t'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 excessive simplicity of the Japanese
nouns. As we have seen, the noun is so 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 indefinite description, 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 na