"Shintō, as is well known, is a combination by the Japanese of the worship of nature and of their own ancestors. But the character of the combination is ethnologically instructive. For a lack of psychic development has made of these seemingly diverse elements a homegeneous whole. Both, of course, are aboriginal instincts. Next to the fear of natural phenomena, in point of primitiveness, comes the fear of one's father; as children and savages show. But races, like individuals, tend to outgrow it as they develop. Now the suggestive thing about the Japanese people is that this passing phase of religion has been perpetuated. The Japanese have stayed boys. Filial respect continued, and, by very virtue of not becoming less, became more, till it filled not only the whole sphere of morals but expanded into the sphere of cosmogony. To the Japanese eye the universe itself took on the paternal look. Parental awe which these people under stood lent explanation to natural dread which they did not. Quite simply to their minds the thunder and the wind, the sunshine and the shower were the work not only of anthropomorphic beings but of beings ancestrally related to themselves. In short Shintō, their explanation of things in general, is nothing else than the patriarchal principle projected without perspective into the past, dilating with distance into deity."