indivisible nature of the Supreme mind, and on its existence in the bodies of the highest and lowest of created things."

"Meditating with joy upon the Supreme Being, having need of nothing, inaccessible to any desire of the senses, without other society than his own soul and the thought of God, let him live in the constant expectation of eternal bliss." "For the chiefest of all his obligations is to acquire knowledge of the Supreme Mind; and this is the first of all the sciences, for this alone confers immortality upon man."

"Thus the man who discovers the Supreme Mind in his own mind, and present in all living creatures, will show himself the same to all, and will thus assure himself of the happiest fate, that of being finally absorbed into the bosom of Brahma." 1

"Having thus abandoned all pious practices and acts of austere devotion, applying his intellect solely to the contemplation of the great First Cause, exempt from all evil desires, his soul is already on the threshold of Swarga, while his mortal envelope is still flickering like the last glimmer of a dying lamp." 2

31

Almost all the foregoing, let us remember, 1 "Manu"; VI, 45, 65, 49; XII, 85, 125.

2 Ibid.; VI, 96.

is long previous to Buddhism, dating from the origins of Brahmanism, and is directly related to the "Vedas." Let us agree that this system of ethics, of which I have been unable to give more than the slightest survey, while the first ever known to man, is also the loftiest which he has ever practised. It proceeds from a principle which we cannot contest even to-day, with all that we believe ourselves to have learned; namely, that man, with all that sur rounds him, is but a sort of emanation, an ephemeral materialization, of the unknown spiritual cause to which it must needs return, and it merely deduces, with incomparable beauty, nobility, and logic, the consequences of this principle. There is no extra-terrestrial revelation, no Sinai, no thunder in the heavens, no god especially sent down upon our planet. There was no need for him to descend hither, for he was here already, in the hearts of all men, since all men are but a part of him and cannot be otherwise. They question this god, who seems to dwell in their hearts, their minds; in a word, in that immaterial principle which gives life to their bodies. He does not tell them, it is true-or perhaps he does tell them, but they cannot understand him—why, for the time being, he appears to have divorced them from himself; and we have here a postulatethe origin of evil and the necessity of suffering

-as inaccessible as the mystery of the First Cause with this difference, that the mystery of the First Cause was inevitable, whereas the necessity of evil and suffering is incomprehensible. But once the postulate is granted, all the rest clears up and unfolds itself like a syllogism. Matter is that which divides us from God; the spirit is that which unites us to Him; the spirit therefore must prevail over matter. But the spirit is not merely the understanding; it is also the heart; it is emotion; it is all that is not material; so that in all its forms it must needs purify itself, reaching forth and uplifting itself, to triumph over matter. There never was and never could be, I believe, a more impressive spiritualization than this, nor more logical, more unassailable, more realistic, in the sense that it is founded only on realities; and never one more divinely human. Certain it is that after so many centuries, after so many acquisitions, so many experiences, we find ourselves back at the same point. Starting, like our predecessors, from the unknowable, we can come to no other conclusion, and we could not express it better. Nothing could excel the stupendous effort of their speech, unless it were a silent resignation, preferable in theory, but in practice leading only to an inert and despairing ignorance.

CHAPTER III

EGYPT

WE

I

E have already considered, in speaking of Nu, Tum, and Phtah, the idea which the Egyptians formed of the First Cause, and of the creation, or rather, the emanation or manifestation, of the universe. This idea— as we know it, at least, from the translation, probably incomplete, of the hieroglyphs,though less striking in form, less profound and less metaphysical, is analogous to that of the "Vedas" and reveals a common source.

Immediately following the riddle of the First Cause they, too, inevitably encountered the insoluble problem of the origin of evil, and although they did not venture to probe into it very deeply, they achieved a solution of it which, though paler and more evasive, is at bottom almost similar to that of the Hindus. In the cult of Osiris spirit and matter are known as Light and Darkness, and Set, the antagonist of Ra, the sun-god, in the myths of Ra, Osiris, and Horus, is not a god of evil," says Le Page Renouf, "but represents a physical reality, a constant law of nature." 1 He is a god as

1 Op. cit., p. 115.

real as his adversaries and his cult is as ancient as theirs. Like them he has his priests, and is the offspring of the same unknown Cause. So little can he be divided from the Power opposed to him that on certain monuments the heads of Horus and Set grow upon the same body, making but one god.

After the same confessions of ignorance, here, as in India, the myth of incarnation proceeds to define and control an ethic which, emerging from the unknowable, could not take shape and could not be known except in and by man. Osiris, Horus, and Thoth or Hermes, who five times put on human form—or so the occultists tell us- -are but the more memorable incarnations of the god who dwells in each of us. From these incarnations arises, with less refulgence, less abundance, less power— for the Egyptian genius has not the spaciousness, the exaltation, the power of abstraction that mark the Hindu genius-an ethic of a more lowly and earthly character, but of the same nature as that of Manu, Krishna, and Buddha; or rather of those who in the night of the ages preceded Manu, Krishna, and Buddha. This ethical system is found in the "Book of the Dead" and in sepulchral inscriptions. Some of the papyri of the "Book of the Dead" are more than four thousand years old, but some of the texts from the same book, which were