objects cannot even be used as the subjects of Transitive Verbs. Nowhere for instance in Japanese, whether Archaic, Classical, or Modern, do we meet
- ↑ Sect. XXXVII is a good instance of the third of these categories. For an elaborate myth founded on the name of a place see Sect. LXV. Lesser instances occur in Sects. XLIV, LXV, and LXXIII.
