tributes" has its reward. The soul that has attained it takes at death the way of the gods to heavenly bliss, and progresses by stages toward true knowledge and final deliverance; it is vastly better off than those who, with no knowledge of Brahman at all, seek their good by the way of works, the old Vedic sacrifices and observances, and fare when life is over by the "way of the fathers" to the reward of their offerings in the moon; while those who have neither knowledge nor good works atone for their misdeeds in hell, thence to return to earth as beasts or as men of castes reckoned lower than beasts.

The lower, theological, knowledge cannot, however, bring salvation; for at bottom it is not knowledge but ignorance which ascribes attributes and personality to Brahman, and sets him, as creator and ruler, over against a world of finite reality, and, above all, conceives him as another and a stranger to the soul itself.

A radically different system, also in the form of a commentary on the Vedanta-Sutras of Badarayana,' was expounded by Ramanuja (ca. 1100). The author belonged to the Bhagavatas, or Pancaratras, an ancient-probably preBuddhistic-sect which developed the pantheistic-theistic ideas in the Upanishads into a philosophical theology. In the evolution of Hinduism the Bhagavatas identified their supreme lord with Vishnu, and contributed not a little, it may be surmised, to the higher teachings of Vishnuism. Ramanuja rejects Çankara's distinctions of a higher and a lower Brahman and the corresponding discrimination of higher and lower knowledge. Brahman is the one reality, but so far from being a metaphysical absolute, devoid of all attributes, he is endowed with all perfections; intelligence is not his essence, but his highest attribute. Brahman is all-embracing, all-pervading, all-powerful, all-knowing, allmerciful, the opposite and the enemy of all that is evil. The external world of our experience and individual souls are

It is now generally admitted that Ramanuja is closer to the sense of the sutras than Çankara.

not the baseless fabric of a troubled dream, but constitute the body of the Lord, of which he is the inner ruler. The unity of Brahman is therefore not a simplicity that excludes all distinctions, but a systematic unity which embraces them all. The passages in the Upanishads which seem to contradict this view-the teachings on which the absolutist Vedanta of Çankara is based-refer, according to Ramanuja, to the periods of world-involution, when matter and souls subsist in Brahman in a germinal state; matter being “unevolved," and without those qualities by which it is empirically known, and the intelligence of disembodied souls being in a state of contraction, or non-manifestation. When this period, which we may call a resting-stage, is over, the world is created again by the will of God; the "unevolved" matter evolves and assumes the qualities with which we are familiar; the intelligence of souls expands; they are united to material bodies according to their deserts in former existences, and the round of death and birth begins again.

From this endless cycle there is no deliverance by the works of the law; but he who by the study of the Upanishads, by thinking on God and by love to him, seeks the knowledge of Brahman is aided by the grace of the Lord to attain it, and at death such a soul passes by the several stations on the way of the gods to the world of Brahman, and there abides for ever in bliss, sharing all the attributes of Brahman except only his cosmogonic functions.

The dualistic philosophy was earlier systematised than the monistic doctrine. For a long time, it seems, regarded as heretical because of its divergence from the main tendencies of Brahmanic thought, it was later counted as one of the orthodox systems, which means that it gained currency among the Brahmans and was fortified with proof-texts from the Upanishads; and not only the epic but the law-books plainly show that in the early centuries of our era it was widely accepted. The essential features of the Sankhya system have been briefly set forth above. It is a pluralistic 1 See p. 277.

realism, recognising on the one side an eternal universal matter, on the other eternal individual souls.

The primary substance is a subtle matter, not perceptible by the keenest sense; its existence is proved by the necessity of positing an ultimate uncaused cause, or, more exactly, a producer that is not a product. This substance is one, infinite, and eternal. It is composed of three constituents, the upsetting of whose equilibrium-occasioned by the proximity of souls, as iron is drawn to a magnet without the magnet's doing anything to draw it is the cause of the evolution of worlds, and whose presence in varying proportion gives their character to all things. The soul is eternal and unchangeable; it is in its essence spiritual, pure intelligence; no attributes or qualities can be ascribed to it; it is a kind of monad absolute. Not only perception and sensation, but all psychical processes and experiences, including the self-consciousness which refers these phenomena to an ego, are not affections or activities of the soul, but functions of a psychical mechanism, the origin and construction of which are minutely described. This mechanism, which belongs wholly to the realm of the material (prakriti), is not an organ or instrument of the soul, nor does it produce impressions on the soul; nor, finally, is there a psychophysical parallelism between the two. The soul is entirely unaffected by what thus goes on about it.

In the "evolved," or actual, state of the universe the absolute soul is always associated with a psychical mechanism, and with an ethereal body composed of subtle material elements which in turn produce the common matter of which bodies consist. The source and substance of the misery of life, the ground of the endless succession of rebirths, is that the soul confounds itself, the true self, with the empirical self thus constituted, mistakenly imagining that it is actor or sufferer in the tragedy of existence, as though a crystal on which the image of a red hibiscus flower falls should deem that it was itself red. The salvation of the soul is the knowledge of itself as metaphysical, not as empirical ego. This

dissociation makes an end at once of suffering and of the doing which is the germ of future suffering: "It is not I, it is not mine." When the residuum of deeds done in the time of ignorance is exhausted, the gross body dissolves into the earthly elements; the ethereal body, the psychical mechanism, the individuating principle which manifests itself in self-consciousness, and the emanated intelligence, return into the "unevolved" state of the primal substance out of which they sprang; and the soul remains for ever the absolute monad soul it really is, subject without object, pure spiritual intelligence without consciousness, as in the bliss of an eternal dreamless sleep.

This emancipation cannot be achieved by works; the Vedic offerings and ceremonies have not even a pædagogic use, nor do they lead to a lower and temporary blessedness in the heavens of the gods, as in the Vedanta; the whole "work branch" of the Brahmanic religion is rejected. Deeds of humanity and charity do not further a man in the way of salvation; for deeds, good as well as bad, must bear their appropriate fruit in another embodiment. Only philosophy conducts to the goal. The guidance of a teacher who has attained salvation in this life is of great use, but the knowledge itself is an intuition, not a tradition nor a conclusion of

reason.

Whereas the Brahmanic Vedanta restricts salvation to the three high castes, whose members alone can fulfil the condition of Veda study, the Sankhya, like the great heresies, excludes no class or condition of men; the Çudra can achieve emancipation as well as the Brahman.

The system is highly intellectualistic; it undertakes to solve the problem of life by purely rational means. But it was far too profound and abstruse for the ordinary mind, and many who accepted it in theory sought a shorter and surer road to the saving intuition of the soul's true nature, and found it in the teaching and practice of Yoga. The name and thing are far older than the philosophical systems; in the later Upanishads it appears as a means of realising the

unity of the soul with the universal soul, Brahman, and the essential features of the Yoga method already appear in these texts; but the systematised Yoga of Patanjali (second century B. C.)1 attaches itself to the Sankhya, and accordingly presents itself as a means of realising the isolation of the soul from all that is not self, the whole realm of material reality. It is an interesting evidence of the rising tide of Hindu theism that the Yoga Sutras, while adopting the atheistic metaphysics of the Sankhya, introduce, illogically and superfluously, an otiose personal god. This god is not employed to account for the origin of matter and souls, nor for their association; he neither requites men's deeds nor delivers them from the inexorable natural law of retribution; nor, finally, is salvation a return to him and union with him; he is at most a paradigm of a blissful soul untouched by the evils of ignorance, egoism, love, hate, and attachment to life, or by deeds and their consequences.

The essence of the Yoga, as defined in the sutras, is the suppression of the intellectual functions (the psychical apparatus and all its operations belonging, it will be remembered, to the sphere of the non-ego-Prakriti); only so is the emancipation of the ego to be achieved. The method has eight stages. The first two, the observance of five prohibitions and five commandments, are not essentially different from the moral and ascetic discipline of other Indian ways of salvation. To these succeed the cultivation of postures and the regulation of breathing-in later hand-books of the Hatha-Yoga thirty-two salutary postures are enumerated and illustrated, and breathing exercises practicable only in the mythical anatomy of the Hindus. The retraction of the senses follows, compared to a tortoise drawing his head and limbs back into his shell. So far the external stages. The higher discipline comprises the binding of the thoughts, concentrated meditation, and absorption. By the last a trance is meant, in which the absolute isolation of

If Patanjali be identified with the grammarian. A recent critic dates the Yoga Sutras in the fifth century A. D.