Hirata thinks that Gods (and men too) have two doubles, the _nigi-tama_ and an _aratama_ mentioned above. These he distinguishes from the _Zentai no mitama_, or "spirit of the entire body." But he admits that these distinctions are not recognized in the old Shinto. There is no limit to the subdivision of the _mitama_. Hirata explains that the deity is like a fire, which may be communicated to a lamp or to firewood while the original fire remains the same. "But the world knows not this." In other words, this is a philosophic refinement too subtle for the popular taste.
While the old records rarely distinguish between the God's real body and his _mitama_, in later times the _mitama_ is often confounded with the _mitama-shiro_ (spirit-token), or _shintai_ (god-body) as the concrete representative of the God is called. Even in the _Nihongi_ there is a case in which a sword is called Futsu no mitama. The _Kiujiki_ calls the mirror of the Sun-Goddess her _mitama_. The _Shinto Miōmoku_ (1699) says that Futsu no mitama is the sword of the great deity of Kashima, and speaks of the Toyo-uka no mitama (the Food-spirit) as being, or residing in, a stone. Hirata himself calls a stone idol the _mitama_ of the God, and speaks of the Sun-Goddess's _mitama_ as going backward and forward between Ise and the sky. The unspiritual vulgar naturally find it hard to distinguish between the spirit of the God and its concrete representative.
The doctrine of the separability of the human body and soul, and of the continued existence of the latter after death, whether in a material or semi-material form, or as a pure spirit, may have been a factor in the spiritualizing of the cruder anthropomorphic conceptions of deity. But there is little or no evidence to this effect in the old Shinto scriptures, and the above pages show that other important influences were at work in producing this result. Whether the idea of God had its origin in the doctrine of separable human souls is a question which may be left to the discerning reader's judgment.
=Gods of Classes and Qualities=.--No language is possible without some exercise of the powers of generalization and abstraction. In Japanese, however, we miss many of the more general, and especially of the more abstract, conceptions embodied in European languages, a circumstance which limits the scope of the personifying faculty, none too vigorous in itself. Supposing that we take the series of conceptions beginning with the concrete individual tree, and passing through evergreen oak, oak, tree, and vegetable, to the definitive generalization of the universe. The Japanese language has no word for vegetable except _sōmoku_, a recent compound of Chinese origin. The word for universe is _Ame-tsuchi_ (Heaven + earth) which is almost certainly a translation of the Chinese _ten-chi_. The consequence is that neither the class of vegetables nor the universe is recognized in the Japanese scheme of nature-deities. Individual trees are deified, and there is a God of trees, but that is all. The neglect of grammatical number in the Japanese language often obscures the distinction between the Gods of individual objects and of classes. _Ki no Kami_ means equally the God of the tree and the God of trees.[18]