anthropologist, merely to trace out the multitudinous lines of its
evolution, and to determine the sources of its various elements:
primeval polytheisms and fetishisms, traditions of dubious origin,
philosophical concepts from China, Korea, and elsewhere--all mingled
with Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism. The so-called 'Revival of Pure
Shinto'--an effort, aided by Government, to restore the cult to its
archaic simplicity, by divesting it of foreign characteristics, and
especially of every sign or token of Buddhist origin--resulted only, so
far as the avowed purpose was concerned, in the destruction of priceless
art, and in leaving the enigma of origins as complicated as before.
Shinto had been too profoundly modified in the course of fifteen
centuries of change to be thus remodelled by a fiat. For the like reason
scholarly efforts to define its relation to national ethics by mere
historical and philological analysis must fail: as well seek to define
the ultimate secret of Life by the elements of the body which it
animates. Yet when the result of such efforts shall have been closely
combined with a deep knowledge of Japanese thought and feeling--the
thought and sentiment, not of a special class, but of the people at
large--then indeed all that Shinto was and is may be fully comprehended.
And this may be accomplished, I fancy, through the united labour of
European and Japanese scholars.

Yet something of what Shinto signifies--in the simple poetry of its
beliefs--in the home training of the child--in the worship of filial
piety before the tablets of the ancestors--may be learned during a
residence of some years among the people, by one who lives their life
and adopts their manners and customs. With such experience he can at
least claim the right to express his own conception of Shinto.

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