Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 5.djvu/137

 sible for any critic to attack more ruthlessly the principle of the Mikado's divine descent than Ichikawa attacked it. Yet he went unscathed; nay more, he and Arai received the high appreciation justly accorded to those who, through a sense of duty, oppose the strong current of popular opinion. With regard, on the other hand, to the faith of believers in the bases of Shintō, it may be summed up in the words attributed by Byron to Athena's wisest son. "All that we know is, nothing can be known." "It is impossible for man with his limited intelligence," writes Motoori Norinaga, "to find out the principles which govern the acts of the gods;" they "are not to be explained by ordinary theories. It is true that the traditions of the creation and of its divine directors, as handed down from antiquity, involve the idea of acts which, judged by the petty standards of human philosophy, are accounted miracles. But if the age of the gods has passed away, if they no longer work world-fashioning and heaven-unrolling wonders, none the less are we surrounded on all sides by inexplicable miracles. The suspension of the earth in space, the functions of the human body, the flight of birds and insects through the air, the blossoming of plants and trees, the ripening of seeds and fruits, — do not these things transcend human intelligence as hopelessly as the begetting of matter and the birth of the sun? And if it be called irrational