Page:Occult Japan - Lovell.djvu/30

14 visitors of good locomotive powers also accomplished this feat without penetrating the secret of the mountain. And yet the trances were certainly going on all the time, and the guides who piloted these several gentlemen must have been well aware of the fact.

The explanation is to be sought elsewhere. The fact is that Japan is still very much of an undiscovered country to us. It is not simply that the language proves so difficult that but few foreigners pass this threshold of acquaintance; but that the farther the foreigner goes, the more he perceives the ideas in the two hemispheres to be fundamentally diverse. What he expects to find does not exist, and what exists he would never dream of looking for.

Japan is scientifically an undiscovered country even to the Japanese, as a study of these possessions will disclose. For their importance is twofold: archaeologic no less than psychic. They are other-world manifestations in two senses, and the one sense helps accentuate the other. For they are as essentially Japanese as they are essentially genuine. That is, they are neither shams nor importations from China or India,