and entire identification of the human soul with God is sporadic and never quite free of theological colouring, in India it is constant and absolute. Tat tvam asi, that art thou, is the formula in which it is summed up and reiterated without end. "That subtle spirit at the heart of all this world, that is the reality, that is the Self, that art thou." And the imagination of these early philosophers exhausts itself in the effort to figure this mystic Brahma, or Âtman, in the terms of finite language. We have seen how Ajâtaçatru, to explain the nature of Brahma, at last leads his interlocutor to a man who was asleep; and in the same way Yajnavalkya, when pressed by Janaka to define the Self, can only point to the state of deep sleep in which the spirit of man transcends this world and all the forms of death. In another Upanishad the great Indra comes again and again to Prajapati as a pupil to learn the nature of this Self which even to the gods is a mystery. At last the teacher says:

"When a man is in deep sleep and at perfect rest, so that he dreams not, that is the Self, the deathless, the fearless, that is Brahma. "-Then Indra went away satisfied in his heart. But before he had got back to the gods, this difficulty occurred to him: “Alas, a man in that state has no knowledge of himself; he knows not that I am I, nor does he know anything that exists. He is gone to utter annihilation. I see no profit therein.”

So with fuel in his hand [the regular fee to a teacher] he came once more as a pupil. And Prajâpati said to him," O Indra, you went away satisfied in your heart; why now do you come back?"-"Sir," he replied, "in that state a man has no knowledge of himself; he knows not that I am I, nor does he know anything that exists. He is gone to utter annihilation. I see no profit therein."

"So it is, Indra," said Prajâpati; "now, I will explain the Self to you further, but only through this same state. Live with me other five years."

What puzzled Indra may well give a Western reader pause, and, in sooth, Prajâpati does not help matters in his further elucidation. We know the stages by which the mind is brought to the brink of this truth, but at the last there remains the great inevitable leap from reason to unreason. Spinoza, the typical philosopher, sought to bridge that chasm by conceiving from any finite effect an infinite series of finite causes back to the infinite cause. But that is merely to throw dust in the eyes; prolong the series as you will, at the last comes the unavoidable break. And the Hindus recognised fully this impossibility of defining the infinite in logical terms. "He, the Self," cries Yâjnavalkya at the close of one of his discussions with Janaka, "He, the Self, can only be expressed by no, no! He is incomprehensible, for he cannot be comprehended; undecaying, for he cannot decay; unattached, for he does

not attach himself; he is unfettered, untroubled, unhurt." And then, passing from the insufficiency of metaphysical theory to the reality of religious experience, the teacher adds, "And thou, O Janaka, hast attained unto peace!" We are constantly in danger of being misled by the later use of the term jnâna (gnosis, knowledge) to express this attainment of spiritual emancipation. "Knowledge" may be a propedeutic thereto, but "knowledge" in any ordinary sense of the word the last stage certainly is not; for how, as the books themselves say, can the infinite Knower himself be known? The first step toward a proper understanding of the Hindu forest philosophy must be a tearing down of the whole scaffolding of German intellectualism. Hume, though for an end of his own, struck at the heart of the matter when he wrote, "What peculiar privilege has this little agitation of the brain, which we call thought, that we must thus make it the model of the universe?"

And none the less must we be on guard against the Gefühlsphilosophie, the feeling-philosophy, which forms the Romantic complement to German metaphysics. Nothing could be farther from the virile faith of the ancient Hindus than that vague emotionalism, freed from all reason and morality, of Schleiermacher's religion, which "as a holy music should accompany

all the actions of a man. How that heilige Musik sang in Schleiermacher's own life may be gathered from his complaisance over the imbecile indecencies of his friend Friedrich Schlegel's Lucinde. What it meant to Goethe may be read in that scene where Faust makes his confession of pantheism to Gretchen: "Fill thy heart with this mystery, however great it be; and when thou art wholly blessed in the feeling, call it then what thou wilt, name it Fortune, Heart, Love, God! I have no name therefor! Feeling is all (Gefühl ist Alles)." And that feeling? But turn the page and Faust is discovered employing it for the seduction of a simple, trusting girl. 1

1 It may seem that unnecessary weight is laid on this contrast between the Upanishads and metaphysical Romanticism. But two things must be remembered. In the first place our own "higher" religion to-day, whether we call it Ritschlianism or what not, comes to us in direct descent from Fichte, Schelling, Schleiermacher, and the other Romanticists of Germany who dissolved the philosophy of J. J. Rousseau into a cloud of mystifying words. And in the second place our conception of ancient India, as an element of universal culture, comes to us from the same source. When we read in Novalis the oft-quoted sentence: "Nach Innen geht der geheimnissvolle Weg; in uns oder nirgends ist die Ewigkeit mit ihren Welten, die Vergangenheit und Zukunft"; when we read his mystical couplet:

“Einem gelang es,-er hob den Schleier der Göttin von Sais,

No, the faith of the Vedânta is neither intellectualism nor emotionalism; it springs neither from the libido sciendi nor from the libido sentiendi. The temptation that came to the forest hermits, strange as it may sound, was rather the lust of power. It was a fixed belief among them that through severe and long

Aber was sah er?-er sah-Wunder des Wunders! sich selbst;"

it might seem as if the wisdom of Yâjnavalkya were to be caught from the lips of a modern poet. Alas, nothing is more deceptive than the human heart, nothing more elusive than these high words of mysticism! One needs but a little acquaintance with the lives and writings of the Schlegels, et id genus omne, to know how far apart India and modern Europe lie. The transcendental Ich of Fichte and the Fichtians turns out in practice to be not the Âtman at all, but a mere mummery of what we know as egotism, an unwholesome exaggeration of the desiring and suffering personality

"Dine hunc ardorem mentibus addunt,

+

Euryale, an sua cuique deus fit dira cupido?" In a word the whole aim of Romanticism was to magnify the sense of individuality to a state of morbid excess, wherein the finite and infinite should be dissolved together in formless reverie; “Erkennen und Begehren soll nicht zwei in mir sein, sondern Eins,” said Schleiermacher, and this union was to be found in emotional self-contemplation. The Vedânta sought through the discipline of knowledge and self-restraint 、 to put away these purely individual desires and emotions altogether, and so to distinguish between the two