The circumstance that many of the Gods, like the Japanese themselves, have numerous aliases, adds to the uncertainty. The nomina and the numina do not invariably go together. There is sometimes reason to suspect that it is the same God who appears under different names, while, on the other hand, the same name may cover what are in reality two or more different deities.
There were no arts of sculpture or painting in Japan before their introduction from China in historical times, and the consequent want of images and pictures for which Shinto has been commended must have contributed materially to prevent the Gods from acquiring distinct personalities like those of ancient Greece.
The feeble grasp of personality indicated by the above facts is profoundly characteristic of the Japanese genius. It is illustrated by their unimaginative literature, which makes but sparing use of personification, allegory, and metaphor, by their drama, with its late and imperfect development, and by their art, which has produced little monumental sculpture or portrait painting of importance. It may also be traced in the grammar, which has practically no gender, thus showing that the Japanese mind is comparatively careless of marking the distinction between animate and inanimate and male and female. The law takes far less cognizance of the individual and more of the family than with us. Another fact of the same order is the neglect of distinctions of person shown by the sparing use of personal and other pronouns. In a passage translated from Japanese into English, without any intention of illustrating this fact, there occur only six pronouns in the former against nearly one hundred in the latter. The verb has no person. _Yuku_ for example, means equally I go, thou goest, he goes, we go, you go, and they go. It is true that person may be indicated by the use of honorifics to mark the second person and humble forms for the first, but even when these are taken into account, the absence from Japanese of indications of person is very remarkable.
Herbert Spencer, in his 'Principles of Sociology,' suggests that the comparative fewness of personal pronouns in the languages of the Far East is owing to the circumstance that they "establish with the individual addressed a relation too immediate to be allowed where distance is to be maintained." Now, not only is it possible, and even common, for pronouns to be used for the express purpose of magnifying the distance between the speaker and the person whom he addresses, as in the case of the German _er_ when used as a pronoun of the second person, but Spencer's explanation does not meet the case of pronouns of the third person, which are just as rare in these languages as those of the first and second. Nor is there anything in the relations between men of high and low degree in these countries which is so radically different from those which have prevailed in Europe as to produce such a far-reaching difference in the language of all classes of society. The truth is that these nations do not _avoid_ pronouns. Their minds are still in a stage of development in which they have not yet realized the advantages in clearness of expression which are to be gained by a more systematic distribution of their ideas into the three categories of first, second, and third person. It is with them not a matter of etiquette, but of poverty of imagination, that power which, as Mr. P. Lowell has remarked, is to the mental development what spontaneous variation is to organic development.[8]