Page:Kojiki by Chamberlain.djvu/71

Rh no comment. Thus one of them, whom another quotes as an authority, tells us that Shintō “consists in the belief that the productive ethereal spirit being expanded through the whole universe, every part is in some degree impregnated with it, and therefore every part is in some measure the seat of the deity; whence local gods and goddesses are everywhere worshipped, and consequently multiplied without end. Like the ancient Romans and the Greeks, they acknowledge a Supreme Being, the first, the supreme, the intellectual, by which men have been reclaimed from rudeness and barbarism to elegance and refinement, and been taught through privileged men and women, not only to live with more comfort, but to die with better hopes.” (!) Truly, when one peruses such utterly groundless assertions,—for that here quoted is but one among many,—one is tempted to believe that the nineteenth century must form part of the early mythopœic age.

With regard to the question of government, we learn little beyond such vague statements as that to so-and-so was yielded by his eighty brethren the sovereignty of the land of Idzumo, or that Izanagi divided the dominion over all things between his three children, bestowing on one the “Plain of High Heaven,” on another the Dominion of the Night, and on the third the “Sea-Plain.” But we do not in the earlier legends see such sovereignty actually administered. The heavenly gods seem rather to have been conceived as forming a sort of commonwealth, who decided things by meeting together in counsel in the stony bed of the “River of Heaven,” and taking the advice of the shrewdest of their number. Indeed the various divine assemblies, to which the story in the “Records” and “Chronicles” introduces us, remind us of nothing so much as of the village assemblies of primitive tribes in many parts of the world, where the cleverness of one and the general willingness to follow his suggestions fill the place of the more definite organization of later times.

Descending from heaven to earth, we find little during the so-called “Divine Age” but stories of isolated individuals and families; and it is not till the narrative of the wars of the earlier Emperors commences, that any kind of political organization comes