Chinese commentators.
The intelligence of the land drank of this stream as the European mind
refreshed itself with the classic waters of the Renaissance. The
Japanese were weary of Buddhistic puerilities and transcendental
doctrines that led nowhere. They demanded sanctions for the moral life
and the social order; in response to this need Buddhism gave them
Nirvana--absolute mental and moral vacuity. Confucianism gave them
principles whose working and whose results they could 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