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USMANIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

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Title

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last marked below.

THE
ENGLISH AND FOREIGN

PHILOSOPHICAL LIBRARY.

EXTRA SERIES.
VOLUME V.

ORIENTAL RELIGIONS

AND THEIR

RELATION TO UNIVERSAL
RELIGION

BY

SAMUEL JOHNSON

INDIA

IN TWO VOLUMES

VOL. II.

LONDON

TRUBNER & CO., LUDGATE HILL
1879

{All rights reserved}

CONTENTS OF VOL. II.

INDIA.
IL

RELIGIOUS '> PHILOSOPHY.
(Continued.}

Page

III. THE BHAGAVAD-GITA 3

IV. PIETY AND MORALITY OF PANTHEISM ". 33

V. INCARNATION 75

VI. TRANSMIGRATION 105

VII. RELIGIOUS UNIVERSALITY 147

III.
BUDDHISM.

I. SPECULATIVE PRINCIPLES 171

II. NiRvANA 211

III. ETHICS AND HUMANITIES 231

IV. THE HOUR AND THE MAN 275

V. AFTER-LIFE IN INDIA 303

VI. BUDDHIST CIVILIZATION 327

VII. ECCLESIASTICISM 361

II.

RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.

(Continued.)

in.

THE BHAGAVAD-GITA.

THE BHAGAVAD-GITA.

date of the Bhagavadgita, or " Divine Lay,"
the most important episode of the Ma- TheDivine
h<ibh&rata, although uncertain, cannot be far Lay -
distant on either side from the beginning of the Chris-
tian era. 1 It embodies, in the form of dialogue, a
revelation by Krishna, as incarnation of the Supreme,
to the hero Arjuna, on the field of Kuru ; and the
armies of two opposing dynasties, about to join brittle,
are drawn up in silence to await the close of this
transcendental communion between the man and the
god. Its initial motive is to remove the scruples of
the prince against destroying human life, which have
paralyzed his power to fulfil the duties of a soldier
and a ruler. To this end it celebrates the sovereignty
of the soul over the body, its eternal essence, which
death cannot harm, and the fulfilment of personal
duty as the way of life and the path of glory. The
use of such arguments to reconcile men to the sternest
obligations involved in a state of war is itself an im-
pressive illustration of the power of ideal interests.
It contrasts favorably with the use of arguments from
immortality to justify the destruction of the heretic's
body in order to save his soul from eternal woe, or to

* Thomson's trannl., 7/nm, p. cxiv. ; Lassen's Prefect, p. xxxvi.

4 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.

make the threat of future punishment more appalling. 1
The meditations of Arjuna before a Hindu epic battle
contrast in many ways with the prayers of Cromwell's
soldiers before a real English one. They are, how-
ever, alike in the recognition of ideal relations in the
sternest actual work.

But this is incidental to the great purpose of tht>
poem, which covers the whole ground of theology,
philosophy, and ethics. It is the final flower of
Hindu intellect and piety ; the summary reconciliation
and poetic fusion of the best elements that preceded
it in the mystical, rationalistic, and practical schools.

It is better known to modern scholars than any
other production of Oriental genius ; having been
again and again edited with rare critical industry, re-
sulting in the statement of Schlegel, based on diligent
comparison of a great number of manuscripts, that
the differences between these are almost impercep-
tible ; while Lassen, after a still more extended use
of materials, adds but fifteen slight emendations. 9
The disagreement among translators and critics on
here and there a passage 3 interferes in no degree
with our sense of possessing an accurate transcript
of this, the most important of all records of Eastern
faith, into the languages of the West. 4 And the en-
thusiasm of its European students almost rivals that
veneration which in India has assigned it a place
not inferior in dignity and authority to the Vedas
themselves. 6

Wilhelm von Humboldt celebrates it as "the most

1 See Matt. xit. 32 ; xxv. 41. * Lasst*, p. xxxiv.

* See especially Wilson's criticisms on Lessen and Schlegel (Essays cm SanJks. Litera-
**PV, vol. Hi.).

* The translations consulted in the present chapter are Scblegel's Latin version, edited
by Lassen (1846), and the English version! of Wilkina (1785) and Thomson (1855).

* LaKt* t p. xxvii.

THE BHAGAVAD-GITA. 5

beautiful, perhaps properly the only true, philosophical
song, that exists in any known tongue." Lassen
shrinks from attempting to recommend it, lest he
should imply that it has need of any praise of his.
Warren Hastings notes a "sublimity of conception,
^reasoning, and diction, almost unequalled ; " and Schle-
gel closes his Latin version with a pious invocation of
the unknown prophet bard, w whose oracular soul is as
it were snatched aloft into divine and eternal truth
with a certain ineffable delight."

It is indeed, though not without its imperfections
like the rest, one of the grand immortal forms in relig-
ious literature ; an eternal word of the Spirit in man.

It combines in broad and inspired synthesis the
various points of view from which the Hindu i tsc0 mpre-
schools had contemplated the union of philoso- h e nsive "e ss -
phy and faith. Opening with the practical doctrine
of duty, as conceived by the Yoga, it unfolds the Idea
of God from the best side of the Vedanta, and the
speculative analysis of man's spiritual relations after
the formulas and in the freedom of the Sankhya, and
ends with the substance of mystical p : ety, deliver-
ance, through self-renunciation and devotion, into
union with deity.

It adheres indeed to the system of caste ; yet seeks
to soften its injustice 1 by declaring perfection i tsun i ver .
t>pen to all who do faithfully their own work, salit y-
and making this very dogma of natural subordination
emphasize the call to every class to seek refuge in
God. Even while, with the old contempt which
Buddhism had repudiated so nobly, it once mentions
women with the lowest castes, it yet declares that

1 A method not unlike that of the early Christian teachers touching slavery.

6 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.

all who resort to God will reach the highest goal. 1
Krishna says :

" I have neither friend nor foe : I am the same to all. And all
who worship me dwell in me, and I in them." *

" To them who love me, I give that devotion by which they
come at last to me." a

* The soul in every creature's body is invulnerable ; 4 and none
who has faith, however imperfect his attainment, or however his
heart have wandered from right discipline, shall perish, either in
this world or in another. He shall have new births, till, purified
and made perfect, he reaches the supreme abode."*

" Mankind turn towards my path in every manner, and accord-
ing as they approach me so do I reward them." 6

Deity here is not abstraction, but speaks to man as
, . . Creator, Preserver, Friend. Krishna is the

Its god Snti- ...

mate with companion and intimate counsellor of Arjuna,
man> revealing* to him out of pure love 7 the law
of duty and the path of immortal life; yet preserving
the majesty and mystery of the Infinite. This is the
"Supreme Universal Spirit/' above and behind the
universe, as well as its inmost substance ; the Maker
as well as the AIL " 1 am the origin of all ; from me
all proceeds. " B "Thou," says Arjuna, "thou only,
k no west thyself by thyself, O Creator and Lord of
all that exists, God of gods, most ancient of Beings !" 9
And Krishna says, "I am the soul that exists in the
heart of all beings. I am the beginning, the middle,
the end, of all things." 10

He is death as well as life ; absorbing all forms, to
_. .. the terror of the finite worshipper; yet the

The vision ^ rr J

of Time as terror is not meant to be final. Arjuna would

estroyer. behioicfthe whole infinite of deity with mortal

eyes. His prayer is answered ; and he sees what

> Bk. ., ch. ix. Ibid Ibid., ch. x. Ibid, ch. ii.

Ibid , ch. vi. Ibid., ch. iv. 7 ibid , ch x. " Ibid., ch. x.

The term it P*r*ska, or/rrw*, ch. x. "> Ibid., ch. x-

THE BHAGAVAD-GITA. J

mortal eyes can see, the onward sweep of atoms and
worlds and souls from life to death. This is the terri-
ble, all-devouring form under which the god appears.
The mystery of time, whelming all objects of sense, is
concentrated into One Visible Shape, clothed by the
tropical imagination, which most dreads the power of
fire, in terrors and splendors that no eye can endure.
The transient, for ever vanishing into the bosom of
the eternal, stands manifest in one immeasurable sym-
bol. Flaming mouths and ventral abysses open to
engulf it ; down these, through rows of dreadful
teeth, the human heroes rush, by their own will, as
full streams roll on to meet the ocean, as troops of
insects seek their death in the taper's flame. 1 Very
apt symbolism it is, in view of the other and immediate
purpose, to reconcile the hero to the dread necessity
of carnage that fronted the assembled hosts.

As in the old Hebrew legends men fall upon their
faces before the vision of Jehovah, so is it Its fondly
with Arjuna here. But this "awe is mingled meanin -
with delight." And its cry of trust is,

" Thou shouldst bear with me, O God ! as a father with his son,
as a friend with his friend, a lover with his beloved. Be gracious,
O habitation of the universe! show me thy other [more human]
form." 8

And the vision of destruction vanishes, when the
divine relations of destruction are thus made plain,
into the familiar shape of the companion and friend.
Through the terrors of Death and Time, that eternal
good-will has been abiding unchangeable ; and the
sublimest lesson of life is learned.

" Be not alarmed, nor troubled, at having seen this my terrible

1 Bk. G , ch. xi. Ibid.

8 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY,

form. But look free from fear, with happy heart, upon this other
form of mine.

" That which thou hast seen is very difficult to behold ; not to
be seen by studying the Vedas, nor by mortifications, nor alms-
givings, nor sacrifices. Even the gods are always anxious to be-
hold that form. But only by worship, which is rendered to me
alone, am I to be seen, and known in truth, and obtained. He
cometh to me whose works are done for me, who holcleth me
supreme ; who is my servant only ; who hath abandoned all conse-
quences, and liveth amongst all men without enmity." !

This Hindu form of the faith that deity is present in
lf . , , human shape, to teach, console, instruct, and

Hindu and r

Christian in- save men, and to make clear and sweet to
carnations. t j iem t i ie m ysteries of death and change,
differs from the Christian idea of incarnation, as set
forth in the gospel of John, in this respect among
others, that it does not seek to confine the freedom of
the universal and infinite to a single historic form.
Krishna, incarnation of Vishnu, the all-pervading
Preserver, is not claimed to be the only possible Word
of God in the flesh for all time. Not once for all is
this immanent life invested in a man.

" Although I am not in my nature subject to birth or decay, and
am lord of all created beings, yet in my command over nature as
mine own, I am made evident by my own (maya) power ; and as
often as there is a decline of virtue and insurrection of vice and
injustice in the world, I make myself evident; and thus I appear,
from age to age, for the preservation of the just, the destruction of
evil-doers, and the establishment of virtue." 2

This is the Krishna of philosophy ; but it expressed
a truth that lay deep in the religious instinct of the
people.

Accordingly, for the worship of the "all-pervading
Preserver," incarnation, or avatdra (descent), runs

Bk, C,, ch. xi. * Ibid., cli. iv. '

THE BHAGAVAD-GITA. 9

through every form of life, beginning in earliest ages
with the creatures in which it was supposed that the
primitive piety of mankind must have beheld deity,
and passing on through a series of saints, heroes,
redeemers, to a final judge, s<5 reaching to the bounds
ef time. In the latest Puranas no less than twenty-
two of these avataras are asciibed to this unfailing
providence ; 1 not all indeed of a noble or worthy
quality, but such as the varying degrees of spiritual
and moral intelligence in the worshippers compelled.

It has never been shown that any appreciable influ-
ence was exerted by Christianity upon the for- Avatara sy s-
mation of this Avatara system of the Hindus. * em , - due

J to Christian

Neither the Apostle Thomas, nor Nestorian influence.
Christians from Syria, nor a stray legend about some
distant realm of mystical monotheists, that turns up
among the leaves of the old epic, nor traces of very
secluded and unimportant Christian settlements in later
times upon the coasts of India, can be made available
for refuting the claim of Hindu religious genius to unin-
terrupted assurance that preserving deity is manifested
in constantly renewed forms upon the earth. Lassen,
after a careful inquiry into the traditions of a Christian
origin of this belief, reaches the conclusion that we
cannot ascribe to missionaries of the church any in-
fluence whatever in shaping these religious concep-
tions of the Hindus. 2

The Krishna Avatara, in special, has been sup-
posed, not only from the resemblance between the

1 See Lassen's account of them in Indische Alterthutnskunde, IV. 578-586. Also
note on Thomson's Bhag. G. y p. 147.

Weber (Ind. Stud, I. 400) and Hardwick (Christ and other Masters, I. 254) main-
tain the theory of Christian influence; but all its points i>eem to be tuliy met by Las&eti,
and no real evidence has been adduced in its defence. There is no proof whatever that the
Apostle Thomas ever saw India, and none that Nestorian missions had any influence there
before the fifth century.

IO RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.

names Krishna and Christ, but from certain corres-
,. . . . , pondences in the later Puranic legends with

Urigm or tne *

Krishna those of the infancy of Jesus, to have origi-
vattra * nated in these relations with Christianity. But
the resemblances are of* slight import; and the belief
itself goes back, at the latest, to the time of Megas*
thenes, three centuries before the Christian era. This
writer describes Krishna as the Indian Hercules, who
had "traversed the whole earth and sea, to purify
them from evil ; " and even identifies his worship with
Mathura, the native place of Krishna in the legend. 1

The similarity of the names, Krishna and Christ, is
its possible purely accidental. The word Krishna means
relations, jfa fr/ ac t ^nd it forms the pivot of a very
curious tendency among the Aryan Hindus to vener-
ate that very color which they despised in the aborigi~
nal tribes of India, and which marked the lowest and
most degraded of the castes. For, in spite of these
antagonisms, strange symbols of a deeper brother-
hood seem to crop out in several interesting myths,
both philosophical and poetic. Here, for instance, in
the Bhagavadgita, Krishna, or the/a<;, is the intimate
friend and divine counsellor of Arjuna, or the white^
a feature which cannot be accidental. And in the
Vishnu Purana, Vishnu sends two of his hairs, the
one white, the other black, to remove by their joint
virtue the miseries of the whole earth. I can, hardly
help believing that this respect for the dark skin points
to very early recognitions of a common humanity;
and it is not improbable that Krishna worship itself is
the mark of some profound influence exerted on the
faith of the aristocratic Aryans by the conquered tribes
of Iijjflia. The generally democratic character of this

1 Lasstn, I- 647; II. iio;.

THE BHAGAV AD-GITl. II

wide-spread and deeply rooted form of worship would
thus be explained. And the exaltation of a repre-
sentative of the enslaved race as divine guide of their
white master, in the noblest intellectual achievement
his literature can boast, is a piece of fine poetic justice,
which gives dignity to the whole history of the Hindus.
And it associates the oldest with the latest phases of
our Aryan pride of race, in a common lesson for com-
ing time.

From the early period above mentioned, down to
the latest Purana, the Bhainivata, in the thir- T u .

' ^ Its history.

teenth century, Krishna comes constantly into
view, in the utmost variety of forms, as protecting
hero; as saint and sage, mastering evil spirits instead
of physical and outward enemies ; as inspired shep-
herd boy, idyllic lover of the country maidens, and
wonder-worker in the spheres of popular interests
and pursuits ; assuming in the epic mythology, where
all the numberless rills of popular belief have flowed
together, all imaginable powers and forms of charac-
ter, 1 He says in the Bhagavadgita, " I am represen-
tative of the supreme and incorruptible, of eternal law
and endless bliss." 2

In the Bhagavata Purana he is exalted as the ideal
centre of all virtues, human and divine ; and saviour
of men through the blessings he bestows on all who
enter his spiritual being through meditation and holy
discipline, 8 His worship is thus a purely native prod-
uct of Hindu sentiment. And the sublime assertion,
in the Bhagavadgita, of his incarnation whenever
right needs to be re-established and wrong to be over-
turned, requires no other explanation than an intuitive

* Muir's Sanskrit Texts, vol iv. * Ibid., ch. xiv. *

* Stt Th. Pavie's Kr&hna et sa Doctrine (Paris, 1852)

12 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.

faith in the intimate union of deity with life and the
world.

We may further observe, as characteristic of Hindu
religious development, an effort in the history
o f Krishna-worship to purify pantheism of its
cruder elements. The pantheistic sense of divine im-
manence and universality naturally involves profound
moral and spiritual meaning. With the advance-
ment of thought, such better significance is brought
to the interpretation of popular beliefs of whatever
nature. Krishna is the common term which Hindu-
ism has maintained as the thread of its religious
tradition ; and, in the heterogeneous web of the Ma-
habharata, all its meaning for the popular mind has
been wrought over in the interest of the higher form
of pantheism just mentioned. So that the Krishna of
the epic presents the very noblest traits which the
Hindu mind was able to conceive, as will be seen
hereafter.

The play of illusion, under which his assumption of
all forms of human sympathy and desire is believed
by the more spiritually-minded to be masked, is
frequently lifted away, revealing what is held to be
his inmost reality, by which the often questionable
phenomena are to be mystically interpreted; a pro-
cess of compromise to which all distinctive religions
have in their different ways, from time to time, sub-
jected their sacred books. The substance of this
higher pantheism is expressed in language like the
following :

" Know that Dharma (righteousness) is my first-born beloved
Son, whose nature is to have compassion on all creatures. In his
character, I exist among men, both present and past, in different
disguises and forms. While all men live in unrighteousness, I, the

THE BHAGAVAD-GITA. 13

unfailing, build up the bulwark of right, as the ages pass. Assuming
various divine births to promote the good of all creatures, I act
according to my nature." *

Upon this grand postulate of the constant pre.sence
and watchful intimacy of deity with man, as sympathies
guide and deliverer, the Bhagavadgita sought ^^^
to unfold the sympathies of past and present avadgua.
forms of faith.

It declared that knowledge and action are one in
worship. 2

" Children only, not the wise, speak of the Sankhya (rational)
and the Yoga (devotional) religious systems as different. He who
sees their unity sees indeed. The place which is gained by the
followers of the one is gained by the followers of the other." 3

" He who can behold inaction in action, and action in inaction, is
wise amongst mankind." 4

" There are divers ways of sacrificing ; and all purify men. But
the worlds are not for him who worships not" ft

For one to reach this higher point of spiritual recog-
nition, the Veda, with the subtle questions Bible and
thereon that have distracted the conscience, mediators.
must have become secondary, and be held as transient
means to a spiritual end.

" When thy mind shall have worked through the snares of illu-
sion, thou wilt become indifferent to traditional belief. When thy
mind, liberated from the Vedas, 6 shall abide fixed in contemplation,
thou shalt then attain to real worship." 7

"Thou shalt find it in due time, spontaneously, within thyself." 8

This freer treatment of the " sacred scriptures " de-

' Bhag. G., ch. iiL Ibid., ch. v.

Ibid., ch. iv. Ibid., ch iv.

So Thoraaoa translates ntrveda, which according to Wilson also (Essays on Sanskr.
Lit. t HI. 128) means "certainty of the futility of the Vedas." Schlegel translates the
passage thus: "aententiis theologicis an^ea distracta " Only Wilkins differs: his reading
is, " by study brought to maturity/* which can hardly be correct.

' Bkag. G., ch. ii. * Ibid., ch. iv.

14 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.

serves notice, as showing how strong is the demand,
Reactions even in a race whose faith naturally turns to

against bib- . - ~ , ., , . .

the past, for escape from a bible-worship,

which still dominates far more enlightened communi-
ties. In every great form of Hindu philosophy we find
this opening upward into freedom from sacred text and
rite. The Vedanta declares tf the science of the Vedas
inferior to the science of soul." The Sankhya denies
the eternity of the hymns, and asserts fullest liberty
of interpretation. The Bhagavadgit& holds real wor-
ship to be that in which the Vedas have no further
place, having done their work, and given way to the
vision and enjoyment of deity. The Ramayana and
Mahabharata speak of themselves as equal to the
Vedas. The Puranas, in general, go much further.
The Bhagavadgita says:

" As great as is the use of a well when it is surrounded by over-
flowing waters, so great and no greater is the use of the Vedas to a
Brahman endowed with knowledge."

But the Bhagavata Purana :

"Men do not worship the Supreme when they worship Him as
circumscribed by the attributes specified in the hymns. Thou who
strewest the earth with thy sacrificial grass, and art proud of thy
numerous immolations, knowest not what is highest work of all"

The Brahmanas peak of the limitations of the
Vedas in the same tone. Even Manu perceives that
the spirit must interpret the text, to make it of service.
The progress of experience brought fresh inspirations
that criticised the older ones ; and there were bitter
controversies between the supporters of the different
Vedas, fatal to the pretence of inviolable authority in
either. 1

See terfe in Muir, III. cb. i.

THE BHAGAVAD-GITA. 15

The w spiritual knowledge " which is to be substituted
for all written or traditional objects of faith, Spirituality
as the supreme end of life, is called jndna. 1
The Bhagavadgitft describes what it reveals as deity,
in terms most clearly expressive of spiritual being :

* " It Is that which hath no beginning, and is supreme ; not the
existent alone, nor the non-existent alone ; with hands and feet on all
sides, at the centre of the world comprehending all ; exempt from all
organs, yet shining with the faculties of all ; unattached, yet sustain-
ing everything; within and without ; afar, yet near; the light of
lights, the wisdom that is to be found by wisdom, implanted in
every breast." 8

" The recompense of devotion is greater than any that can be
promised to the study of the Vedas, or the practice of independ-
austerities, or the giving of alms." 3 ence -

" Better than material sacrifice is the sacrifice of spiritual
wisdom." 4

" Men are seduced from the right path by that flowery sentence
proclaimed by the unwise, who delight in texts from the Vedas, and
say, ' there is nothing else than that, 7 covetous of heaven as the
highest good, offering regeneration as the reward of mere perform-
ances, and enjoining rites for the sake of pleasures and powers." a

"The worship of personages as divine bestowers of all good
seeks to propitiate such personages ; and receives, as from them, its
reward, which yet comes after all only from God. But the reward
of these disciples of little mind is finite. They who worship gods
go to their gods. They who worship me come to me. Only the
unwise believe that I, who neither am born nor die, am confined
to a visible form." 6

While the power of attaining union with essential
truth and good, independently of permanent Ethica | ^j.
or exclusive mediators, is thus affirmed as in- ture ; action -
dispensable to the highest life, the ethical conditions
of such attainment are not slighted. The authority
of the moral nature has all due reverence.

t Compare Greek yvwffif , Latin nosco, Saxon knew. Bhag. G , ch xiii.

Ibid., ch. viii. Ibid., ch. iv. Ibid., ch. ii. * Ibid., ch. vii.

1 6 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.

What is the secret of duty ? O Arjuna ! the old
eternal answer, the soul knows no other : Master
the senses, and subdue desires. Of all actions the con-
sequences are bonds determined and inevitable. What
is the self-centred act, what the pleasure of mere
physical contact, that comes but to pass again, leaving
unsatisfied desire behind it, but " a womb of pain " ?
Is then all activity to be renounced ? By no means.

" No one ever restcth a moment inactive. Every one is in-
voluntarily urged to act, by principles which are inherent in his
nature. Inertness is not piety. Perform, then, thy functions.
Action is better than inaction."

" But as this world entails the bonds of action on every work
but that which has worship for its object, therefore abandon,

son of Kunti ! all selfish motive, and perform thy duty for God
alone."

"Even if thou considerest only the good of mankind, still thou
shouldst act. For what good men practise, others will practise
likewise."

" I have no need of any good, that I should be obliged to do any
thing throughout the three worlds ; yet do I for ever work. For if

1 did not, men follow in my steps in all things, and the people
would perish." l

" But every work is comprehended in wisdom : seek thou this,
by worship, inquiry, service." *

" Whoso abandons all interest in the reward of his actions shall
be contented and free : though engaged in work, he, as it were,
doeth nothing. The same in success and failure, even though he
acts he is not bound bylhe bonds of action. His mind led by
spiritual knowledge, and his work done for the sake of worship,
his own action is, as it were, dissolved away."

" God is the gift, the sacrifice, the altar-fire ; God the maker
of the offering ; and God, the object of his meditation, is by him
attained." '

" Let thy motive lie in the deed, and not in the reward : perform
Motive, tnv ^ ut y an< * ma ^ e tne event equal, whether it ter-
minate in good or ill This is devotion." *

i Bka <?., ch. iii. Ibid., ch. iv. Ibid., ch. ii.

THE DHAGAVAD-GITA. I/

" He who puts aside self-interest is not tainted by sin, but re-
mains unaffected, as the lotus-leaf is not wet, by the waters." l

" What is given for the sake of a gift in return, or for the sake
of the fruit of the action, or reluctantly, is a gift of inferior quality." 2

* Whatever thou doest, do as offering to the Supreme." 3

" He who casts off desires, he into whose heart desires enter but
svs rivers run into the never-swelling, passive ocean, he is Mastery of
tranquil; and there springs in him separation from all desires
trouble. He only whose thoughts are gathered in meditation can
find rest." 4

" The wise are troubled to determine what is action and what is
not. 1 will tell thee the path of deliverance. He is the doer of
duty who beholds inaction in action, and action in inaction, free
from the sense of desire : his action is consumed by the fire of
knowledge." 5

" As a candle placed in shelter from the wind does not flicker,
so is he who, with thoughts held in devotion, delighteth in his soul,
knowing the boundless joy that the mind attains beyond sense,
whereon being fixed it moveth not from truth ; and who, having
attained it, regardeth no other attainment as so great as it is, nor
is moved by severest pain." 6

" Seek refuge in thy mind." 7

" Let one raise his soul by his own means : let him not lower
his soul ; for he is his soul's friend or enemy. He who Se if. respect .
has subdued himself by his soul finds that self which,
by reason of the enmity of what is not spiritual, might be a foe,
the friend of his soul." 8

" Draw in the senses from objects of sense, as the tortoise
its limbs ; for when the heart follows their roaming it Spirituality
snatches away spiritual wisdom as a wind a ship on the of purpose,
waves.** *

Yet even in the practice of ascetic disciplines, com-
mended to the devotee who would concentrate ._ . .

Moderation.

his mind on God alone, excess is discounten-

Bhag. G , ch v. Ibid., ch xvii. Ibid., ch. ix.

Ibid., ch. it. ' Ibid , ch. iv. Ibid., ch vi.

' Ibid., ch it. Ibid., ch. vi. Ibid., ch. ii.

ItS RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.

anced ; and fanatical abstinence from food, sleep,
recreation, action, are discouraged, he only being a
true devotee who is moderate in all things, and, above
all, in his desires. 1 How these opposite tendencies
are reconciled does not indeed appear. It has been
supposed ^ that indifference to results was substituted
for abandonment of action, from a sense of the neces*
sity of modifying the strictness of ascetic practices,
which is very probable.

Such are the cultures of piety, contemplative
Practical mainly, and in their final aim. But practical
virtues. virtues are held as equally imperative. Such
are fearlessness, temperance, rectitude, veracity, a
harmless spirit, freedom from anger, liberality, mod-
esty, gentleness, benevolence towards all, stability,
energy, fortitude, patience, purity, resolution, and the
absence of vindictiveness and conceit. 3 These are
enforced as positive duties. They are described, also,
as the path of those who are " born to the lot of divine
beings," while those whc^have them not gravitate the
other way.

All actual conditions were, to the Hindu, profoundly
Natural retrospective. They must somehow find their
destiny. ground in the determinations of a divine Order.
There was more in moral good and evil than mere
fruit of culture. And to be ff born to the lot" of divine
or depraved beings must of course have meant some-
thing beyond caste-distinctions. A sense of destiny
came mightily down on the dreamer's vision, as he
thought of the prodigious force of natural endow-
ment in determining the paths of conduct. Virtues
were upward tracks, for which, it was plain, some had

Mkag. ., ch. vi. Wilson, III. no. Bhaf. 0., ch. xvi.

THE BHAGAVAD-GITA. 1 9

a kind of natural fore-ordination ; while the birth-doom
of others drove them in the opposite direction into
correspondent vices. And here the poet's moral judg-
ment seems too much absorbed in the sense of inevi-
table consequence to recognize that apparent injustice
in such predestinations, which demanded solution.
And he turns the evil-doers away l upon their down-
ward path of bestial transmigrations, with as little
apparent sympathy as is conveyed in that kindred
sentence from another gospel: "These shall go
away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous
into life eternal." Doubtless in the one case, as in
the other, the special aspect under which moral evil
was, for the moment, intensely conceived, excluded
other and kindlier elements of faith, which elsewhere
enter into both these gospels, though in different ways.
With the Hindu, the deliverance from these bonds of
destiny might surely be found in the all-embracing
mystic unity of spiritual life, as with the Hebrew in
the depths of the Fatherhood of God. And yet it is
evident of the one as of the other gospel, that its cen-
tral idea had not reached its own full significance, as
a guaranty for the preservation and perfection of
all spiritual forces, even in the mind of its greatest
teacher.

But we must not overlook the fact, that this whole
poem is intent on pointing out the ways in which the
dark, bewildering, bestializing gunas, or organic qual-
ities, might be w burned away in the fires of worship."
It implies a certain inherent and absolute power in
these disciplines and endeavors, to accomplish their
purpose. They involve a higher freedom, which
contravenes the apparent fatalities of evil.

1 Bhag. G., ch. xvi.

2O RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.

And for all aspirations alike there was the One Lif<
The path that animated all lives, an unfailing promise
opcntoau. justification, and resource.

" Rest assured, O son of Kunti ! that they who worship me
shall never die. I am the pledge of their bliss." '

" Forsake all other reliance, and fly to me alone. I will delive
thee from all thy transgressions." *

" Even if one whose ways have been ever so bad worship mi
alone, with devotion, he shall be honored as a just man ; for he hai
judged aright. He soon becometh of a virtuous spirit, and enteretl
eternal rest." 3

"He my servant is dear to me, who is free from enmity, th<
friend of all nature, merciful, exempt from pride and selfishness, th<
same in pain and pleasure, patient of wrongs, contented, of subduec
passions and firm resolves H and whose mind is fixed on me alone.

" He also is worthy of my love who neither rejoices nor find:
fault ; neither laments nor covets ; and, being my servant, has
forsaken both good and evil fortune.

" He is my beloved who is the same in friendship and hatred, ir
honor and dishonor, unsolicitous about the event of things ; tc
whom praise and blame are as one ; who is of little speech, anc
pleased with whatever cometh to pass ; who owneth no particulai
home, and who is of steadfast mind.

" They who seek this amrita [immortal food] of religion, even as
I have said, and serve me faithfully, are dearest of all." 4

Here the independent witness-soul of the Sankhya
is combined^ with a Vedantic reverence for the
One Universal Life, and a Buddhistic recogni-
tion of action and social duties. The meaning
of this blending of stoical indifference, pious ardor,
and human love, can only lie in the effort to consecrate
the whole of life, to fuse every element of the human
ideal in the one purpose of worship, as substantial
unity with the Highest, as all-sufficing joy.

1 Bhag. ., ch. 11. * Ibid., ch. xviii.

Ibid . ch. bu Ibid., ch. xii. ( WOkin*).

THE BHAGAVAD-GITA. 21

" They who worship me dwell in me, and I in them." *

a By him who constantly seeks me, without wandering of mind,
I am easily found." *

"Thinking on me, absorbed in me, teaching each other, and
constantly telling of me, the wise are blessed. To such as seek
me with constant love, I give the power to come to me. Through
my compassion, while remaining in my own essence, I yet turn their
darkness into light."*

" Most dear am I to the spiritually wise, and he is dear to me.
The distressed, the seeker for light, the desirer of good, the wise,
are all exalted ; but the wise, whose devout spirit rests on me, I
hold even as myself." 4

" Though thou wert the greatest of offenders, thou shalt cross
the gulf of sin in this bark of spiritual wisdom. He who hath
faith shall find this ; and, having found it, shall speedily attain rest
for his soul. No bonds of action hold the mind which hath cut
asunder the bonds of doubt. Son of Itoarata, sever thy doubt in
worship, and arise ! " *

And, on the other side, the inevitableness of moral
penalty is as positively asserted. It rests not Moral pen .
on any arbitrary decree, but on the essential alties -
qualities of conduct. It is associated indeed in certain
aspects with the notion that the castes originated in
these moral qualities, and their due subordinations ; 6
for the Bhagavadgit does not attain the grand dem-
ocracy of Buddhism. But the inherence of moral
consequence according to purely moral quality is
nevertheless strictly defined :

" The pleasure that 'springs from serenity of mind is first like
poison, and afterwards like the amrita of immortals ; but the pleas-
ures of the senses begin like amrita, and end as poisons ; and the
pleasure that is from sleepy sloth is the utter bewilderment of the
soul."*

According to the quality that has ripened into pre-
dominance is the form the individual spirit assumes ;

Bk*g. G. t eh. be. * Ibid., ch. viii.. Ibid., ch. x.

* Ibid., ch. vii. Ibid., ch. iv. Ibid., ch xviii.

22 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.

gravitating at death to the w imperishable place, 3 * or
downwards, through lower forms of life, even to the
"wombs of the senseless," or inorganic matter, if the
deathly blight of indifference shall come to that at
last. 1 "Threefold the gate of this hell, avarice,
anger, and lust." 2 Thus the bad are consigned, not
to endless misery by one dread sentence, but to pro-
bations manifold; and, if hopelessly sunk, reaching
at last a quasi annihilation, by laws of affinity alone ;
not to be preyed on by the worm that dieth not and
the fire that is not quenched ; but, more mercifully (if
that word be applicable at all), to become the clod or
the stone, which testify that the capability to sin and
to suffer are alike no more. So that hope ceases only
with consciousness itself; for transmigration is a re-
volving wheel, and with every fresh birth comes fresh
gift of opportunity for such intelligence as may still
survive.

" All worlds up to that of BrahmS, are subject to
TM u, i [the law of] return." But there is a state

The blessed L t J

hfe beyond from which they who enter it do not need, as
they cannot desire, to return.

" There is an invisible, eternal existence, beyond this visible,
which does not perish when all things else perish, even when the
great days of Brahma's creative life pass round into night, and all
that exists in form returns unto God whence it came. They who
obtain this never return." 3

" They proceed unbewildered to that imperishable place, which
is neither illumined by the sun nor moon ; to that primeval Spirit
whence the stream of life for ever flows." 4

" Whoso beholds me in all things and all in me, I do not vanish
from him, nor does he vanish from me ; for in me he lives." 6

" Bright as the sun beyond darkness is He to the soul that
remembers Him in meditation, at the hour of death, with thought

Bhaf. ., eh. xiv. ' Ibid., ch. xvl > Ibid., ch. viB.

Ibid., ch. xv. Ibid.,ch.vu

THE BHAGAVAD-GITA. 23

fixed between the brows, Him the most ancient of the wise, the
primal ruler, the minutest atom, the sustainer of all, in the hour
when each finds that same nature on which he meditates, and to
which he is conformed." J

" They who put their trust in me, and seek deliverance from decay
and death, know Brahma, and the highest spirit (Adhyatma), and
every action (karma). They who know me in my being, my person,
and my manifested life, in the hour of death know me indeed." *

Who is this that is so known ?

" The Soul in all beings, the best in each, and the inmost nature of
all ; their beginning, middle, end ; the all-watching preserver, father
and mother of the universe, supporter, witness, habitation, refuge,
friend ; the knowledge of the wise, the silence of mystery, the
splendor of light ; and death and birth, and all faculties and
powers ; the holiest hymn, the spring, among seasons, the seed
and the sum of all that is." 3

And whoso by inward worship of God overcomes
the blind qualities and dispositions, by devotion shall
enter at once into His being. 4

These conceptions of a future life seem to hover
between absorption into deity and revolving cy- p ers onai
cles of ever-renewed births. Yet, through all immortalit y-
this indistinctness, a certain sense of permanence must
have been felt by those whose minds dwelt so con-
stantly on the thought of somewhat eternal in the very
consciousness of spiritual being. We have already
seen that the mystical Hindu mind did not demand so
distinct an assurance of continued personal conscious-
ness after ,death as does the intense individualism
of modern thought. Such positiveness of prediction
would have been associated with limitations rather than
with freedom : always the longing of mystical faith
has been to lose limit in pure self-surrender, and find
freedom in absolute present trust.

Bkaf. G. t ch. viiL * Ibid., ch. vii.

* Ibid., ch. ix. x. xi. * Ibid., ch. xhr. rvnL

24 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.

Yet the Bhagavadgit& recognizes the desire of con-
tinued being, as indeed it does not fail of recognizing
almost every genuine aspiration. And when Krishna
would allay the compassionate scruples of Arjuna
against destroying human life, he points to the im-
perishable personality that resides in every soul. Its
description fully corresponds with what we mean by
that term. One with infinite soul, expanded to share
the universal life, yet in a real sense distinct in itself,
as being that in each soul which makes it real and
eternal, it comes home to our experience as our own
deepest sense of immortality, which transcends the
thought of beginning as of end.

" As the soul in this body undergoes the changes of infancy,
youth, and age, so it obtains a new body hereafter.

"Know that these finite bodies have belonged to an eternal,
inexhaustible, indestructible spirit. He who believes that this spirit
can kill, and he who believes it can be killed, both are wrong.
Unborn, changeless, eternal, it is not slain when the body is slain.

" As a man abandons worn-out clothes and takes other new ones,
so does the soul quit worn-out bodies and enter others. Weapons
cannot cleave, nor fire burn it. It is constant, immovable ; yet it
can pass through all things.

" If thou hadst thought it born with the body, to die with the
body, even then thou shouldst not grieve for the inevitable ; since
what is born must die, and what is dead must live again. All
things are first unseen r then seen, then at last unseen again. Why
then be troubled about these things ?

" Some hold the soul as a wonder, while some speak and others
hear of it with astonishment ; but no one knoweth it, though he
may have heard it described. The soul, in its mortal frame, is invul-
nerable.

" Grieve not then for any creatures, and abandon not thy duty.
For a noble man that infamy were worse than death." l

" It is good to die doing thy own work : doing another's brings
danger." *

1 &kag. G. t ch. it. * Ibid., ch. iii.

THE BHAGAVAD-GITA. 2$

The sense of immortality is here associated with
the idea of duty, conceived indeed after a Hindu
fashion. Wherever such connection is recognized as
essential, there, under whatever special form duty may
be presented, we may be sure that personality is in-
volved in the idea of eternal life.

This "invulnerable soul" is in every one of the
living beings before Arjuna on the battle-field AII destinies
of Kuru. "An imaginary thing can have no divbe -
existence, nor can that which is real be other than a
stranger to nonentity." l Is not this an implication
of full faith in personal destinies? What limitation
is possible to the sweep of this invulnerability of life
through all special lives? What is it but the living
path and the living goal, at once, for them all? It is
a protest against the fate elsewhere in the Bhagavad-
git assigned to those who are fallen lowest in delusion
and vice. The " wombs of the senseless " disappear
before it. How can the soul die down into a clod, if
soul is invulnerable? By this rescue of the substance,
all that waste is made impossible. The higher "con-
servation of force," which resides in intelligence itself,
forbids it. The " wombs of the senseless," like the
"everlasting woes" of Christian theology, are, in
fact, but mythological and dramatic fictions, in which
the fears and hates arising from certain stages of
moral development invest the idea of spiritual destiny.
Intuitions of the eternal validity of that which is in-
most substance and proper selfhood in every one, flash
out by the side of these mythologic fancies, and reach
beyond them, discerning the real purport of existence.
This inmost personal life, rooted in essential life, con-
tains all guaranties of good : whatever else dies out or

1 Bhag. G., ch. a.

26 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.

revolves through phases of matter, coming up again
in vapor or tree, that which is called "soul" in each,
the intellectual and moral quality, the sphere of aspi-
ration and relation to the infinite, however it may
change and develop, must escape such fate, must
abide, according to this philosophy, in the imperish-
able place of soul itself. Honor to pantheism for
affirming the oneness of spiritual substance, for the
sweep of its great circle that leaves no life homeless
and wandering outside God.

The recognition of an inmost personality, lifted in
, pure independence of all the change and loss

Correspond- * *

involved in actions and their fruits, is as posi-

tinction between Prakriti and Purusha. In fact, this
distinction, with the whole Snkhya system, 1 is here
fully set forth ; though as but a single side of an
eclectic philosophy, and combined Kapila would
hardly say, reconciled with that oneness of spiritual
being to which he objected as opposed to individual
claims.

"He who beholdeth all his actions performed by Prakriti, at the
same time perceives that his atma [self] is inactive in them. The su-
preme soul, even when it is in the body, neither acts nor is it affected,
because its nature is eternal, and free of qualities. As the all-pene-
trating ether, from the mjnuteness of its parts, passeth everywhere
unaffected, so this spirit in the body. As one sun illumines the
whole \u>rld, so does the one spirit illumine the whole of matter,
O Bharata ! They who thus perceive the body and the soul as dis-
tinct, and that there is release, go to the Supreme." *

This effort to combine the Sankhya with the Ve-
Universuiiuy danta is but one element of the vast synthesis
of theGUA. O f f a i t h attempted in the " Divine Lay" which

1 The reader will recall the explanation rf this distinction, as suggested in the ctuptfti
on the Slnfchya in the present volume, p. 388-
* JBJt<*\ (?., ch. xiiu

THE BHAGAVAD-GITA. 2J

we are now studying. It has been described 1 as
evading all great questions which divide the schools
of belief, as hovering between faith and works,
reason and devotion, the worship of the invisible
and the worship of the visible God. 1 It is certain
that the reconciliation of opposite tendencies is by no
means clear or satisfactory. It is syncretism rather
than fusion. It is intellectual recognition, rather than
final system. But the breadth of this recognition is
what deserves our admiration, the large justice done
to every existing element of Hindu thought. Like its
own Brahma, the Bhagavadgita is the best of every
form, revealing its highest aspect, its spiritual pur-
port. Faith is good, and works are good ; but the
goodness of each is in the subordination of one to the
other. Absorption and transmigration are both real ;
but their meaning for the desire of immortality is in
their respective meanings as the true end of life and
the consequence of conduct. Not less real the worth
of the Veda for the greater worth of nirvcda, the
divine certainty that lies beyond it. Sacrifices are
good, yet only as the step to a higher service of God.
The Sankhya witness-soul is exalted ; not less so the
soul performing these duties that belong to its path in
life. The gunas, or qualities of blind nature, have
their tremendous moral issues; not less true are the
aH-dissolving Unity of Brahma, and the illusion of this
universe that comes and goes, these worlds of life
that are w subject to return." The eternal Substance
abides, beyond all forms of existence, inconceivable,
unknown. Yet every term by which the inmost per-
sonality of man is expressed is carried up into this
divine substance, making it a fulness of life. It is

* Wilson, Essay on Bkaf*v. QUA (Sanstr. Lit., III. 144)-

28 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.

Purusha, personal soul. It is Purushottdma^ Ultimate
Personality. It is Adhydtma, Over-Soul, or Divine
Self. It is even Makes-vara, the Great Lord. It is
the Avat&ra, the perpetual providence, ever manifest
in visible form to save the world.

This boundless hospitality to existing beliefs indi-
cates at least the force with which the religious senti-
ment was embodied in them all at the time when the
Bhagavaclgiti was written. One element betrays the
Brahmanical source from which it flowed, the main-
tenance, however modified, of caste. Brahmanism is
here seen, surrounded by rationalizing independent
tendencies, seeking to accommodate itself to their
demands, while maintaining the unity of religious
development as a whole. Like the somewhat analo-
gous production of the Christian Church, the Johannic
Gospel, it is the work of the highest spiritual genius,
the most deliberate and careful constructive skiJJ,
the most earnest desire of religious unity, which the
tendencies it represented had at their command ; and
a spirit is moving through its speculative deeps, that
could not be bound within the limits of any creed,
the spirit of Universal Religion.

We cannot wonder that in a time of contending sects,
The maker an ^ amidst the distinctions of caste, the disclo-
of the Lay. sure o f fa[ s "sublime mystery " to the reviler,
the indifferent, the unspiritual, should be forbidden. 1
How indeed, leaving caste out of the question, could it
be made known to such ? No deep religious faith fails
wholly of that wisdom which knows where not to cast
its pearls. As the Hebrew reformer clothed his doc-
trine in parables, for those who hearing did not hear,
and as the Greek philosopher veiled his in symbols, so

, cli. xvui.

THE BHAGAVAD-GITA. 29

the Hindu mystic admonished his disciples that prepa-
ration was needed for receiving what only the eye of
thoughtful attention could even behold. And was not
this light of pure thought indeed shining in compara-
tive darkness ? Was it not on the heights of con-
templation, in a region which the disciplined intellect
alone could make a home ? Yet we detect also behind
these ethical and spiritual considerations the strict re-
quirements of caste. Not here the broad humanity of
Buddha, whose word was a gospel rather than a phi-
losophy, and probably uttered with less of esoteric
mystery or exclusiveness than that of any other teacher
of the ancient world. The claims of the philanthropist
differ from the claims of the seer.

Shall we not say with the latest English translator
of this wonderful song, sung in the far East two
thousand years ago, that " it is sufficient praise for the
mystical old Brahman to have inferred, amidst dark-
ness and ignorance, the vast powers of mind and will,
and to have claimed for the soul the noble capacity
of making the body and even external matter its
slave ? "

IV.
PIETY AND MORALITY OF PANTHEISM.

PIETY AND MORALITY OF PANTHEISM.

TF the Bhagavadgita is pantheistic, it is none the less
* theistic also. While these two terms i

their extreme meaning represent widely differ- of the ** c<
ent conceptions, here is a higher unity which seeks to
include what is best in both. Whatever may have
been the result of this effort, its comprehensiveness
deserves special notice, in view of the demand of our
civilization for a breadth and freedom which can ap-
preciate every real element of human belief. In this
spirit of the age, Goethe wrote to Jacobi that he could
not be content with one way of thinking ; that as artist
and poet he was a polytheist, while as student of
nature he was a pantheist.

All phases of religion appear alike imperfect, if
defined as mutually exclusive systems. But their
real affinities are coming to be comprehended in the
unify of personal experience. We are learning to
recognize theism, polytheism, and pantheism as legiti-
mate parts of ourselves, to resume them under as-
pects which explain their power over races and times
other than our own, and so to relieve the steps of
human endeavor from disparagement by exclusive
creeds.

3

34 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.

There are phases of skepticism and phases of
to sc ' ence which seem to turn from religion as
pantheism well as intuition with sweeping denial. There
needed. ^^ phases of superstition apparently blind to
all rights of skepticism and science. But both science
and religion in our day are to receive a republican
breadth of meaning. They will not only guard thr
right of every faculty and every aspiration to plead
its own cause, but respect the witness it may be able
to bring in its own behalf from the confidence of
mankind.

To how purely negative a criticism has pantheism
been subjected ! Yet there must be truth in. a form
of belief which has satisfied enduring civilizations,
and which has reappeared in philosophy and ethics
wherever these have reached a high development,
without regard to the lines which separate recognized
religions or even races. It has usually been through
some form of spiritual pantheism that these distinctive
religions have escaped their limitations, and risen into
a universality unknown either to their founders or
to the ordinary current of their history. We may
instance the Sufism of the Mohammedans, the Neo-
Platonism of the Greeks, and the Mysticism that
preceded the Reformation in Germany and Italy, and
showed a far larger -and profounder spirit than that
movement. Modern philosophy has received its
strongest impulse from a similar tendency in German
thought. And the unities of political, intellectual, and
religious life, at the present time, make the relation
of pantheism to the coming age a question of real
moment.

Whatever inferior forms of experience may have
received or assumed the name, it is of great irapor-

PIETY OF PANTHEISM. 35

tance to emphasize that special purport of pantheism
which accounts for its frequent recurrence and its
noble fruits. Our study of the Hindu schools of re-
ligious philosophy should help us to this result.

It is commonly insisted that all pantheistic systems
are ways of confounding the Creator with the whatw
cr&ation, and sinking the soul in the senses. pantheiRn ?
Tin's form of statement comes mainly from Semitic
habits of thought inherited by Christianity. Panthe-
ism could expect no other reception from their intense
jealousy for the rights of an external deity, by whom
the world is made out of nothing, and the human soul
autocratically ruled.

But, if pantheism were what this fixed impression
of the Christian Church as a whole represents it, it
would certainly be far from resembling the* aspirations
of those Hindu seers whom we have beert studying
in the preceding chapters of this volume. They, of
all men, sought emancipation from the " wheel of the
senses/' and fervently believed in the possibility of
union with the Absolute and Eternal.

In reality, pantheism, whether as sentiment or
philosophy, is not the worship of a finite and visible
world. In its nobler forms it is essentially of the
spirit, and rests, as its name imports, on these princi-
ples : that Being is, in its substance, one ; that this
substantial unity is, and must be, implicated in all
energy, though indefinably and inconceivably, as
Life, all-pervading, ail-containing, the constant ground
and ultimate force of all that is ; and that the recog-
nition of this inseparableness of the known universe
from God is consistent with the worship of God as
infinitely transcending it.

A theism of pure sentiment, following the Hebrew

36 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.

prophetic consciousness of intimacy with God, yet, like
T . . , that earlier Semitism, too monarchical in its

Limits of

Christian theory to recognize h<5w completely all manifes-
theism. t a tion mus t be one with its spiritual substance,
was the religious inspiration of Jesus and his compan-
ions. Not less was this the limit for every form under
which Christianity could appear. Even the Gospel*of
John though a later product, drawing largely from
Greek and Oriental fountains, and imbued with mystical
elements apparently unknown to the original faith as
it was in Jesus stopped short, on this track, with
limiting the -pure immanence of God in the universe
to the ideally constructed person of Jesus, as the "Word
made flesh." All pantheistic forms or tendencies of
distinctive Christianity have had the same limitation;
and this obscures the universal element, which never-
theless underlay and in fact prompted them.

The ideal demand of modern life is for fuHer recog-

, , nition tk&ft 'was ever before possible, that spirit-
Modem r r

ideal of ual being is of one substance. All religions
ty. measurably express this truth, and their aspira-
tions after universality imply it. But their distinctive
tendencies have interfered more or less harmfully with
its free development and just emphasis. With the
knowledge of universal laws there enters a more
genial and inclusive spirit.

Philosophy now aims at complete expression of the
essential unity of subject with object, in what Aristotle
called "thought thinking itself;" thus reaching the
ultimate conception of One Spiritual Substance em-
bracing all being within the scope of its self-affirma-
tion. 1 The Imagination of our time divines, beyond

1 This is involved even in the ** relativity of all knowledge," which might seem to
make it void , since the conception of this relativity implies recognition of its opposite, the

PIETY OF PANTHEISM. 37

this metaphysical conception, that the living universe
is the play of deity, through all forms and forces, all
dream and faith and action, all names, all symbols,
all religions. Its Piety and its Humanity must be
more than a mere recognition of what is eternally
gopd and true, as an object of thought : they aim at
the expression of this, as far as possible, in forms of
which // shall be at once the productive cause and the
inseparable life. Its Sciences must recognize that
what lies beyond their tests and explanations is really
the one master force involved in every step of evolu-
tion from lowest to highest forms, the substance of
these force-factors out of which all constructions flow.
Its God must be no mere Creator of a distinct uni-
verse, in the sense of maker, constructor, provider ;
but far more, even the inmost Essence and Principle
of all. The age, in fine, is resuming, in the fulness
of its experience, the ideal meaning of all spiritual
motives profound enough to have acquired distinctive
names, and to have entered into the classification of
religious systems.

I am not then forgetting the larger light of science
and practical relation in the civilization of the West,
when I bring the " Hindu dreamers" to help towards
a better understanding of the needs of our time. It is
these very forms of intellectual maturity that impel us
to" seek fresh meaning in all ancient divinations of the
Unity of Being.

The mystery which we are to ourselves, and find in
all things around us, not only transcends our Themystery
theological terms, but effaces all scientific land- of bein ^
marks and distinctions. It is by thought we know all
that we call God, the world, ourselves ; and in all

38 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.

directions alike is thought incomprehensible to the
thinker. Facts, phenomena^, the operation of forces,
we claim to understand simply because we employ them
for our purposes, select them to meet definite demands,
combine them in positive constructions. But of force
we only know that it acts in certain ways, not AOT% it
can act thus, nor how act at all. And of the fleeting
play of phenomena, what can we say but that the con-
nection between mind and the physical organs through
which they are perceived nay, between mind and
its own activity is a mystery penetrable by no faculty
that we possess. With a change in our mode of exist-
ence, the familiar universe would roll up as a scroll ;
though it were only to reappear in such new, unim-
agined form as may accord with new desires or needs,
so slight the hold of either our volition or our com-
prehension on the relations of our being. Yet we
inevitably trust the reports of consciousness concern-
ing its own objects. And how should this unison be
possible, and this confidence and calm abide in the
depths of the reason, but for an inmost identity of es-
sence, including within itself alike the truster and
what he trusts ?

This presence of the unfathomable, in which all ex-
perience is involved, cannot be set aside on the ground
that it is always unknown, and that a purely unknown
factor may be eliminated from the problem. It abides
everywhere : it is that which we do know most surely,
even if we know nothing else, unless knowing means
comprehending, in which case we should do well to
drop the word altogether.

Nor can a universal element be eliminated and left
out of the problem, like a constant factor in arith-
metic, on the ground that it is constant and every*

PIETY OF PANTHEISM. 39

where of equal force. 1 It is dynamic, not arithmetical.
It enters into the substance of each experience, with
special influences in each. Its presence affects the
spirit and attitude of inquiry, shapes the definitions,
and saves from absorption in the finite side of experi-
ence. "They who prize experience exclusively," said
Goethe, w forget that experience is but the half of ex-
perience."

Our victorious science fails to sound one fathom's
depth on any side, since it does not ex-

\ . . Thepanthe-

plain the parentage of mind. For mind was ibtic ude of
in truth before all science, and remains i O r thought
ever the seer, judge, interpreter, even father, of all its
systems, facts, and laws. Our faculties are none the
less truly above our heads because we no longer won-
der, like children, at processes we do not understand.
Spite of category and formula, of Kant and Hegel,
we are abashed before our own untraceable thought.
The stars of heaven, the grass of the field, the very
dust that shall be man, foil our curiosity as much as
ever, and none the less for yielding to the lens, the
prism, and the polariscope of science ever new tri-
umphs for our pride and delight. Not less mystical
is mind because it will no longer be suppressed and
stultified by mysteries of faith. True as ever is what
Krishna says in the old Eastern reverie :

"Some regard the soul as a miracle, while some speak of it, and
others hear of it, with like astonishment ; but no one comprehends
it, even when he has heard it described." *

What know we of matter ? Philosophy can define
it as a form in which spirit manifests itself to spirit,
a reflex of thought, an expression or mode of mind ;

1 This is Mr. Buckle's mode of historical computation: "The moral factor is con*

40 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.

and so escape the dualism that would seem involved in
its being an independent reality. The spiritual is its
substance, is what it means, is what we are conscious
of, after all. What, then, is spiritual essence? We
cannot define it, we know not how, only that it acts ;
still less do we know what it is. To remember, to
hope, to love : these we explain only by themselves
again. That they are is itself the mystery, all-
pervading, infinite, To Be.

Into such transcendence the whole of life enters,
and with it all science, matter, force, and form. By
this one fact of mystery alone, though we should look
no further, the infinite of mind is found inseparable
from all experience. And this " Unknowable " is
known to be not merely continuous with the human,
nor interpenetrating it merely, as space is per-
vaded by light, but more. As a man's mind is in
his thought and his love, so is essential mind the
unfathomable life in which all intelligent spiritual
forces move. 1

And this truth has still closer relations with our
in ethics moral and spiritual nature. The sense of
and faith. ]j m it that for ever besets the understanding,
withholding from us the meaning of the world and
the purpose of existence in a certain repulsion as
towards aliens and* strangers, necessitates a path
upwards to the freedom of an all-embracing idea, an
all-dissolving unity, in which our individual imperfec-
tions shall, ideally at least, cease to separate us from
the whole. This dualism, as between one who seeks

1 Spencer (Psychology* p. noj regards such ideas as anthropomorphic, and so without
authority. But if the substance of the universe is not mind, as we are mind who think it,
then the very conception of existence, on which that of substance depends, is also base-
law as resulting from our mentality alone.

PIETY OF PANTHEISM. 4!

and one who shuns, can yield only to a sense of in-
most identity. The soul must gather the world and
itself under one conception. It must see the whole,
in other words, in God. Only the inseparableness of
finite from infinite can assure our life of an origin and
purport adequate to its nature. "Because God is,"
saith the soul, " therefore I am and shall be, in
God."

But to this assurance there is no other path
than that of moral consecration. The reconciliation,
the freedom, the unity, come only with absorption
of the conscious self into the truth of principles,
convictions, ideal aims; with finding, in the best
moments, somewhat of thought or feeling, which
" having been must ever be ; " with participation in
somewhat of divine nature and endless promise,
through an absolute love and service : so that it
shall n6 longer be the private self, but soul as soul,
which affirms within us, and once for all, w I am."

" O grace abundant, by which I presumed
To fix my sight upon the light eternal,
So that the seeing / consumed therein !

I saw that in its depth far down is lying
Bound up in love together in one volume
What through the universe in leaves is scattered ;

Substance, and accident, and their operations,
All interfused together in such wise
That what I speak of is one simple light" l

Such experience is limited to no age nor race.
Through such paths as these, in such form as was
possible within his special horizon, as I believe, ihe
Hindu saint arrived at his pantheistic faith. This is
the substance of the process, with whatever errors

1 Paradiso, XXIII (Longfellow's trans 1 .).

42 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.

mingled, by whatever superstitions marred. Through
such experiences not the saints and seers only, but
simply earnest people, through much imperfection,
have in every religion reached the certainty of infinite
good, under whatever name, as inseparable from
their own inward being.

These are truths not of the reason only, however
its ethical tne y ma } T accord with its higher processes ;
value. b u f- primarily of religious sentiment, and espe-
cially in its dealing with the facts of moral and phy$r
ical evil. For the root of all effective force against
these facts as actual is in holding the good to be the
one reality ; in finding fast anchorage in this ultimate,
essential fact which they are bound to subserve ; in
being sure that the whole process of life is somehow
contained within the infinite rectitude of God. The
Hindu dreamer, seeking to abolish evils by thinking
them away ; and the practical worker, in practical
races and times, more effectually battling them down
by action, alike assume that the real and essential
are to be found only in the good. Both seek to reach
true being by denying the claim of evil to be positive
and permanent ; to read the world with clearer insight
of its meaning ; to affirm for the actual its ultimate
significance in the ideal, in God.

We master the despair with which the prevalence
of evils would otherwise overwhelm us, by assuring
ourselves that evil is properly "good in the making,"
a condition of finite growth. This i$ but recognizing
the fact that our philosophy cannot possibly be sound
and healthful so long as it does not explain the finite
by the infinite, and interpret the life of man in its
wholeness as manifestation of God.

The best and- bra vest souls have always treated evils

PIETY OF PANTHEISM. 43

not as if their depressing side were the substance of
their meaning, but as involving issues of all-reconcil-
ing good. This mystic faith, that things seen but in
part are seen in illusion, and that they are seen but in
part till they are brought out into relations that accord
with ideal good, is as practical as it is speculative.
Science itself can offer no other interpretation than
this of the physical evil, which "final causes" and
w special interferences" only aggravate by their im-
plication of a divine intention. Its help is for the
sternest and bitterest lot. It is an instinct of cheerful
hope, where it has not yet become a clear perception
of- the reason. It inspires the will, where it finds no
hold in the understanding. Its secret assurance is
perhaps strongest in the simplest natures that are least
perplexed with casuistry or doubt. It is apt to find
clear and hopeful solutions of duty, whether men are
dealing with their own sense of wrong-doing or with
outward and social wrong.

We must act upon the testimony of the practical
consciousness \ hold common sense sacred ; ignore no
facts that life teaches ; neglect no function of the
understanding. But there is need of a philosophy in
which the ideal only is seen as real ; of hours when
the eye .is opened with vision of the divine alone.
Alas for common sense itself, if our ideals have taught
us no more than our understandings ; if banks and
ships and railroads do not sometimes dissolve as illu-
sions in the white light of noble dreams ; if even the
woes and sins of the world, which permit no rest to
the eyelids of faithful men, could never vanish before
their sight into the infinite depths of Divine Order ;
never melt, even for an hour of happier inspiration,
into the mystery of all-embracing good 1

44 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.

But is not this pure Fatalism, and destructive to the
Relation moral being ? To this question we must reply
to fate. t h at ^ w hii e destiny or fate in the sense of abso-
lute external compulsion would certainly be destructive
not only of moral responsibility, but of the personality
itself, yet religion or science without fate, in another
sense, is radically unsound. The word property means
"fixed, settled, irrevocably spoken ;" that is, it notes the
final truth and substance of things. To make it mean
only hostile sovereignty what is desperately bad, and
rendered so by a dead, mechanical, motiveless, yet
external power is to misapply it. Rather should
it signify what is impregnably certain ; and if good is
so, things being regarded in their inherent and ulti-
mate meaning, then good, not evil, is fate. Is not
truth itself, then, fate: truth, which is but another
name for the sanity and integrity of nature and law ;
truth, which is the health and sweetness of universal
order ; truth, which is therefore interchangeable, as to
its meaning, with good? Why should not the very
perfection of the moral and spiritual laws, whose be-
nignity it is no part of our liberty of thought or will
to alter or suppress, to make or to mar, stand to the
soul as its fate? Subject as we surely are to organi-
zation, heredity, conditions innumerable, shall we not
hold that the ideal go&d also, which we dream of beyond
these limitations, is our ultimate destiny ? We cannot
separate perfection and fate. Deity, whose sway is
not destiny, would not be venerable, nor even reliable.
It would be a purpose that did not round the universe,
a love that could not preserve it. Theism without
fate is a kind of atheism. And a self-denominated
"atheism," yet holding justice to be the true necessity,
or fate, is proper! v theism, though it refuse the name.

MORALITY OF PANTHEISM. 45

Sovereign right and good at the centre of soul and
nature, what is that but God?

So that destiny should not be defined as hostile
sovereignty or suppressive decree. But we Freedom
must go further. It cannot be pure outward reconciled
force, compelling man, even to his good.
Even worshipped as the dearest ideal, even cherished
as the power of God to set aside human defect and
guarantee the best, it would still abolish liberty, the
substance of the soul, if it were this. The impell-
ing forces therefore represent not foreign mastery, but
natural growth. God is the inmost life of the human,
not the external will that shapes it as the potter moulds
his clay. The fate that man must accept is but the
real law of his own nature, whereby it is in accord
with the universal life. It is thus not only consistent
with freedom, but coincident with it. While he resists
his own essential humanity, while he fails to express
or to seek in his individual purpose that harmony with
the universal order, his will can in no proper sense be
called free : it is enslaved to illusion and bound to
failure, and can reach nothing he really needs or can
intelligently love. Liberty itself can be found only in
knowing essential good to be the moving force of his
own spiritual being. This unity is the true self; in
this is personality ; therefore it is spontaneity, joy,
health, success. The fate that abolishes individual
caprice is the seal of freedom. Hence the inspiration
that comes in self-abandonment to an idea or a duty.
It identifies our fate with our freedom. All great
aspiration brings the sense of destiny, because it frees
from inward conflict, from the resistance of finite
caprice to infinite good ; and in this deep natural alli-
ance and harmony of forces the doubts and fears are
dissolved.

46 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.

Even in the less enlightened forms of personal
energy, we note that the sense of destiny comes in,
wherever there is unity of the motive powers, al-
lowing entire concentration of purpose. This is
the condition of valor, assurance, authority. The
vivacious Norse Sagas are full of fatalism, and
every storming Viking believed that his destiny was
written in his brain at birth. " Odin," says the Heim-
skringla, "knew beforehand the predestined fate of
men, or their not yet completed lot." "No soul can
die unless by permission of God," says Mohammed
in the Koran, for the encouragement of his followers.
r Every man's fate have we bound about his neck."
Better still, fate is the refuge and strength of Greek
Prometheus in that sublime martyrdom which he en-
dures as the penalty of his love for man. It is free-
dom and justice approaching in the future, to dethrone
the tyrannical gods of the past. And this divine
myth of the identity of fate with noble will is a normal
type of all ethical and spiritual inspiration.

The heroes and the saints are fatalists, and read
doom and triumph alike by one token : " for this
cause came I unto this hour." The Stoic schools,
both Greek and Roman, have proved that spiritual
pantheism, as the essential unity of the human and
divine, is reconcilable with the strongest conviction of
moral freedom ; l affirming in theory, and carrying
out into actual life, a degree of personal independence
and self-respect as remarkable as their confidence that
fate and providence are one. 2 The pantheistic fol-
lowers of the Bab, a modern Persian heretic, have

1 See Zeller's Stoics, pp. 170, 205, 337.

* Stobxus Eclog., I. 179 : Seneca dt Benef., IV. 7.

MORALITY OF PANTHEISM. 47

met incessant persecutions of the most barbarous kind
with astonishing courage and enthusiasm. 1

And why should the fact be otherwise? Immanent
deity, become intensely real for the consciousness,
should not only consecrate the whole life to duty, but
sH&uld give the powers that freedom of aspiration
which a universe so consecrated cannot but guarantee
to all its own natural and proper forces. "It is an
error to suppose," says Heine, "that pantheism leads
to indifference. On the contrary, the sense of his
own divineness will stir man to reveal the same, and
from that moment really grand actions and genuine
heroism will enter and glorify this world." 8

The life and death of the pantheistic Fichte were
full of noble service, both patriotic and humane.
Spinoza was the harbinger of free thought and scholar-
ship, the Columbus of ethics and theology as well as
of philosophy. The mystical " Friends of God " in the
Middle Ages were the fathers of modern philanthropy :
their "Theologia Germanica," Luther tells us, first
brought him inward light and peace. From the spirit-
ual closet of a pantheistic dream issued the Reforma-
tion. And every time the world is about to move a
fresh step forward, there is somewhere in seclusion
a mystical brooding sense of all-mastering and all-
absorbing deity, that holds in its bosom the germinant
religious and social revolution, and sends forth the
earliest witnesses and purest martyrs in its cause.

It must not, then, be supposed that Hindu Panthe-
ism and Fatalism were wholly irreconcilable Hindu Pan-
with moral earnestness, or even energy. I
cannot admit, for instance, that Mr. Banerjea, sense.

* See their history in De Gobmeau's Relig. de VAsie Centrale*

* De PAlttmaj&tt, I. p. 103.

48 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.

a Hindu convert to Christianity, has furnished con-
vincing proofs that the Vedanta, making the universe
and the soul identical with God, destroyed the idea of
duty. The same was said of Spinozism, by Jew and
Christian. Yet Spinoza himself, cast out of the syna-
gogue with curses as the sum of all wickedness, was,
in morality, piety, and spiritual earnestness, far in
advance of all his accusers, then or since. Moral
purpose in the Hindu was apt to take inward, rather
than outward, directions : this was incident to his
ethnic and climatic conditions. But how large a
degree of such purpose was involved in the effort *o
overcome self and the senses by his method! It was
contemplative indeed, not social. He watched the
flow of change as it swept through all forms, as one
watches in reverie the waves of a running stream,
or the drift of clouds across the sky ; and the thought
that he was himself but part of the current made him
feel himself profoundly a child of fate. And he was
fond of such sayings as these :

" Life, death, wealth, wisdom, works, are measured for one while
on his mother's bosom."

" Their fated allotments the very gods must bear. As pieces of
drift-wood meet in ocean, and remain together a little time only ;
as a traveller sleeps under a tree, and the next day departs, so
friends and possessions pass : there is no return." l

" When his time is come, the bird who can see his food a long
way off cannot see the snare."

" Birds are killed in the air ; fishes caught in the sea : what help
in choice of place ? "

" When I see the sun and moon in eclipse, and the wise man in
want, then I say, Fate is master." *

" Where are the princes of the earth with their chariots and
armies ? The earth that saw them perish still abides."

1 Ram&yAtta. Hitopadtsa, I. 44-46.

MORALITY OF PANTHEISM. 49

"Who sees not that this body passes away every moment?
Like a pot of clay in the water, it falls in pieces."

" So many dear ties as man may form, so many thorns of sorrow
are planted in his heart.' 1

M Foolish is he who would lay up riches in a world that is like
a bubble."

" As waters flow away and come not back, so the days and nights
of'mortal men."

" The society of the good, which brings us a little joy, is bound
to the yoke of pam ; for it ends in separation.

" And there is no healing for the heart that is wounded with this
sword." l

But the inference shows that the wisdom to draw
help from these necessities was not wanting.

" Therefore be thou resolved, and think no more of sorrowing :
here is the healing for thy wounds." *

*' Every thing on earth has its pleasure and its pain. Death
comes to all that is born, and new birth to all that dies. Grieve
not for what must be." 3

And what was this intense feeling of the transient
but equally intense suggestion of the eternal ? Did
not the lower fate point to a higher ? If change
sweeps over all, what makes the changes but a
changeless law ? 4 What makes a changeless law
but an eternal life ? Vicissitudes pass, God is. And
we are, in God. So, with all his moral energies,
the devotee of contemplation strove to reach perma-
nent peace, at the heart of a restless world.

The old lawgivers found no lack of moral sanction
here.

HUofi., IV. 67-77 * Ibid., 8a.

1 Ram&y&na; Bkag. Git&, &c.

4 " Anaxagoras, Epicurus, and Euripides agree that

' ' * nothing djes ;
But different changes give their various forms.' "

Plutarch, Scntim. of Nature.

SO RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.

" If one considers the whole universe as existing in the Supreme
Spirit, how can he give his soul to sin ? " l

" He who understands divine omnipresence can no more be led
captive by crime." 8

A Upanishad says :

" Such a one, who beholds the soul in the infinite soul alone,
him sin does not consume : he consumes sin ; becomes free from
doubt, and is pure." 3

The pantheistic bias of Hindu thought does not
Trust exclude a trustful and hopeful spirit. Through
most Indian poetry there flows a delicate sense
of divine benignity in the natural processes of life.
The Hitopade&i, the people's ancient Book of Precepts
and Fables, whose choice sentences are gathered out
of all the Hindu classics, says :

" Hear the secret of the wise. Be not anxious for subsistence :
it is provided by the Maker. When the child is born, the mother's
breasts flow with milk. He who hath clothed the birds with their
bright plumage will also feed thee."

" How should riches bring thee joy, which yield pain in the
getting, and pain in the passing away, and turn the head of the
winner with folly ? What trouble so great, in this life of many
cares, as the for ever unsatisfied desire ? That only which one no
longer seeks with anxious heart has he really attained"." 4

The Vedanta says :

" As birds repair to a tree to dwell therein, so all this universe
to the Supreme One." 6

" He, the All-wise Preserver, dispenses the objects of our desire.
To know Him is to be free : there is no end of misery but through
this knowledge of God. To him whose trust is in God reveal
themselves the mysteries." 6

Says the Divine One in the Git :

* Mann, XII. 118. Ibid., VI. 74; so Spinoza.

Brihatt, IV. iv. 23. From Miiller's version, I. 170-179.

Prasna, IV. 7. tivet&favatarai VI. 13-23.

MORALITY OF PANTHEISM. 51

w I am the Preserver who watches in all directions. Be not
alarmed at having seen me in the terrible shape of all-destroying
Time. Hasten to look, free from fear, on my human and friendly
form."

Another text, of frequent recurrence in the philo-
sophical and ethical books, makes mortality itself
the ground of spiritual faith :

" From what root springs man, when felled by death ? Say not,
* like a tree, he springs from seed.' If the tree be destroyed with its
root, it grows not again. If then man be cut down by death, from
what root shall he spring to life again ? It is God, the highest aim
of one who abideth in and knoweth Him." 2

In the Ramayana, Bharata is adjured by the sages
not to mourn too bitterly for his dead father :

" O wise Bharata ! grieve not for the departed. He is no longer
an object for grief, and too many tears may bring him down from
the heaven to which he has gone." 3

And Arjuna, permitted to ascend, though living, to
the heaven of the just,

" Follows the path unknown to mortals, where no golden sun
nor silver moon divides the time, but the mighty hosts of men
shine with the splendor of their own virtue, in a light which we
afar off think to be the tremulous fires of stars.

" There sees he the good kings, the brave and faithful men who
were blessed with glorious deaths, and holy prophets, and pure
women in chariots that wing the heavenly spaces." 4

In the absence of historical and biographical facts,
we are obliged to infer the ethical ideal and Ethical
attainment which Hindu civilization permitted, illustrations -
from the prevailing maxims and proverbs ; the wisdom
that has been circulating for ages, in sentence and in
song, among the masses of this immense empire.

1 Bhag. G., ch. xi. * BnJiad, III. ix. a8.

* Rim&V., B II. * Mahabh., III.

52 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.

Here, for example, is manly diet, from the Hitopa-
The Hito- desa, for the believer in fate :

padesa.

" Twofold is the life we live in : fate and will together run :
Two wheels bear the chariot onward : will it move on only one ? "

" Nay, but faint not, idly sighing, ' destiny is mightiest. 1
Sesamum holds oil in plenty ; but it yieldeth none unprest." l

" Fortune comes of herself to the lionlike man who acts. It is
the abject who say, 'All must come from fate.' Forget fate, and be
brave. If thou failest, having put forth all thy force, the blame is
not thine.

" The deeds done in a former life are what is called fate. There-
fore let one exert himself with unwearied energy in the present.

" As the potter shapes the clay at his will, so a man shapes bis
own action.

" Though he see his desired good close at hand, fate will not
bestow it on him : it waits the manly deed.

" A work prospers through endeavors, not through vows : the
fawn runs not into the mouth of a sleeping lion." 8

" Take good and ill as they come ; for fortune turneth like a
wheel.

" Frogs to the marsh, birds to the lake, so all good to the man
who strives for it : as one who seeks him, so hastes it to the hero
who dallies not, is virtuous, grateful, and a faithful friend." 3

" By his own doings one rises or falls, as one man digs a well
and another throws up a wall." 4

" Seek not the wild ; sad heart ! Thy passions haunt it.
Play hermit iu thy house, with will undaunted.
A governed heart, thinking no thought but good,
Makes crowded houses holy solitude."

1 Hitopad. Introd) 29, 31. The veises are from Arnold's pleasant abridgment of this
old Book of Good Counsels (Lend. 1861), and are literal translations. The prose pas-
sages are selected from Jtfit//fr"s German version (1844) I have also carefully compared
with this the French version of Lancereetu (1855) and the English by Sir William Jones*
This last is hardly trustworthy, and Miiiler thinks it cannot have received the author's
entire elaboration. Such liberties are taken by the native copyists of the Hitopadesa,
that, in Mutter's opinion, no true edition is possible, and each translator must select the
special text he will follow. This* fact helps to explain the very marked difference in
these \ ergons.

MORALITY OF PANTHEISM. S3

"Thine own self, Bh^rata, is the holy stream, whose shrine is
virtue, whose water is truth, whose bank is character, whose waves
are jtympathy. There bathe, O Son of Pandu ! Thy inward life
is not by water made pure." l

"Better be silent than speak ill; better give up life than love
harsh words ; better beggar's fare than luxury at another's board. 71 *

" Only that life is worth living which is free. If they live who
depend on others, who are dead ? " *

" He has all good things whose soul is content : the whole earth
is spread with leather, for him whose own feet are well shod."

" He has read and heard and acquired all things, who turns his
back on hope, and expects nothing." 4

" Do not rage, like a cloud, with empty thunder : the noble man
does not let the good or ill that foes have done him be seen." 5

" What is a brave man's fatherland, and what a foreign country ?
Wherever he goes, his strength makes that land his own." 8

" A bad man is like an earthen pot, easy to break and hard to
mend. A good man is like a golden vase, hard to break and easy
to mend." 7

" Disposition is hard to overcome. If you make a dog a king,
will he not still gnaw leather ?" 8

"A gem may be trodden under foot, and glass be put on the
head : yet the glass is only glass, and the gem is still a gem."

" How shall teaching help him who is without understanding ?
Can a mirror help the blind to see ? " 10

"It is to no purpose that the bad man says, I have read the
Vedas and the Laws. His character rules him, as it is the property
to milk to be sweet." "

" Wise men seek not things unattainable : grieve not over the
lost, and stand firm in time of trouble." 1f

" In the poisoned tree of life grow two sweet fruits, the enjoy-
ment of the nectar of poetry and the society of noble men." I3

" Integrity, self-sacrifice, valor, steadfastness through all changes,
sympathy, loyalty, and truth are the virtues of a friend." M

* Hitopadcs'a, IV. 83, 86 From the Mah&bh. * Ibid., I 129 * Ibid., II. at.

* Ibid., I. 135, 137- ' Ibid., IV. 91. Ibid., I. 96.
1 Ibid., I. 86. Ibid., III. 58. Ibid., II. 67.

Ibid., III. 117. Ibid., I. 15. M Ibid., I. 161.

w Ibid., L MS- " Ibid., I. 8q.

54 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.

" By whom is this jewel created, this word of two syllables
(Mitram, friend), wherein we pour the joy of love, which guards us
from sorrow and foes and fear ? A friend who gladdens the heart,
sharing one's pleasure and pain, is hard to find. Friends in pros-
perity, self-seekers, abound ; but misfortune is their touchstone."

" Be hospitable to thine enemy when he comes to thy door : the
tree withdraws not its shade even from the wood-cutter.

" Good men are compassionate to the lowest beings. The moon
refuses not its light to the hut of the Chandala.

" A <?uest who departs from a house disappointed, leaves his
own sins behind him, and carries away the virtue of its owner.

" Even a low-born man who comes to a Brahman's house must
be honored : the stranger is on the same footing with the gods." f

" He alone is to be praised, he is blest, from whom the weak and
suppliant go not away with hopes destroyed." 3

" The friendship of noble persons endures to the end of life ;
their anger is quickly appeased ; their liberality is without self-
interest." 4

" Only the foolish ask, ' Is this one of us or an outside person ?'
To the noble the whole world is a family." 6

"One should spare his neighbor, thinking of the pain one feels
when he sees that he must die."

" O sacred earth ! why dost thou endure the false man, who re-
turns noble and trusting kindness with evil treatment?" 6

**This life, which is like a wave trembling in the wind, is in a
right cause to be sacrificed for the good of others." 7

" Let the wise man give up his goods for the sake of his neigh-
bor ; for the sake of the good let him even give his life." 8

"As life is dear to thee, so is it to other creatures: the good
have mercy on all, as on themselves.

" He who regards another's wife as his mother, his wealth as vain,
and all creatures as himself, is wise.

'* Give to the poor, O son of Kunti ! not to the rich. Medicine is
for the sick, not for those that are well.

u The gift, bestowed with right purpose, at right' time and place,
on one who cannot repay it, is to be called a real gift" 9

. 303, 204. ' Ibid., I. 53-S7* * Ibid I. 183.

Ibid., I 180. Ibid., I. 64. Ibid., I. 61, 73.

Ibid . III. 140. Ibid . I. 38. * Ibid M I. 10-14.

MORALITY OF PANTHEISM. 55

" Between virtues and the body there is infinite difference : the
body perishes in a moment, virtues endure while the world lasts." l

" The wise will follow duty, as if death were already grasping his
hair."*

The following are from the Panchatantra, a still

older coljection of tales and sentences, whose i> ancha .

relation to the Hitopades'a is not yet very tdntra -
understood :

" In all actions, to be like one's self is the praise of the wise :
this makes smooth the right path, so full of hindrance." 3

u When the just falls, it is like a ball of feathers, but the wicked
falls like a clod." 4

"A noble person never fails in protecting others, even in his
extreme need ; as the pearl loses not its whiteness, though it have
passed through the flames." &

" The storm blows down the strongest tree, if it stands alone ;
but not the well-rooted trees that stand together." 6

"He who is kind to those that are kind to him does nothing
great. To be good to the offender is what the wise call good." 7

"A good prince is eye to the blind, friend to the friendless,
father and mother of all who do well." 8

" Where he is honored who is unworthy of honor, and he de-
pised who deserves respect, there come three things, famine.
pestilence, and war." 9

The fact that these popular " Books of Wisdom " are
mainly of Buddhist origin 10 does not weaken their
testimony to the union of practical morality with pan-
theistic sentiment. The Hindu masses who have
rejected Buddhism as a system of negations cherish
these manly maxims as the true philosophy of life.
They are heard on the lips of the poorest people, and
circulate freely through city and village. As in the

43- * Ibid., Introd > 3.

/><*<:&*/. (Benfey's German transl.) B. III. Ibid., II.

Ibid. IV. Ibid., III. Ibid., IV. ix.

Ibid., I. xii. Ibid., III. x.

* See Benfey, Einleitung g. Panchatantra.

56 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.

gnomic literature of other races, so here, the highei
ethics are combined with maxims of prudential and
even of selfish quality, though these last are very
rare. 1 Plaints of poverty, and policies that secure
success are quaintly mixed with admonitions on the
brevity of life and the vanity of riches. And, as with
Buddhist teaching generally, the inculcation of good
will sometimes runs out into extravagant forms of self-
sacrifice. These fables are in fact an honest picture
of human life, and proverbs are not wanting which
answer to every human quality represented therein.
That those of sense and shrewdness should abound
is but another proof that pantheism does not exclude
practical capacities and aims.

Bhartrihari, a very ancient gnomic poet, whose
" sentences " on human life and conduct areVery popu-
lar in India, begins with the praise of love and beauty,
and ends with the praise of devotion :

" Wisdom is a treasure thieves cannot steal. It grows by spend-
ing, and it cannot pass away. The wise are the rich ; and ye, O
princes ! will never become their equals."

" Without the wisdom that burns away our sins, the Vedas are
nothing but men's trading wares."

" Virtue has no need of penances, nor a pure heart of washing
in the Ganges, nor a true man of human protection, nor magna-
nimity of any ornament, nor~the wise of any treasure but wisdom."

" Though thy efforts fail, be steadfast, and thou shalt be exalted.
The torch thrown on the ground goes not out."

" He who has given himself to virtue, and felt the joy of obedi-
ence to duty, will give up life, but not his purpose."

"If the thistle has no leaves, is the spring to be blamed ; or the
sun, if bats fly not by day ; or the cloud, if no drop of rain fall into

1 The wont of these in the Hitopadesa are suggested by the good mouse (B. I.)
purely for the purpose of testing the heroic professions of the king of the doves, who begs
him to gnaw his subjects out of the net before himself, thus preferring their safety to hit
own. The selfish maxims are promptly rejected, and answered by others of the opposha
quality : whereat the mouse praises this wisdom of self-sacrifice as worthy of a king.

MORALITY OF PANTHEISM. 57

the cuckoo's beak ? So blame not fate : not so wilt thou change its
path."

" Go not aside from wisdom : then shall fire become as water, and
the sea as a well ; Meru shall be as a hillock, and the lion as a
gazelle ; poison shall be sweet as nectar, and serpents a crown of
flowers."

"As shadows in the morning is friendship with the wicked:
hour by hour it wanes. But friendship with the good grows like
the shadows of eve, till life's sun shall have set."

" The drop of rain falls on glowing iron, and is no more. It falls
on a flower, and shines like a pearl. It sinks into a shell at the
happy hour, and becomes the pearl itself. Such the difference be-
tween kinds of friendship among men."

* 4 To do good in secret, to conceal one's good act, to help the
poor when he comes, to be moderate in prosperity, always to speak
kindly, is the path of wisdom." '

I add a few selections of similar ethical purport
from other, popular Hindu writings:

" In thy passage over this earth, where the paths are now low,
now high, and the true way seldom distinguished, thy steps must
needs be unequal ; but fidelity to thyself will bear thee right on-
ward." *

" Let thy motive lie in the act, not in the reward. Having sub-
dued thy passions, do thy own work, unconcerned for the result.
Then shalt thou stand untainted in the world, as the lotus-leaf lies
on the waters unwet." 3

The Mahabharata says of Arjuna that

" Neither lust nor fear nor love could tempt him to transgress
his duty, or to do evil : M

ancf RAma in the Ramjiyana that

"As birds are made to fly and rivers to run, so the soul to
follow duly. 1 '

" As the fragrance of a blossoming tree spreads far, so the fra-
grance of a pure action. 1 ' 4

1 Bkartr. (Von Bohlen's Latin vers ) I. 13; III. 72; I. 45, 75; H. 100; I. 89,
t*. <* $7-

* SakuntolA. * Bhigtivad-GitA. Mahanan\yna l//*. t II.

f8 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.

"As the stars disappear, so fades the memory of a kindness out
of an evil heart." l

** Our senses are like lattices, at which the deities keep watch.
And if the soul unconsciously leaves them open to the poisonous
air of temptation, sincere prayer to these heavenly guardians will
save the precious light."

" How can he who loves all men he torn by affliction ? Or he
who hates be free from terror ? or the voluptuary from misery ?
How can he fail who acts wisely? How can he be happy who mur-
murs at 1'rovidencc ? Who can be glorious without virtue ? who
truly dishonored without blame ? And how without justice shall
the kingdom stand?" 2

" He who lives pure in thought, free from malice, contented,
leading a holy life, feeling tenderness for all creatures, speaking
wisely and kindly, humble and sincere, has Vasudeva (Vishnu) ever
in his heart. The Eternal makes not his abode within the heart of
that man who covets another's wealth ; who injures living creatures J
who speaks harshness or untruth ; who is proud of his iniquity ;
whose mind is evil." 3

" Men are ever seeking, never attaining, bliss. They die thirst;
ing. The whole world is suffering under triple affliction. Why
should I hate beings who are objects for compassion ? why cherisfc
malignity towards those who are more prosperous than mysejf ? ,!)|
should rather sympathize with their happiness. For to suj&press
unkind feelings is itself a reward." 4

" It is the duty of the good man, even in the moment of his de-
struction, not only to forgive, but to seek to bless his destroyer, even
as the sandal-tree sheds perfume on the axe that fells it." *

" Heaven's gate opens to the good without a gift : the gate shut
fast to the wicked, though he bring hundred-fold offerings.

**Put a thousand horses*in the scale, yet shall virtue be the
heavier weight.

" The sweet scent of flowers is lost on the breeze, but the fra-
grance of virtue endures for ever.

" Whatever men do of good or evil, they shall reap the fruit in
due season.

" The foolish, like a child, knows not if things grow better or
worse ; and while, drawn by the roses, he lets the orchard go, he
will mourn over the fading flower, and lose the golden fruit" *

Hindu Pliy (Wi.son). Kam&y&na. Vishnu Pur&na, III. vii.

PIETY OF PANTHEISM. 59

And so we may judge whether Manu is not justified
in claiming what he does for the religion of his race.
w Of all duties the first is to know the Supreme. It is
the most exalted science, and assures immortal life.
For in the knowledge and adoration of God, which
the Veda teaches, all rules of good conduct are com-
prised." "Wisdom," says the Hitopadesa, "is the
highest good of man ; for it cannot be sold nor taken
from him, nor can it ever die. He who hath it not,
the destroyer of doubt, the mirror of the unseen, the
eye of all, is blind." 1

The belief that the substance of life is one and
divine has its forms in all ages, recognitions, ^ . .

& The mtui-

more or less enlightened, of a constant spir- tionofhfe
itual fact ; to which thought is again and again ab one '
remanded, under broader and clearer aspects, as man
advances to new forms of culture. And this better
knowledge comes mainly from doing justice to the
balancing fact of difference, or individuality.

In the Hindu mystic, a child of religious instinct
and dream, the unity of life was an exclusive con-
sciousness, an all-absorbing wonder and delight.
For the religious sentiment of itself is not analytic,
"but integrative ; absorbed in what it loves, it sees not
parts, but wholes ; it dissolves antagonisms and dis-
tinctions, just as it does doubts or fears, in its own
.fervent heat. While the understanding is unde-
veloped, this mystic sense of oneness is of course
blind to the capabilities of life, and the meaning of
its relations. As in Brahmanism, it even helps to
eternize social wrongs ; either ignoring them as illu-
sion, or else accepting them as elements of a divine
order, and reconciling them in its all-dissolving dream.

., lntrod. % 4, 9.

6O RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.

Yet this dream is divination also of a central truth,
whose practical and social meaning grows with prog-
ress, and appears in the latest science and faith.

For these are really the goal involved in that mystic
point of departure, that intuitive ideal of the unity of
life. The course of history justifies and reaffirms it
on a broader plane, having at last developed its human
values. We can here but sketch this process.

In the Oriental philosophies, unity is for the most
its historical P art a religious abstraction, an ideal of con-
evoiution. templation. But with Greek and Roman the
understanding comes to its rights. The individual
asserts his validity. The human and finite are
marked off, as against the infinite, and studied, in and
for themselves. And in this polarity or antagonism
come liberty and progress. Man recognizes his own
regulated powers to be the path to truth, beauty, goc
It is no longer the unlimited, but limit, that is diviti
What Kapila and his Sankhya reaction on Vedarnt
showed in germ thus reaches maturer expre
under more favoring skies, in more energetic rfl
Here all is relation, contrast, difference.

With the Greek comes the triumph of dialectics,
the clear analysis of ideas and principles, the kefeest
sense of individual purpose. With the Greek
duality of matter and mind ; also of matter and <Jj
ber. Pythagoras determines the harmonious retattions
of finite things. Xenophanes, who pronounced $fcnity
to be the ultimate fact, as distinctly as the Vedafttists?
and who recognized the illusion of the phenomenal
world as fully, yet not the less insisted that all visible
things should be studied, and had his own natural
history of their origin and development. So the
Ionian cities first thoroughly distinguished politics

PIETY OF PANTHEISM. 6l

from theocracy ; and Greek life emancipated govern-
ment, making it a separate independent science. And
the first great step was taken towards freeing men
from religious bondage when Xenophanes pointed out
the fact that they "made their own gods.

" The gods have not given every thing to man. It is man who
has ameliorated his own destiny."

The Prometheus of -^schylus, resisting Jove for the
sake of mankind, and predicting his downfall at the
hands of the son of a mortal woman, illustrates the
same protest of the human, against an overwhelming
sense of infinity. Taine has admirably pointed out
this quality of the Greek mind. "The Greeks have
no sentiment of this infinite universe, in which a
generation of people is but an atom in time and place.
Eternity does not set up before them its pyramid of
myriads of ages. The universal escapes them, or at
least half occupies them, or remains in the background
in their religion." l In Rome, on the other hand, the
universal was everywhere pursued, yet always in con-
crete and human forms, as political organization,
as jurisprudence, as world-wide sway.

Even in Greece and Rome, however, we still find
the religious sentiment to be, on the whole, inclusive
of all human spheres and functions. It gives man
and nature their meaning for art, science, philosophy,
domestic, social, municipal life ; so that there is still
a sense in which life might make the impression of a
divine unity. But the process advances.

Aristotle has defined ; analyzing man and nature as
he could. Bacon goes further ; plots the sciences on
a map, and marks the regions yet to be filled. Men
botanize, dissect, unroll the earth's pages, loose the

1 Art in Greece, p. 38.

62 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.

bands of Oridn, and resolve the galaxy into myriads
of worlds. It is telescope and calculus, instruments of
analysis, that are divine. We learn the mechanics
of religion, politics, commerce, art. Men search out
the cunning workmanship of the universe. They are
all eye lo detect how ?t was contrived by a Being who
plans, devises, manipulates, constructs like themselves.
In this inspection of definite processes the immanence
of the infinite gradually recedes from thought, and
religion enters the phase of a more or less external
deism, oscillating between the Paleys and Voltaires ;
knowing God only as a manipulator of materials
provided for him from without, just as one knows an
architect by the style of his house, or a watch-
maker by his watch. It is not strange that analytic
science, elated by its discoveries in this realm of de-
finable relations and palpable mechanism, and in-
attentive to the infinite substance that must condition
all phenomena, should concentrate its homage at last
on the processes by which it achieves its triumph.
Analysis, in fact, by its own function of taking the
world to pieces, instead of receiving the impression
of its unity and integrity, is reduced to holding this
critical process as the essential thing, the vital fact of
the universe. Mini and nature become in its theory
simply objective material for testing and reducing,
mere hylic mass for manipulation by its forces ;
whether to afford them discipline, or to give scope to
their energies, or to reflect their praise.

This merely analytic process is quite incompetent to
reveal truth in the form of life. To dissect its objects,
it must destroy them. It slays that beautiful unity of
functions and relations, in which life is mysteriously
shrined. In the heap of dead fibres and organs, on

PIETY OF PANTHEISM. 63

which it has operated, and which it displays in their
mere outward mechanism, what resemblance is there
to the living, breathing, inspired body? What resem-
blance to the former life can you get by putting them
together again? Phosphorus in the growing grain is
food for human brains : extract this phosphorus by
chemical process, and it is poison. Being must be
seen in its natural and vital relations, in its integrity^
or it is not seen at all. Under the power of mere
analysis, science would become pure autopsy, and
nature have no informing soul.

The genius of scientific and practical races has
therefore not been without its tendencies to transform
the living universe which for the contemplative spirit
is thrilling with a mystic divine pulsation, and which
Plato even called a living creature into a well-devised
-machine. Their vast capacities, under the lead of
analysis, have developed its definable uses, rather
than felt the mystery of its life. As one after
another they have unfolded its flowing activities, its
unfathomed forces, they have seemed to claim these
by right of creation quite as much as by that of dis-
covery ; to throw off the Infinite as a separable ele-
ment, and then refuse it all place in the triumph of the
very powers which it conditions and supplies ; writing
on each freshly won field, " God is not here, but, if
anywhere^ behind and beyond ; " insisting all the
time, observe, that the idea of God as a distinct exter-
nal power is the only idea of God, being that which
analysis must report. Their physical science goes
further still, and in its search for physical origins of
life has often quite overlooked the substance for the
processes of nature, and mistaken the mechanism of
life for its explanation and cause.

64 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.

But science cannot penetrate far on her divine path
Through without discerningr that it ts divine. Science

mature sci- . .

encc. has no commission to take the mystery out of
nature, to exorcise from its laws the life that preserves
them from being fathomed by progressive thought,
or marred by imperfect will. So much is clearly dis-
cerned by the broadest scientific minds of the day.

Science solves no problem but by recognizing
another and more interior, disclosed by the solution
itself, as a flower within its opening sheath. The
freest explorers of nature not only see most clearly the
unity of the universe, tracing its laws through their
relations to each other and to the whole, but also the
jiifinitude of these relations^ inexhaustible for everj
atomic fact. Not less is the unity of life revealed 1$
the wonderful gradations of its forms ; in the compile*;
hension of all lower stages within all higher ones;
and in endless subtle affinities, transitions, transforma-
tions, that forbid absolute lines of separation betwetn
these stages of ascent. And the whole drift of mod-
ern science is towards the recognition of what has
been described by one of its ablest exponents as w one
harmonious action, underlying the whole of nature,
organic and inorganic, cosmical, physical, chemical,
terrestrial, vital, and social." 1

Yet this unity is, it must also be observed, of a
purely transcendental kind. It is not explicable, or
even expressible, by the processes of science, which
can but trace the order of phenomena, and must
therefore confess herein the immanence of the infinite
throughout its fields of research. Science, then, must
inevitably bring fresh tributes to mystic contempla-
tion, and reconcile liberty and knowledge with that

1 Mivart, Genesis qfSfecieti p. 339,

PIETY OF PANTHEISM. 65

old eternal longing of the soul for the unfathomable
One.

Of this whole process, miracle is of course the in-
tolerable negation. If it were possible for the Throu h ^
notion that the course of natural law can bejectionof
violated or suspended to hold its ground, it mlrac1es>
would utterly abolish the power of science to reveal
immanent deity, and even the idea of deity as infinite
intelligence. Logically, there could be no science,
and no religion ; only observations of phenomena that
point to no universal or reliable basis of belief. How
could these observations really reveal One who may
contradict them to-morrow? But such contempt of
nature and distrust of its orderly laws is not properly
Aryan. With races of this stock science hastens to
fulfil its religious function. The Semitic mind also
has learned to greet this form of revelation as freely
as the Ar} r an.

Oriental faith in miracles knew no bounds. But
miracle was as universal in the East as law with us, and
so that stupendous' mythology had meaning for the re-
ligious sentiment. There was no vain distinction made
between miraculous and natural revelation ; but the
whole actual or possible of nature and life was, as it
were, insphered in deity. In a child's wonder at all
he sees, special wonder-working counts for no more
than plain nature.

The scientific conception of invariable law comes,
then, not to destroy this divine dream that the The mission
universe is in God, so dear to contemplative of 8cience -
minds in every age, but to interpret and fulfil it.
Man has been learning to reconcile freedom, even
in deity, with orderly and unchanging ways, and to
clear his own ideal of perfection from every element

66 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.

of exclusiveness or divided power. He has been
learning that the closest study of mind and nature
does not free him from the conviction that infinite in-
telligence is the inmost ground of finite, but confirms
it by all the certainties of law. The mystic faith
which, while yet an infantile instinct, sang of Brahma,
as the All, and of the world of forms as his divine
play, has thus permanent meaning for man ; and all
its phases in history have been pointing beyond them-
selves to a maturity which only science could bring.
Clothed in new knowledge as in new names ; inter-
preted by things natural and practical, and giving
these a sublime reach of relation and promise ; set to
largest social uses, and inspiring them with universal-
ity, identifying religion with the free growth of every
human faculty, with labor and with life, and so eman-
cipating it from dependence on mediator or miracle,
this mystic faith in the oneness of God and man
reappears at last as a freedom and intelligence, which
neither distinctive Brahmanism, Judaism, nor Chris-
tianity could express.

I perceive no power either in the friends or foes of
s intuai re sc ^ ence to resolve it into spiritual negation. It
lationsof can neither become the slave of superstition
nor the bat to sentiment and ideal vision. It
refuses to be ruled by the hostile supernaturalist, who
imagines that a development theory must involve
atheism. It must no less distinctly decline the pro-
posal of the student of nature to banish, in the name
of law itself, " what we call spirit and spontaneity,"
from human thought. 1

For a law, physical or psychological, is no mere
automatic machinery. It is a mode of action^ so

1 Huxley on Physical Basis of Lift.

PIETY OF PANTHEISM. 67

orderly, so harmoniously related to other laws, so
expressive of what we most reverence in thought,
that to divorce it from hiind would be to refuse belief
in the ideal forms of those attributes which most
dignify mind; those highest functions to which in-
telligence, as we find it in ourselves, clearly points
upward. Instead of being apart from mind, the con-
stancy of natural law implies an inseparable mental
force, none the less real because without the limita-
tions which human intelligence involves. Its univer-
sality does not make it the less, but the more divine.
A man may make wheels, springs, and levers his
agents, and withdraw ; for inertia and weight do not
depend on his fingers, and the machine will get on for
a while without his aid. But deity cannot leave the
laws of the universe to work alone, since they are sim-
ply forms of divine energy ; the activity of the law
being nothing else than the instant energy of imma-
nent mind. That this energy transcends all we ex-
perience as personal consciousness does not alter the
fact that it is a form of mind.

What serves it to remand this wisdom and power
to a distinct sphere, and lay it quietly aside as w The
Unknowable " ? How indeed can that be unknowable
of which we know that it exists, and of which, if we
are to allow ourselves competent to science in any
form", the very meaning for us is constant self-mani-
festation in phenomena?

The mind and heart of man still fail not to enter-
tain the never solved, yet never wholly unanswered
questions which a secret intuitive assurance will not
suffer him to dismiss.

What is this instant intelligence whereby the uni-
verse becomes unity and order and growth ? What

68 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.

harmonizes nature and man ? What brings the atoms
together each moment to form the coherent globe, and
yet holds them at the same moment apart, so that two
shall never touch ? What lifts each separate billow
of the sea, yet binds it to obey the tidal swell ?

Discussion as to which is the one great force in
material atoms, attraction or self-repulsion ; or whether
all things come to pass through action and reaction
of the two, makes no difference to our questions,
which go deeper.

What is that in conscience which is so at one with
gravitation and affinity and light ? What mysterious
sway makes recollection and hope, past and future,
alike our servants ? What directs the remedial retri-
butions, silent and sure, to bring us back to nature
and* right ?

What is that most minute attention which guards
the pulsations of the heart ; keeps thought, affection,
will, coherent and untroubled; buoying up individual
existence on the unfathomed sea? And what makes
the deep that brought us hither, and into which we
return, to be in all its mystery a home into whose care
we entrust what is dearest to us with such wondrous
calmness?

Questions these as old as mind and heart, earlier
than the study of natural laws, and not set aside there-
by. And what of the answer ? Was it only because
he had so little knowledge of the definite processes,
the delicate distinctions which science reveals, that the
Hindu, pondering over these mysteries, solved all
questions by pronouncing the one word Adhydtma^
Over-soul ? Was it his ignorance that spirit and
spontaneity must be dismissed, upon the discovery of
law, that prompted the answer, "Mind is all" ? Yet

PIETY OF PANTHEISM. 69

it would appear that our science of invariable har-
monious law itself can give no other answer ; and
we must still demand what invisible life is plying at
this seamless warp and woof of "evolution," "natural
selection," "metamorphosis." Is it we individually, we
collectively, who do it, we who can neither make nor
mar one of these laws, and who advance only by
accepting and rightly using them according to laws
of reason and love ? Is it, as some dream, spirits
wiser than we, a hierarchy of diviner insights and
powers ? We gain not a step by such ascent, to-
wards reaching the constitutive force of law. Spirits
themselves are not less truly expressions of this force
in their mental energies, for being also free, produc-
tive, personal. Their spontaneity itself rests on this
mystery of orderly law, like the movements of atoms
and of suns. Morality is personal liberty ; but it is no
less the movement of immutable law, transcending
the individual, while it lifts him into the freedom and
strength which belong to universal truth.

We call the intelligence, of which universal law is
the movement, God. But in reality we have no name
for it, because no name can cover the whole. Law,
Life, Love, Unity, Fatherhood, Brotherhood, this re-
ligion, that religion, all are waves of the One Divine
Sea.

None of these syllables have quite expressed the
truth that is found only in the whole. They yield but
fragments of a sense that was never sounded, of a
growth that cannot end.

The Vedantic worship of One Life in all was
darkened by idolatry of tradition and of caste. Escape from
Yet it should be noted that caste and tradition Citations.
were held to be steps only ^ to higher unity of being

7O RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.

which should dissolve them away. After all, the rela-
tions of the devotee with his ideal of the Supreme
were felt to be personal and direct : his own sacrifice,
his own disciplines, not another's, were relied on to
make his illusions vanish and reality appear.

All special religions have, in like manner, presented
obstacles of their own to that free recognition of the
infinite which they sought. Especially is this true
of their pretensions to supernatural revelation, which
science is so thoroughly setting aside in the name of
law. In the lower stages of culture, supernaturalism
is indeed a reaching forth to find God : it means that
there is at least a divineness in things exceptional or
wonderful, for those who have not yet learned what
sacredness there is in things familiar and near. It is,
primarily then, a form of spiritual progress, and satis-
fies real needs. But, when prolonged into scientific ages
and enlightened races, claims of this kind
teach that God is not in man, in nature, in j
but out of man, against nature, behind history; en-
tering the world once on a time, with what men
are expected to receive as truer than truth, more
legislative than law, more loving than love. They
teack that spirit is to be held the more divine
for secluding itself* in the prescriptive claim of one
or of a few. They teach that the infinite is the
better recognized for confining its manifestation to a
class, an epoch, an individual life. All this limita-
tion of universal forces, this prescription of divine
paths, this foreclosure of inspiration, the liberty of
our day holds to be no better than sarcophagus or
shroud. It will choose rather that pantheism of
the Spirit that finds God instant and informing in all
history, experience, law, and work. What Eastern

PIETY OF PANTHEISM. 7 I

contemplation could foreshadow, Western vigor and
grasp of things will have to deliver out of its limita-
tions, old and new, by bringing the unities of races
and sciences and faiths, to serve, now that their day
too has come, this eternal desire of the soul.

Never can man, with whatsoever motive, even in
theory separate himself from God. Theology has
vainly attempted it, under promptings of fear and
self-contempt. Even the noble" sentiment of humility
has been pressed by a sense of imperfection and in-
ward evil, to the point of imagining a gulf positively
separating the divine from the human. It has thus
attempted what would divide deity itself, and abolish
at once both human and divine. This also was in
vain.

It is the virtue of modern culture, intellectual* and
moral, that it educates man in self-respect; so that
he shall no longer think himself bound to deny the
validity of his own nature, in order to affirm the reality
of the divine. It does not hesitate to assure him that
it is only where he finds his own real being that he is
finding God.

V.

INCARNATION.

INCARNATION.

literal meaning of Incarnation is that deity
assumes a material body, in order to be Univereality
clearly recognized as present in the actual of the idea -
world. Substantially, the belief implies a profounder
truth, which its various forms imperfectly express ;
that Life is in its inmost sense one with God. It is
essential to the religious sentiment, and has as many
forms as there are religions in the world. God must
be not abstraction, but life. Somehow the world must
manifest the Highest Spirit. Philosophy affirms that it
must be so, by the very nature of being, notwithstand-
ing the conditions of relativity and imperfect vision
under which we must behold this manifestation. The
heart pleads that it is surely so, because God loves
us, and nothing will satisfy this love but to take our
nature, that he may be among us as a friend. The
disciples of 'every positive religion insist that it has
been so, in this or that exalted personage who has
appeared, to found a faith. The -devout thinker says :
It is so, now and always; for what is God but the
life of the universe, as of the soul ?

No race of men, in other words, is satisfied to think
of the world as separate from ideal good. And every
religion devises some special way of bringing the one
into the other, even though it may overlook or deny

76 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.

some completer way ; because all instinctively divine
that the two are essentially one. Of course the form
chosen is noble or otherwise, according to the charac-
ter of the civilization ; but the endeavor is not any-
where wanting. Even where little inspiration or faith
is left, religions throw themselves back upon past
ideals, which are believed to have exhausted the
sources of truth. And this idolatry becomes the more
anxious and jealous, the feebler the faith in revelation
through living consciousness and present opportunity.
The manifold superstition that hastens to call itself
" inspirational " proves at least the need of being some-
how assured of a divine presence. Lacking the
heavenly form, men will grub within the earth for sub-
stitutes. Nor is there any creature so insignificant,
down to beetle and worm, but it has been some-
where supposed to guest a god. And if science
delights to discover the forces of gravitation and re-
pulsion in every atom, and the mysterious dynamics
of life in every organic molecule, may not the relig-
ious instinct well have sought to greet the divinity in
every form of being from the loftiest to the least?

The highest type of the idea is of course that of
incarnation incarnation in Man ; and this also is not ex-
in man. clusively revealed to any race, nor in any per-
son. It is human, as is also the faith that deity is in
sympathy with man, and uplifts him through experi-
ence of his needs and desires.

Of this assurance how various the forms in human
history, all more or less imperfect expressions of
the idea. For the Hindu, it was God manifest in
the Brahman, or divinely absorbed man; for the
Hebrew and Mohammedan, in the prophetic man ; for
the Greek, in the Delphic man or woman, oracular

INCARNATION. 77

and ecstatic ; for the Celt, in the Druid man or wo-
man ; for the modern Persian mystic, in the Bab, or
man who represents the open n gate " of God ; for the
Christian, in the Christ, or man supposed to have
been the one only possible Form of God, or else
exclusively "anointed" to be the central life of hu-
manity, or nucleus of its faith in God. Then for the
Roman Catholic, to meet the needs of that great
organization which had followed logically on the sub-
mission of mankind to this central Christ, it was in-
evitably the papal man.

But there are far broader and more spiritual forms
than any of these, into which the idea of incar-
nation is now steadily advancing. God becomes in-
carnate through the eternal principles that underlie
the conscience and the affections of man ; in his reason
and his faith ; organized into character as intellectual
light and noble love. And again God is incarnate in
the social man, in humanity itself, developed at once
in the individual and in the race, as is possible only
through the free intermingling and mutual balance of
all human elements, and inspiring institutions with
those principles of personal freedom and moral order
by which the human becomes one with the divine.
We are henceforth to find this unity in actual life ; in
wise, productive labor of brain and hand ; in an inte-
gral culture of the individual and the race, instead of
reading it as a tradition of the past, veiled behind my-
thology and philosophy, as an idealization or a divine
dream. For all the lofty sentences of Eastern wisdom
do not tell us how far men lived according to the best ;
and it would also seem that the more the New Testa-
ment is studied in a genuine spirit of historical re-
search, the less can be affirmed with certainty about

78 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.

that personal life which Christians have been taught
to adore.

But everywhere in some form recurs the assurance
that God is manifest in man. Ever since man, made
in the divine image, came to conscious spiritual life,
he has felt the necessity to find his nature indeed
divine ; to behold deity in it, transfiguring its outward
part in the shimmer of miracle, or else its inward and
spiritual part, and thence the body and its uses, in the
real splendor of truth and love. The aspiration never
dies out of the soul, because God and the soul are
essentially one.

And this, which Oriental instinct divined, was re-
cognized in many noble ways, not only in its relation
to the desire of progress, but as balance to the sense
of moral evil and spiritual need.

Emile Burnouf } thinks that incarnation in the com-
Aryan incar- plete sense is pre-eminently an Aryan belief;
nation. t h at it is easier for an Aryan to conceive God
as incarnated in man than to conceive prophetic inspi-
ration in the Hebrew sensed This is but to sa}' that
the Aryan religious sentiment is pantheistic. And
the statement is true. There is a breadth and abso-
luteness in its conception of the unity of all truth,
which is not satisfied with leaving man outside divin-
ity, the mere recipient of gifts from a source apart
from his nature. The divine desire in the soul implies
the divinity of the soul. The object of worship is
more than object: it pre-existed ill the worshipper,
and prompted the aim and the prayer. The yearnings

1 Art. on the Science of Religions, in the Revue efts Devx Monde$.

' As an illustration may be mentioned the Persian sect of Bibists, already referred to,
which has spread over a large portion of Persia, and, like Sufism, engrafted upon Islamite
theism a pantheistic faith. See Gobinea