Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/354

314 Kami, i.e. the Heaven-shining great-august-deity, whose names permit no possibility of misconception as to their attributes.

The following scrap of theory, prepared with a special view to the facts of Shinto, is meant only as a help towards defining its place among religions.

A species of animism forms the basis of Shinto, as it does of other religions. Early man, proceeding by a similar, though less tangible analogy, to that by which he recognises in his fellow-men and other living beings will and sensation resembling his own, extends to natural elements and objects, especially those which inspire gratitude, fear and wonder, something of the same quality. He regards the sun, fire, wind or sky as alive. Religion, at this stage, hardly amounts to theism. I have called it animism, using this word, it will be observed, in a more restricted sense than Dr. Tylor in his Primitive Culture.

The next step is to endow nature with human qualities, physical and moral. From this combination of humanity with the awe-inspiring might and majesty of nature, beneficent in some aspects and terrible in others, springs the first rude conception of divinity. As the organisation of society proceeds and individuals are aggregated into families, families into tribes, and tribes into nations, the original imperfect notion of deity is enriched and widened by analogies drawn from the father, the chief and the sovereign. This we may call the anthropomorphic stage of religious development. A later phase of it is where the material, natural object is supposed to be inhabited or governed by an unseen but not incorporeal anthropomorphic deity.

The third or spiritist stage of belief is that in which natural phenomena are attributed to the action of an invisible and incorporeal power or powers whose essential humanity has been refined and purged of the grosser ideas which accompanied it in the earlier stage of progress. There are two phases of spiritist belief, one in which the