Shinto. Aston William George
Infinite. – Max Müller says that without the faculty of apprehending the Infinite there can be no religion. In that case Shinto is not a religion. The Gods are not conceived of as infinite. They are superior, swift, brave, bright, rich, &c., but not immortal, omnipresent, omniscient, or possessed of infinite power. Where the word infinite is used it is said of infinite time. We hear of the infinite succession of the Mikados, and of infinite or perpetual night (tokoyami). Perhaps what Max Müller really meant was "transcendent," that is, beyond man's power to rival, or even fully to comprehend.
CHAPTER V.
MYTH
Nature of Myth. – Myth and religion have distinct sources. We have seen above48 that there is a phase of religion antecedent to myth. On the other hand, the earliest form of myth has no religious significance. It is the result of an idle play of fancy without any definite purpose. I have known a child of two or three years of age, who, when he saw a light cloud pass over the rising moon, exclaimed "She is putting on her clothes." Not that he believed the moon to be an animated being, or that he thought that clouds were really her clothes. His childish imagination was stirred by an instinctive impulse, to be compared with that which prompts the gambolling of a kitten who rushes from one place to another without any definite object, or to the butting of a young ruminant before his horns have grown. Closely related to such spontaneous efforts is the myth invented solely for the amusement of the hearer. May we not place in this category some of the nature myths of savages which to all appearance have no worship or belief associated with them, and belong to a pre-religious stage of development. Then we have the myths which are explanatory of some custom, rite, natural phenomenon, political institution, names of places or persons, &c. With these we may associate the genealogical myth. There is also the blunder myth, arising frequently from a misunderstanding of language, and the lie-a myth framed with intent to deceive. All these classes of fiction are abundantly exemplified in the old Japanese books. More important for our present purpose is the religious myth, that
Mysterious veil, of brightness made,
At once the lustre and the shade
of religious conceptions. Like the metaphor, of which it may be regarded as an expansion, it suggests the True by means of the Untrue. It is an acknowledged necessity of religious teaching. In the infancy of language there is no other means of expressing spiritual verities than by physical symbols-in other words by myth and metaphor. And even when a language has acquired some capacity for the direct expression of spiritual facts, it is found that the old methods must still be resorted to in order to excite the interest and impress the imagination of the ignorant multitude. It is not to be supposed that the makers of such myths believed that they were true in their natural physical acceptation. Take for example the parable of the prodigal son. There is no reason to believe that the "far country," "the husks that the swine did eat," "the fatted calf," and the prodigal himself were not figments of Our Lord's imagination. Nor if the story had been true in all its details would this circumstance have added one whit to the value of the lesson taught by it. I believe that the author of the Mosaic story of the Fall of Man would be much surprised to know that his drama, which deals so forcibly in concrete form with temptation, sin, and its punishment, had been taken by the world for many centuries as a narrative of actual fact.
Some high authorities apply a different measure to pagan and savage myth. Dr. Pfleiderer, in his 'Philosophy of Religion,' says that "it must be carefully borne in mind that the religious phantasy, in producing such poetic symbolical legends, is not in the habit of distinguishing, nor can distinguish between the ideal truth and its sensible investment." The late Mr. Fiske held substantially the same view. He goes so far as to apply it to Dante, whose "Charon beating the lagging shades with his oar," "Satan crushing in his monstrous jaws the arch-traitors Judas, Brutus, and Cassius," "Bertrand de Born looking at his own dissevered head," he regards as "in the minds of Dante and his readers living, terrible realities." True it is that a stern reality underlies these grotesque fancies. But it is not of the physical order. No one knew better than Dante the virtue of the altro intende in such matters. We may be quite sure that he did not believe in a real inscription over the gate of Hell, in Italian terza rima, and composed by himself. It is a mistake, I submit, to imagine him, "like Katerfelto, with his hair on end at his own wonders." When Dickens tells us that he decidedly looked on his heroes as living persons we must take this statement cum grano salis. We know what would have happened if some one had offered him, by way of payment, a cheque bearing the signature of Mr. Boffin, Dombey & Son, or the Brothers Cheeryble.
Mere inferences are often taken for facts, but, under normal conditions, the imaginative man is not the dupe of his own inventive faculty. It may be said that, however true this may be of more modern religious myth, the attitude of the "primitive man" towards the naive creations of his fancy is different. Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as a primitive man. However far we may go back, we shall find men with parents, and preceded by an infinite line of ancestors. Still there can be no harm in using this term to designate mankind at some ill-defined stage of progress above the highest lower animal and below the savage of our own days. Strange things are told us of the primitive man. He is said to be unable to distinguish between his imaginations and facts, and that he is in the habit of taking his dreams49 for real occurrences. Fiske says: "Our primitive ancestors knew nothing about laws of nature, nothing about physical forces, nothing about the relations of cause and effect, nothing about the necessary regularity of things… The only force they knew was the force of which they were directly conscious-the force of will. Accordingly, they imagined all the outward world to be endowed with volition and to be directed by it." Of course our primitive ancestors expressed themselves differently from ourselves. They did not talk about laws of nature and the necessary regularity of things. But can we conceive them ignorant of the law of the regular alternation of night and day, of summer and winter, of the phases of the moon? Did not the "primitive man" know just as well as Newton that when an apple is detached from a tree it falls to the ground? He knew that from a blow as cause we may expect pain, wounds, or even death as the effect. He had sufficient acquaintance with dynamics to be aware that he could not raise himself from the ground more than a few feet, and with chemistry to have learnt that the savour of food is improved or spoilt, according to circumstances, by the application of fire. Nor is it true that he ascribed all forces to volition. It is only by exception that the child, the savage, and the primitive man attribute life to inanimate things. This requires imagination, a faculty which is notoriously feebler with them than with the adult civilized man. The progress of humanity is from a sporadic towards a general recognition of will in or behind the material universe, from fitful and sportive fancies involving this idea to an earnest and steady conviction of its truth, and from the fragmentary personification of the part as animated to the conception of a living, universal whole. Agnosticism, which ignores volition in matter, belongs, therefore, to the lower end of the scale of progress. Where it appears in civilized man, it is a case of arrested development. The average savage is a materialist, who associates volition with the energies of nature in a much less thorough and systematic way than the Christian, who believes that a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without the Father.
We must not confound the primitive maker of religious myth with the primitive man. It would lead to error if we modelled our idea of the average modern European on Bunyan, Milton, or Dante.
It is sometimes asserted that the impossible and miraculous occurrences which we so often meet with in the narratives of the primæval myth-maker are to him true. Why should he be limited to fact in this way? No doubt his standard of truth is different from our own. He would regard as possible many things which we know to be impossible. But is it necessary to suppose that his knowledge that a thing was impossible should prevent him, any more than our modern storytellers, from utilizing it in his imaginative work? Jules Verne well knew that a voyage round the moon is an impossibility. The unknown author or authors of 'Cinderella' surely need not be credited with a belief that pumpkins can be converted into coaches by the stroke of a fairy wand; the inventor of the story of the birth of Minerva from the brain of Jupiter knew quite well that such obstetrical operations were not feasible; and it is unnecessary to believe that the myth-makers of
See above, p. 12, and Index-'Dreams,'