Page:Occult Japan - Lovell.djvu/37

Rh typhoon, the sunshine and the earthquake, were the work not only of anthropomorphic beings, but of beings ancestrally related to themselves. In short, Shintō, their explanation of things in general, is simply the patriarchal principle projected without perspective into the past, dilating with distance into deity.

That their dead should thus definitely live on to them is nothing strange. It is paralleled by the way in which the dead live on in the thought of the young generally. Actual personal immortality is the instant inevitable inference of the child-mind. The dead do thus survive in the memories of the living, and it is the natural deduction to clothe this subjective idea with objective existence.

Shintō is thus an adoration of family wraiths, or of imputed family wraiths; imaginaries of the first and the second order in the analysis of the universe. Buddhism with its ultimate Nirvana is in a sense the antithesis of this. For while simple Shintō regards the dead as spiritually living, philosophic Buddhism regards the living as spiritually dead; two aspects of the same shield.