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 abstract philosophy with primitive
concrete 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