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the Chinese character shin (shên), a meaning has come to be attached to it which it did not originally posses. The ancestors of the Mikados were not gods but men, and were no doubt worthy to be reverenced for their virtues, but their acts were not miraculous or supernatural. If the ancestors of living men were not human beings, they are more likely to have been birds or beasts than gods.
This is but a short summary of fifty-four pages of close print, a great part of which is occupied with the defence of the “Holy Men” and the Chinese philosophy. Some of the arguments remind us somewhat of the early deistical writers of Europe who maintained that religion was invented by priests with interested motives. It is not improbable that the author was indebted in some measure to the Koshi-tsû of Arai Hakuseki, a rationalistic work composed about the year 1716.
Motoöri replied to Ichikawa in a book called Kuzuhana, written in 1780. In reply to the accusation of being an admirer of Laotzu, he says that it by no means follows that because that philosopher attacked the “Holy Men,” all others who attacked them must be his followers. It is quite possible to have a bad opinion of both Taoism and Confucianism. To maintain the contrary is to resemble certain people who seeing a party of gamblers arrive first at the scone of a fire, and work hard to put it out, believed some honest villagers who came later, and aided in the good work, to be gamblers also. The teaching of the “Holy Men” is like a fire burning a house, Laotzu is the gambler who first tried to extinguish it, and Motoöri’s own work the Nawobi no Mitama is the honest villager.
With regard to the first argument put forth by Ichikawa, he argues that before the invention of writing the want of it could not have been felt in the same way as it would, if we were now deprived of a medium of recording facts on which for ages past we have been accustomed to depend almost entirely. It is an acknowledged fact, however, that we still find ourselves obliged to have recourse to oral language in matters of delicacy or detail which
