Page:Shinto, the Way of the Gods - Aston - 1905.djvu/36

26 "primitive " religious development, as is so often supposed. "Primitive man," it has been said, "thinks that the world is pervaded by spiritual forces." I would rather describe his mental attitude as a piecemeal conception of the universe as alive, just as he looks on his fellow man as alive without analyzing him into the two distinct entities of body and soul. A dog knows quite well the difference between alive and dead; but the distinction between body and soul is far beyond his intellectual capacity.

In Japan the process of spiritualizing the Gods has not gone very far. Like the Gods of the Homeric Olympus, the Shinto deities are, on the whole, unspiritual beings.

The doctrine of spiritism is associated in Shinto with the word Mitama, for which "spirit" is the nearest English equivalent. Strictly speaking, the Mitama is not the God, but an emanation or effluence from him, which inhabits his temple, and is the vehicle of his action at a distance from the place where he himself resides. It therefore corresponds to the Shekinah (that which dwells) of the Jews, and, though in a less marked degree, to the Roman numen. The Shekinah, like the Mitama, is a later development. Where Habakkuk, ii. 20, says, "The Lord is in his holy temple," the Targums have, "Jehovah was pleased to cause his Shekinah to dwell in his holy temple." I cannot see that the Shekinah and Mitama owe anything to the analogous doctrine of the separability of the human soul and body. The ghost is not the parent of either.

The unavoidable assumption that an anthropomorphic God can act at a distance from his own abode in Heaven or elsewhere really involves the doctrine of spiritism, though time and thought are required for its development.