see and understand.  Its sanctions appealed both to the imagination and to the reason, antiquity and learning and piety being all in their favor.  The sanctions were also seen to be wholly independent of puerile superstitions and foolish fears.  The Confucian ideals and sanctions, moreover, coincided with the essential elements of the old Shinto world-view and sanctions.  In a true sense, the doctrines of Confucius were but the elaborated and succinctly stated implications of their primitive faith.  Confucianism, therefore, swept the land. It was accepted as the groundwork and authority for the most flourishing feudal order the world has ever seen.  Japan bloomed again.[DF]

This difference, however, is to be noted between the Shinto ideal social order and the Confucian, or rather that development of Confucian ethics and civics which arose during the Tokugawa Shogunate; Shinto appears to have been, properly speaking, nationalistic, while feudal Confucianism was tribal.  Although in Confucian theory the supreme loyalty may have been due the Emperor, in point of fact it was shown to the local daimyo.  Confucian ethics was communal and might easily have turned in the direction of national communalism; it would then have coincided completely with Shinto in this respect.  But for various reasons it did not so turn, but developed an intensely local, a tribal communalism, and pushed loyalty to the Emperor as a vital reality entirely into the background.  This was one of the defects of feudal Confucianism which finally led to its own overthrow.  Shinto, as we have seen, had long been pushed aside by Buddhism and was practically forgotten by the people.  The zeal for Confucian doctrine brought, therefore, no immediate revival to the Shinto cultus, although it did revive the essential elements of the old communal religion.  We might say that the old religion was revived under a new name; having a new name and a new body, the real and vital connection between the two was not recognized.  We thus discern how the religious history of Japan was not a series of cataclysms or of disconnected leaps in the dark, but an orderly development, one step naturally following the next, as the sun follows the dawn.  The different stages of Japan’s religious progress have received different names, because due to specific stimuli brought from abroad; the religious life itself, however, has been a continuous development.

Another difference between Shinto and Confucianism as it existed in Japan should not escape our attention, namely, in regard to their respective world-views.  Shinto was confessedly a religion; it frankly believed in gods, whom it worshiped and on whose help it relied.  Confucianism, or to use the Japanese name, Bushido, was confessedly agnostic.  It did not assume to understand the universe, as Buddhism assumed.  Nor did it admit the practical existence of gods or their power in this world, as Shinto believed.  It maintained that, “if only the heart follows