lower self and its home in the phenomenal world became an unreality to the understanding. He transferred our ignorance of the relation between the infinite and the finite to the finite itself. For him the world existed thus only through ignorance, and by a metaphor of language ignorance was the cause of the world's existence. As he attained knowledge by putting away ignorance the world ceased for him to exist. Such is the nature of the doctrine of vidya (knowledge) and avidyâ (non-knowledge) which formed the basis of Hindu philosophy. It differs from Western metaphysics in its frank acceptance of the dualism of human experience and of man's inability to reconcile that dualism through the reason.

In after times the sense of this dualism weighed on the Hindu mind like the oppression of a frightful nightmare, and we not seldom find him sinking into a state of pessimism similar to that which Schopenhauer portrayed to Europe as the essence of the Upanishads. He could not throw off the weariness of ceaseless change and of unresting desires; he was haunted with a vision of the soul passing through innumerable existences, forever whirled about with the wheel of mutation, forever seeking and never finding peace; and from that weltering sea he reached out toward salvation with a kind of pathetic

O World! I faint in this thy multitude

Of little things and their relentless feud;
No meaning have I found through all my days
In their fantastic maze.

O World! still through the hours of blissful night
The widowed moon her benison of light
Outpoureth, where the sacred river seems
From heaven to bear sweet dreams.

How soon, O World, beside the Gangå shore,
Through the long silent night shall I implore
The mystic name? how soon in Gangâ's wave
My sin-stained body lave?!

But in the books of the older philosophers there is little of this morbid yearning, no touch of fierce pessimism; and their fault is rather an inhuman disregard for the disabilities of our mortal state. Indeed, the illusion and mutability of life are seldom mentioned, however they may lie as a background to the brighter picture. The substance of those books is the great and indomitable zest of a strong people groping for the light; and through the seeking and the questioning there breaks now and then the supreme joy of one who has found and knows what he has found. "Brahma is joy and knowledge," said the teacher whose name we have met most frequently in this excursion into the forests of India.

Here, and in one or two other places further on, I quote the translation of Bhartrihari from my Century

THE BHAGAVAD GÎTÂ

In the course of time every religion is brought face to face with a problem which it must solve or cease to grow, which-and this is the tragic recurrence of history-it can solve only by surrendering its purest portion of truth. The religious instinct, as we have seen, is based on the two contrary tendencies in the soul of man, by one of which he is dragged down to the desires and painful satisfactions of this world, while by the other he is lifted out of changing impressions into the serene contemplative possession of himself. Faith is the faculty whereby the world becomes unreal beneath the light of the greater inner reality. In the days of fair beginning, when the few elect minds are making their way up the delightful stairs of truth and the end is felt as a wonderful possibility, the difficulty of the final paradox is only a goad to progress. But when all is defined and settled and there is no longer the liberty of an imagined hope, then too often comes the benumbing disappointment. Religion, we are told, should carry us into a sphere where the

claims of this world have no meaning to the soul, yet withal we are men among men, with imperious needs and duties; and we see not who shall reconcile the aspirations of faith with the demands of daily existence. And so it is the history of Christianity, as of every new gospel, that as it expands and defines itself, it must alter from a free and noble inspiration of faith to a Church organised for the guidance and regulating of society.

Nor is this antinomy of hope and fact confined to the larger historic movement; in a smaller way it is repeated in the growth of each individual who knows clearly what he is and what he aspires to be. If indeed religion is a denial of the earthly state, there should seem to be no satisfaction of its claims save in that stern renunciation of the Brahman in his last stage, who, leaving all things behind him, walked steadfastly on until death brought its release and consummation. Rather, who shall say that the death of the body is the final answer, and that the trial is not to be renewed and the agony of division repeated here or elsewhere?—

And we shall be unsatisfied as now;
And we shall feel the agony of thirst,

The ineffable longing for the life of life

Baffled for ever; and still thought and mind

Will hurry us with them on their homeless march,

Over the unallied unopening earth,

Will blow us fiercely back to sea and earth,
And fire repel us from its living waves.
And then we shall unwillingly return
Back to this meadow of calamity,
This uncongenial place, this human life;
And in our individual human state
Go through the sad probation all again,
To see if we will poise our life at last,
To see if we will now at last be true

To our own only true, deep-buried selves,

Being one with which we are one with the whole world;
Or whether we will once more fall away

Into some bondage of the flesh or mind,
Some slough of sense, or some fantastic maze
Forged by the imperious lonely thinking-power.

The lines are inspired by the story and the
poetical fragments of the Greek Empedocles,
but in them Matthew Arnold has unconsciously
come very close to expressing the ancient prob-
lem of religion as it was seen by the Hindus.

To most men the question comes in a lower key, and the very harshness of so absolute an antinomy between religion and practice might to them indicate some error in the absolute premises of faith. We commonly pass from worship to the world as sabbath dawns into week-day, and think we have paid the demands of both God and Mammon. Yet to all of us, even with our gleams of faith obscured and our natural instincts subdued by sullen routine, there must occur moments of sad doubting.

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