Page:Occult Japan - Lovell.djvu/36

20 race-mother, not what they were taught from abroad. Buddhist they are by virtue of belief; Shintō by virtue of being.

Shintō is the Japanese conception of the cosmos. It is a combination of the worship of nature and of their own ancestors. But the character of the combination is ethnologically instructive. For a lack of psychic development has enabled these seemingly diverse elements to fuse into a homogeneous whole. Both, of course, are aboriginal instincts. Next to the fear of natural phenomena, in point of primitiveness, comes the fear of one's father, as children and savages show. But races, like individuals, tend to differentiate the two as they develop. Now, the suggestive thing about the Japanese is, that they did not do so. Filial respect lasted, and by virtue of not becoming less, became more, till it filled not only the whole sphere of morals, but expanded into the sphere of cosmogony. To the Japanese eye, the universe itself took on the paternal look. Awe of their parents, which these people could comprehend, lent explanation to dread of nature, which they could not. Quite cogently, to their minds, the thunder and the