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and sound extremely plausible, but what they call the absolute and infinite, the positive and negative essences, the eight diagrams and the five elements are not real existences, but are fictitious names invented by the philosophers and freely applied in every direction. They say that the whole universe was produced by agencies, and that nothing exists which is independent of them. But all these statements are nonsense.
“The principles which animate the universe are beyond the power of analysis, nor can they be fathomed by the human intelligence, and all statements founded upon pretended explanations of them are to be rejected. All that man can think out and know is limited by the powers of sight, feeling and calculation, and what goes beyond these powers cannot be known by any amount of thinking.
“How is it then possible for men who were born hundreds and thousands of myriads of years after the origin of the universe, to konw how it originated and the successive steps by which it assumed its present form? Our country, owing to the facts that it was begotten by the two gods Izanagi and Izanami, was the birth place of Amaterasu oho-mi-kami, and is ruled by her Sublime Descendants for ever and ever, as long as the universe shall endure, is infinitely superior to other countries, whose chief and head it is; its people are honest and upright of heart and are not given to useless theorizing and falsehoods like other countries, and thus it possesses correct and trite information with regard to the origin of the universe. This information has descended to us unaltered from the age of the gods, and unmixed, even in the slightest degree with unsupported notions of individuals. This indeed is the genuine and true tradition. The Chinese accounts sound as if based on profound principles, and one fancies that they must be right, while the Japanese accounts sound shallow and utterly unfounded in reason. But the former are lies, while the latter are the truth, so that as time goes on, and thought attains greater accuracy, the erroneous nature of these falsehoods becomes ever more patent, while the true tradition remains intact. My
