Note 8 — Chapter II

"Mr. Tyler has justly observed that the true lesson of the new science of Comparative Mythology is the barrenness in primitive times of the faculty which we most associate with mental fertility, the imagination.... Among these multitudes (the millions of men who fill what we vaguely call the East) Literature, Religion, and Art--or what correspond to them--move always within a distinctly drawn circle of unchanging notions.... This condition of thought is rather the infancy of the human mind prolonged than a different maturity from that most familiar to us."--Maine, 'Early History of Institutions,' pp. 225-6. This characteristic of the mental development of the races of the Far East is discussed in 'A Comparative Study of the Japanese and Korean Languages,' by W. G. Aston, in the Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society, August, 1879, and more fully by Mr. Percival Lowell, in his 'Soul of the Far East,' 1888. See also Mr. B. H. Chamberlain's' Kojiki,' Introd., lxvi.