=Development of the Idea of God.=—The Nature-gods of Shinto, as of other religions, are in the first place the actual material objects or phenomena regarded as living beings. Sometimes the personification proceeds no further. There are Mud and Sand deities which have no sex, and no mythical record beyond a bare mention. But in the case of others the same progressive humanising process that is to be observed elsewhere has already begun. The Sun is not only the brilliant heavenly being whose retirement to a cave leaves the world to darkness, she is a queen, a child, and a mother—in a miraculous fashion. She speaks, weaves, wears armour, sows seed, and does many other things which have nothing to do with her solar quality. At a still more recent stage—though not in the old records—she becomes an independent personage who rules the Sun, while with many worshippers at the present day her solar character is forgotten altogether, and she is considered merely as a great divine ancestor who dwells at Ise and exercises a providential guardianship over Japan. This line of development is familiar to us in other mythologies, the two stages of thought being often confounded. In Shakespeare’s _Tempest_, Iris is at once the rainbow and an anthropomorphic messenger of the gods. Phoebus is not only the sun but a deity distinct from that luminary, though associated with it, as in the story of Phaeton. As the god of music and poetry, his solar function is not obvious. The same is true of the gods of the Vedas. =Impersonality of Shinto.=—The faculty of imagination was not powerful with the ancient Japanese. It was active, and produced many deities of all classes. But they are very feebly characterised. Indeed, most of them may be said to have no characters at all. They are popularly reckoned at eighty myriads, or eight hundred myriads. Though this is a fanciful exaggeration, Shinto is a highly polytheistic religion, and numbers its deities by hundreds, even if we do not go back to that earlier period when the rocks, the trees, and the foam of water had all power of speech. There is a constant depletion in their ranks by the mere force of oblivion, while, on the other hand, new deities come into notice. Different gods are identified with one another, or the same deities may be split up like Musubi into a pair, or a number of distinct persons. The same deity at different places may have different ranks and attributes.