In Japan, the myth and metaphor-making faculty--in other words the imagination--though prolific enough, is comparatively feeble. The ancient Japanese especially were appreciably more neglectful than Western races of the distinction between the animate and the inanimate, and there was therefore less scope for the play of fancy in which religious personification consists. Like other Far-Eastern peoples, they realized the personal conception of deity with less intensity than the Aryan or Semitic nations. In this respect Homer and the Bible stand at the opposite pole from Confucius, whose _Tien_ has as little about it of humanity as is possible for a being who is said to know, to command, to reward, and to punish. Shinto approaches Confucianism in this respect. There is, no doubt, a profuse creation of personified nature-deities, but we find on examination that they are shadowy personages with ill-defined functions and characters wanting in consistency. Moreover, owing to the neglect by the Japanese of grammatical forms indicating number, it is frequently hard to tell whether a given name is that of one deity or of several. Musubi, the God of Growth, is sometimes one God, sometimes two, while at a later period he became split up into five or more deities. The Wind-God is at one time a single deity, at another a married couple. Susa no wo has in recent times been made into a trinity. Such fissiparous reproduction of deities is characteristic of a low degree of organization.[7] To meet the difficulties arising from this state of things Motoöri, in the eighteenth century, propounded his theory of _bun-shin_, or "fractional bodies," which may remind us of the "three persons and one substance" of Christian theology. Hirata, his pupil, speaking of the three Sea-deities, Uha tsutsu no wo, Naka tsutsu no wo, and Soko tsutsu no wo, says: "This deity, although, strictly speaking, born as three deities, is described as though one deity were present. This is to be understood of the God dividing his person and again uniting it. The descent of the _Adzumi no Muraji_ (a noble family) from him shows that in this respect he is to be regarded as one." 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.