earth mine with all its wealth, tell me, should I, or should I not, be made immortal thereby?"—"Not so," replied Yâjnavalkya; “like the life of the rich would thy life be. There is no hope of immortality through wealth."

And Maitreyî said: "What should I do with that which cannot make me immortal? What my lord surely knoweth, that tell thou me."

And Yajnavalkya replied: "Thou wast indeed dear to me, but now even dearer. Therefore, if it please thee, lady, I will explain this matter, and do thou mark well what I say.'

And he said: “Verily, not for the love of husband is the husband dear; but for love of the Self the husband is dear. Verily, not for the love of wife is the wife dear; but for love of the Self the wife is dear. Verily, not for the love of sons are the sons dear; but for love of the Self sons are dear. Verily, not for the love of wealth is wealth dear; but for love of the Self wealth is dear. . . . Verily, not for the love of gods are the gods dear; but for love of the Self the gods are dear.”

The doctrine is not easy, and it is not surprising that Maitreyî cries out, "Sir, thou hast utterly bewildered me, and I know not what to make of this Self." Yajnavalkya, we are told, went away into the forest. He was the oracle of many restless souls who were then wandering about in search of the secret knowledge. Of Maitreyî no more is said, but one imagines her going into the woods with her husband and talking with him interminably on these high themes. And one gets here a glimpse of the kind of questions that had come to dis

turb the religious peace of India. Especially when released from the heavy routine of observances, in the forest where the worshipper was permitted to substitute a mental devotion for all, or at least for the burdensome part, of the ceremonial, he began to consider more closely the meaning of the elaborate servitude he had undergone, to ask himself what correspondence could be found between the outer and the inner reality, and the value of what he had outgrown.

In this fermentation of thought it is natural that the Kshatriyas, or ruling caste, who had always been outside the secret of the ceremonial, should appear on the whole to have been the leaders of the friendly revolt, whereas the priestly caste of Brahmans, whose influence and very existence depended on the physical sacrifice, should have been the learners and followers. And the manner in which the new faith spread is sufficiently clear. Here and there to some lonely thinker the swathing bands of prescription fell away and exposed to his view the innermost core of his spiritual experience. He would give a name to this reality, a kind of catchword which passed from mouth to mouth, and inquirers, hearing the word and half understanding its meaning, would travel to the sage with their questions. It is evident that those who had attained enlightenment expounded their vision only under precautions.

If the questioner showed that something in his own life corresponded to the progress of the sage, if it appeared that the exposition of the secret word would be a reality to him,-neither a vain syllogism of the reason nor a pretext for contempt of duty,-then in some metaphor or some quaint dialectic the teacher would lead him to trace back the steps of his own experience, until he reached the innermost source of truth. Thus the doctrine was a rahasyam, or upanishad, a secret (for this is the real meaning of the word), which gradually spread itself among these forest-dwellers. After a while it was written down in books, not without large admixture of outworn mythologies and popular superstitions, and in this form was at last taken up by the more orthodox Brahmans into their ritualistic writings. As a secret doctrine these treatises were called Upanishads; as a portion of the literature designed for the forest life they were Aranyakas (aranya, forest); as forming the conclusion of the sacred canon they were the Vedanta, the Veda-End (Veda, specifically the early collections of sacrificial hymns, generically the whole religious canon; anta, end).

In all this it cannot be too often repeated that a definite moral and spiritual experience is the true basis, that the rationalising theories > come afterwards, that in a certain sense rationalism is a contradiction of what it undertakes

to expound, and flourishes only when the reality has begun to fade away. In our own civilisation we know that deism, or rationalism, was fundamentally a denial of the religion it sought to bolster up; and so in India the later syllogistic aphorisms of Bâdarâyana, through which Professor Deussen has approached the Upanishads, indicate the beginning of an inner petrifaction. Perhaps the surest way to avoid this fallacy of the reason would be to eschew the metaphysical path altogether. Instead of starting with a comparison of the transcendental unreality underlying the thought of Kant and Plato and the Vedânta, after the manner of our learned guide, 1 one might look first for the

1 The attitude of Professor Deussen is fairly represented by a passage in the section treating of The Conception of the Upanishads in its Relation to Religion:

"The thought referred to, common to India, Plato, and Kant, that the entire universe is only appearance and not reality, forms not only the special and most important theme of all philosophy, but is also the presumption and conditio sine qua non of all religion. All great religious teachers therefore, whether in earlier or later times, nay even all those at the present day whose religion rests upon faith, are alike unconsciously followers of Kant. This we propose briefly to prove.

"The necessary premises of all religion are, as Kant frequently expounds: (1) The existence of God, (2) the immortality of the soul, (3) the freedom of the will (without which no morality is possible). These

truth of the Upanishads in the vivid consciousness of a dualism felt in the daily habit of humanity; adding - with some temerity, no doubt that the degree of clearness with which

three essential conditions of man's salvation-God, immortality, and freedom-are conceivable only if the universe is mere appearance and not reality (mere mâyâ and not the âtman), and they break down irretrievably should this empirical reality, wherein we live, be found to constitute the true essence of things.

"(1) The existence of God will be precluded by that of space, which is infinite, and therefore admits of nothing external to itself, and nothing within save that which fills it, i. e. matter (the most satisfactory definition of which is "that which fills space").

“(2) Immortality will be precluded by the conditions of time, in consequence of which our existence has a beginning in time by conception and birth, and an end in time by death; and this end is absolute, in so far as that beginning was absolute.

“(3) Freedom, and with it the possibility of moral action, will be precluded by the universal validity of the law of causality, as shown by experience; for this requires that every effect, consequently every human action, should be the necessary result of causes which precede the action, and which therefore in the actual moment of action are no longer within our control."

It would not be easy to state in fewer words the common intellectual basis of the Vedânta, of Plato, and of Kant. Analytically there is nothing to censure. Yet from another point of view it is possible to say that, as a preparation for understanding the Upanishads, the critical qualities of such a passage start the reader in a wrong frame of mind.