things with the one universal spirit.

As to inanimate objects, the idea of supposing sex where there is
not even life is altogether too fanciful a notion for the Far

Eastern mind.
Impersonality first fashioned the nouns, and then the nouns, by

their very impersonality, helped keep impersonal the thought and
fettered fancy. All those temptings to poesy which to the Aryan

imagination lie latent in the sex with which his forefathers
humanized their words, never stir the Tartar nor the Chinese soul.

They feel the poetry of nature as much as, indeed much more than,
we; but it is a poetry unassociated with man. And this, too,

curiously enough, in spite of the fact that to explain the cosmos
the Chinamen invented, or perhaps only adapted, a singularly sexual

philosophy. For possibly, like some other portions of their
intellectual wealth, they stole it from India. The Chinese

conception of the origin of the world is based on the idea of sex.
According to their notions the earth was begotten. It is true that

with them the cosmos started in an abstract something, which
self-produced two great principles; but this pair once obtained,

matters proceeded after the analogy of mankind. The two principles
at work were themselves abstract enough to have satisfied the most

unimpassioned of philosophers. They were simply a positive essence
and a negative one, correlated to sunshine and shadow, but also

correlated to male and female forces. Through their mutual action
were born the earth and the air and the water; from these, in turn,

was begotten man. The cosmical modus operandi was not creative nor
evolutionary, but sexual. The whole scheme suggests an attempt to

wed abstractphilosophy with primitiveconcrete mythology.
The same sexuality distinguishes the Japanese demonology. Here the

physical replaces the philosophical; instead of principles we find
allegorical personages, but they show just the same pleasing

propensity to appear in pairs.
This attributing of sexes to the cosmos is not in the least

incompatible with an uninterested disregard of sex where it really
exists. It is one thing to admit the fact as a general law of the

universe, and quite another to dwell upon it as an important factor
in every-day affairs.

How slight is the Tartar tendency to personification can be seen
from a glance at these same Japanese gods. They are a combination

of defunct ancestors and deified natural phenomena. The evolving of
the first half required little imagination, for fate furnished the

material ready made; while in conjuring up the second moiety, the
spirit-evokers showed even less originality. Their results were

neither winsome nor sublime. The gods whom they created they
invested with very ordinary humanity, the usual endowment of

aboriginal deity, together with the customary superhuman strength.
If these demigods differed from others of their class, it was only

in being more commonplace, and in not meddling much with man.
Even such personification of natural forces, simple enough to be

self-suggested, quickly disappeared. The various awe-compelling
phenomena soon ceased to have any connection with the

anthropomorphic noumena they had begotten. For instance, the
sun-goddess, we are informed, was one day lured out of a cavern,

where she was sulking in consequence of the provoking behavior of
her younger brother, by her curiosity at the sight of her own face

in a mirror, ingeniously placed before the entrance for the purpose.
But no Japanese would dream now of casting any such reflections,

however flattering, upon the face of the orb of day. The sun has
become not only quite sexless to him, but as devoid of personality

as it is to any Western materialist. Lesser deities suffered a like
unsubstantial transformation. The thunder-god, with his belt of

drums, upon which he beats a devil's tattoo until he is black in the
face, is no longer even indirectly associated with the storm.

As for dryads and nymphs, the beautiful creatures never inhabited
Eastern Asia. Anthropoid foxes and raccoons, whollylacking in

those engaging qualities that beget love, and through love
remembrance, take their place. Even Benten, the naturalized Venus,

who, like her Hellenic sister, is said to have risen from the sea,
is a person quite incapable of inspiring a reckless infatuation.

Utterly unlike was this pantheon to the pantheon of the Greeks,
the personifying tendency of whose Aryan mind was forever peopling

nature with half-human inhabitants. Under its quickening fancy the
very clods grew sentient. Dumb earth awoke at the call of its

desire, and the beings its own poesy had begotten made merry
companionship for man. Then a change crept over the face of things.

Faith began to flicker, for want of facts to feed its flame. Little
by little the fires of devotion burnt themselves out. At last great

Pan died. The body of the old belief was consumed. But though it
perished, its ashes preserved its form, an unsubstantial presentment

of the past, to crumble in a twinkling at the touch of science, but
keeping yet to the poet's eye the lifelike semblance of what once

had been. The dead gods still live in our language and our art.
Even to-day the earth about us seems semiconscious to the soul,

for the memories they have left.
But with the Far Oriental the exorcising feeling was fear. He never

fell in love with his own mythological creations, and so he never
embalmed their memories. They were to him but explanations of

facts, and had no claims upon his fancy. His ideal world remained
as utterly impersonal as if it had never been born.

The same impersonality reappears in the matter of number.
Grammatically, number with them is unrecognized. There exist no

such things as plural forms. This singularity would be only too
welcome to the foreign student, were it not that in avoiding the

frying-pan the Tartars fell into the fire. For what they invented
in place of a plural was quite as difficult to memorize, and even

more cumbrous to express. Instead of inflecting the noun and then
prefixing a number, they keep the noun unchanged and add two

numerals; thus at times actually employing more words to express the
objects than there are objects to express. One of these numerals is

a simple number; the other is what is known as an auxiliary numeral,
a word as singular in form as in function. Thus, for instance,

"two men" become amplified verbally into "man two individual," or,
as the Chinaman puts it, in pidgin English, "two piecey man." For in

this respect Chinese resembles Japanese, though in very little else,
and pidgin English is nothing but the literal translation of the

Chinese idiom into Anglo-Saxon words. The necessity for such
elaborate qualification arises from the excessivesimplicity of the

Japanese nouns. As we have seen, the noun is so definite" target="_blank" title="a.模糊的；无限期的">indefinite a
generality that simply to multiply it by a number cannot possibly

produce any definite result. No exact counterpart of these nouns
exists in English, but some idea of the impossibility of the process

may be got from our word "cattle," which, prolific though it may
prove in fact, remains obstinately incapable of verbal multiplication.

All Japanese nouns being of this definite" target="_blank" title="a.模糊的；无限期的">indefinitedescription, all require
auxiliary numerals. But as each one has its own appropriate numeral,

about which a mistake is unpardonable, it takes some little study
merely to master the etiquette of these handles to the names of

things.
Nouns are not inflected, their cases being expressed by postpositions,

which, as the name implies, follow, in becoming Japanese inversion,
instead of preceding the word they affect. To make up, nevertheless,

for any lack of perplexity due to an absence of inflections,
adjectives, en revanche, are most elaborately conjugated. Their

protean shapes are as long as they are numerous, representing not
only times, but conditions. There are, for instance, the root form,

the adverbial form, the definite" target="_blank" title="a.模糊的；无限期的">indefinite form, the attributive form, and
the conclusive form, the two last being conjugated through all the

various voices, moods, and tenses, to say nothing of all the
potential forms. As one change is superposed on another, the

adjective ends by becoming three or four times its original length.
The fact is, the adjective is either adjective, adverb, or verb,

according to occasion. In the root form it also helps to make
nouns; so that it is even more generally useful than as a

journalistic epithet with us. As a verb, it does duty as predicate
and copula combined. For such an unnecessary part of speech as a

real copula does not exist in Japanese. In spite of the shock to
the prejudices of the old school of logicians, it must be confessed

that the Tartars get on very well without any such couplings to
their trains of thought. But then we should remember that in their

sentences the cart is always put before the horse, and so needs only