This page has been validated.
NOUMENA.
379

no motion could have existed in the solar system except one vast self-crushing in the sun.

Thus idiosyncracies are a necessary part of us, but they are numerous and diverse in proportion to the height the individual development has attained. They are much less marked between man and man in Japan than among Aryan folk. The average Japanese more nearly approaches his own national norm.

This lands us in our investigation at an unexpected conclusion, to wit, that these gods really are what they claim to be. In Shintō god-possession we are viewing the actual incarnation of the ancestral spirit of the race. The man has temporarily become once more his own indefinitely great great-grandfather. It is a veridic incarnation, if ever there was one. If these his ancestors were gods in the past, gods they are that descend to embodiment to-day.