correct. The West has never had a truly intuitional religion; has never originated any religion except Stoicism.

India, on the other hand, has permitted the three faculties to unfold in a more rational and beautiful manner. While in the West one faculty alone was developed to the exclusion of the other two, India with her more tolerant spirit allowed all three to mature side by side. To produce truly satisfactory results, the unfolding of any one of man's powers must be continuous and not proceed by fits and starts. In India the former path. was taken, and so we find a more symmetrical general evolution of ideas as well as a more complete expansion in each particular line.

In India, just as in the West, each philosophy decides whether its standard shall be intuitional, mental, or emotional, and constructs its beliefs and its religious life accordingly. But the similarity ceases here. India understood that if a philosophy once starts out to be mental, it ought not to be influenced by any emotional or intuitional considerations. I do not believe that European philosophers ever fully realized this. They seem ever fearful of offending some non-mental part of their nature, and hence never carry a purely mental implication to its logical conclusion, which would, more often than not, be emotionally or intuitionally distasteful. The Hindu requires the postulates of a particular philosophy to conform solely to the single standard, mental, intuitional, or emotional, of that philosophy. Each implication is carried to its conclusion according to this standard alone. Everything not in agreement with this standard is discarded, and it is precisely this casting off from everything not essential to the doctrine that makes Indian philosophy so impressive.

We have neither the great religious spirit the Hindus. have, nor the moral courage to free ourselves from all worldly things and devote ourselves solely to salvation

through the means given by the Indian philosophies. The best that we can do is to get some understanding of the more practical philosophies, and through them to strive for a better understanding of what we are doing here below, to learn how we may approximate contentment with what we do and how break loose from our continual striving for the unattainable.

The two Indian philosophies best adapted to the Western mind are, it seems to me, those of Buddhism and the Bhagavad Gita. Perhaps the latter is the more practical of the two, since it requires fewer abstract conceptions than does Buddhism and is constructed upon an emotional rather than a mental basis. Yet to my mind Buddhism is the more satisfying, and, from an ethical point of view, of greater value. The codes of morals set up by the Buddha and Krishna are quite similar, but there is a greater incentive to do right when knowing that thereby you are following one who did lead an absolutely irreproachable life, than to do right when knowing that the one who set that ideal before you failed to follow it himself. Theoretically this is incorrect, for Krishna is simply above all ideals of right and wrong. It is true that these are on a lower plane, yet the psychological effect of having before you a life so beautiful as that of the Buddha is a greater incentive to act rightly than that arising from a similar contemplation of the life of Krishna.

Perhaps the strangest, and to some, the most distasteful point in any Indian doctrine is the unimportant position to which the personality is relegated. Probably the belief in reincarnation has done much to create a somewhat exaggerated impression of the insignificance of individual existence. With hundreds of lives behind one and hundreds ahead it is quite natural that one should attach little value to a single reëmbodiment of the spirit in the cramped quarters of a human body which must be dragged about till the time comes for it

to be relieved of its burden and to rest for a while in heaven or suffer in hell, as the case may be.

Again, the climate and geography of the country probably helped to foster this attitude. Enervated by excessive heat, man becomes incapable of withstanding floods and drought, plague and wild animals, all of which exact a dreadful toll of life. He soon comes to feel the futility of contending with the blind yet insuperable forces of nature through the grace of which he lives and in the fury of which he is destroyed.

Then above the heated plains where little men perform their little duties and live their little lives tower the mighty Himalayas, cloaked in ancient forests and crowned with eternal snows. Since time began they have stood there, dwellers in everlasting peace, silent witnesses of the never-ending strife of man. Is it strange that before these grand masterpieces of physical nature man should know himself to be the pygmy that he isshould despise the personality with its petty desires restricting and confining the divine life within, which, were it free, might ascend the Himalayas of the spirit? Those great-souled men who go forth into the silence of these mountains, leaving behind all that forms the life of the ordinary mortal, surely achieve the greatest reward that is given man on this earth to attain; but even the ordinary man who may look upon these manifestations of the strength and power of nature must sense something of the infinite Power that has made them possible. To my mind, the greatest pleasure that man may experience through his senses is the view of great distances from a great height. His self shrinks almost to nothingness while his consciousness expands until it seems to include the peace of the sunny plain below, the quiet of the thickly wooded valleys, the sinister unrest of the dark river in the shadowy ravine, the life-giving power of the sunshine, though feeling at the same time the exaltation of being high above the world, far removed from all that it experiences, yet still one with it.

But I must come back to sea level and my point. The Westerner, whenever he comes face to face with any doctrine that teaches the relative unimportance of the personality, promptly retires into the shell of his belief in his own importance, and, refusing to see anything outside of this, lives happily on, blind to everything that he believes does not directly concern him. But if he disdelikes the idea of his own unimportance, imagine his concern at being told he has no self-which is precisely what Buddhism would tell him.

This lack of individuality anywhere in the universe is the fundamental teaching of Buddhism, while the doctrine of the Bhagavad Gita depends upon the existence ?- Va of Krishna either as a personal God, the soul-principle of the universe, or as the totality of individual souls, according as one views the book from the standpoint of the Yoga, Sankhya or Vedanta philosophies.

The Sankhya is the great mental philosophy. It affirms the existence of matter (prakriti) and Soul (purusha). These two form the universe. They are eternal, equally real, and forever distinct. Each atom of matter has one of these three qualities: Goodness, Passion, and Darkness (sattva, rajas, and tamas). Before creation matter was one homogeneous whole, Goodness, Passion, and Darkness being present in equal quantities and neutralizing each other. At creation the atoms of different qualities became separated from each other, so that now each material atom has a single quality. Soul consists of an infinite number of individual souls who are purely spiritual and who will eternally remain separate, one from the other. In some way or other the individual soul descends into matter, and attracts to itself varying quantities of Goodness, Passion, and Darkness. Now action takes place only in matter, never in Soul. The soul's only function is to bring that particular form which it inhabits to consciousness. After its descent into matter it believes that the action of

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which it is conscious in the form is done by itself. When the soul, through the use of the mind, fully realizes that it has no connection with matter and does nothing whatever, it attains Nirvana. It is freed from all further connection with matter, though the form to which it was last confined will live out its natural life without consciousness. There is no place in this system for gods, for, being spiritual, they could never act.

The Yoga is the emotional philosophy. It accepts the Sankhyan scheme of the universe, but it introduces a personal God. Nirvana in this system means union with God. It is attained by certain practices described in the philosophy. God helps his worshiper to attain this goal.

The Vedanta is the intuitional philosophy. In it the universe is spiritual, and it is the Brahman, the "one existing thing." The àtman is the individual soul, which is really identical with the Brahman, but through illusion (màyà) it believes itself and all other beings to be separate. All individual things, from earth to the highest heaven, are illusion and have no real existence. When the individual soul realizes its identity with the Universal Spirit it reaches Nirvana.

Since in any system of religion or philosophy the conception of the soul or self of man influences the ethical ideals possibly more than any other part of the doctrine, it is perhaps better to consider this subject further before proceeding. The views of the soul propounded by Krishna and the Buddha could hardly differ more than they do if they had arisen in two different worlds, instead of within the very same country. Both religions are tremendously influenced by their respective soultheories; that of the Gita being virtually upheld by the Self of Krishna, while Buddhism, though bearing plainly the stamp of the wonderful personality of its founder, derives positive support from its "anattam" or soullessness.