Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/565

 REVIEWS 549

ing errors of the whole. Probably three greater errors were never compressed into a single sentence than in this from p. 27 : " The real religion of Japan, the religion still professed in one form or another by the entire nation, is that cult which has been the foundation of all civilized religion and of all civilized society ancestor-worship." That ancestor-worship is still professed by the entire nation is nega- tived by all we know from other sources as well as all we should expect. The ancestor-worship native to Japan had been appropriated by Buddhism ; and, since the revolution of 1868 with its disestablish- ment of that church, the Butsudan, where the tablets were kept, has been largely sold as an art object or has been simply disused. The mitatnaya mentioned on p. 50, as if in extensive use for ancestor- worship, is found only in a few purist families, and is known to the mass of Japanese only as the rear apartment or structure of a Shinto- ist shrine.

That ancestor-worship is " the real religion of Japan " and " has been the foundation of all civilized religion" are errors that Mr. Hearn owes to Herbert Spencer's influence, which is confessed here, and indeed is evident throughout the work. Perhaps nothing has brought Spencer into more discredit than the lengths he went to prove this basic nature of ancestorism in his Principles of Sociology, and the reader of pp. 121-24 of Mr. Ream's work will readily see how futile also is the attempt to show that the nature-deities of Shintoism were only " transfigured ghosts." No, indeed, God did not make man and leave ghosts to make him religious. The heaven and the earth were here before ghosts, and man could personify them just as soon as he knew himself as a person, which he must have done long before he analyzed himself into a ghost-soul and a body. Had Mr. Hearn not ignored Reville, Max Miiller, Pfleiderer, and Saussaye, while steeping himself in Spencer, he might have observed, what is plainly visible in Shintoism as elsewhere, that religion has two tap roots, ancestorism indeed, but also naturism.

Again, Mr. Hearn's sentence declares that ancestor-worship is " the foundation of all civilized society." This is the prevailing view throughout the work, for example on pp. 23, 57, 86, 99, 175, and 320. But other passages imply the saner view that religion and morality are co-ordinate functions of one man. Thus at p. 511 Mr. Hearn attributes Japan's power to " her old religious and social training." The many and strong cases of influence of religion upon conduct that can really be shown in Japan amount only to influence, of course, and