ness.

from an age which is already weighted with care and oppressed with the burden and heat of the day. To the original settlers in New England, the vastness of the Transatlantic continent conveyed a very different impression; it stimulated into enthusiastic hope the hearts of the Pilgrim Fathers. But perhaps the most remarkable instance is that of India herself. We have seen that her morning was all brightThroughout that morning, even from the dawn, she dwelt in the same environment that subsequently evoked her spirit of gloom. She was surrounded by the same gigantic aspects of nature and the same vast scale of scenery; yet in these hours of morning she did not shrink before the spectacle, nor feel small in the presence of material greatness. How shall we account for this? It is true that many of her people had originally been transplanted from another soil; shall we say that her early hopefulness was only the expenditure of that former life, only the survival of a culture which the gloom of the new environment could not at once wear away? Such a theory is precluded by the facts. There would be some force in it if the period of India's youth had been of short duration; it might then, indeed, have seemed like the expiring gleam of a fire elsewhere lighted. But the period of India's youth is long, unwontedly long; it must be measured not by years but centuries. The proof lies in the fact that her earliest books reveal a civi

lisation that could not have sprung up in a night, and an acquaintance with the arts of life that demanded a lengthened past. The power, therefore, which conferred this primitive brightness on the Indian mind could not have been a foreign power; it must have been indigenous to the soil. It was capable of subsisting during a very long minority in the midst of these same geographical influences which are supposed to have produced its contrary; and the conclusion seems inevitably to follow, that the effect attributed to these influences has been due to some other cause.

The truth is, we habitually overrate the originative influence of nature upon mind. Nature is both a fountain and a mirror; but it is far more a mirror than a fountain. It does not give nearly so much as it gets. We talk in popular language of receiving our impressions from surrounding scenery; in reality, we first give our impressions to the scenery and then take them back again. Our moods of mind are rarely created by nature; they are almost always imparted to nature and restored to us anew. The visible creation dances to our piping and mourns to our lamenting; it laughs when we are joyful, it weeps when we are sad. If the Indian enters upon the scene with ideas of freedom in his heart, he will find these ideas mirrored in everything around him-expressed in the endless plains and typified in the gigantic mountains. If the Indian should

come to the scene with a mind overwhelmed by a sense of its own impotence, he will find the impression confirmed by the very same aspects of nature; the boundless length of the plain will repeat to him. the contrast of his own nothingness, and the towering strength of the mountain will remind him of his insignificance anew.

We must arrive, then, at the conclusion that the change in the Indian mind from gay to grave is not to be accounted for on geographical principles. A second attempt to account for it has been made from an opposite direction. It has been sought to explain it not from the world without but from the world within. We have been told that the shrinking of the Indian before the aspects of nature has been due to the natural inactivity of his intellect, to that want of mental energy which characterises the East in general and marks the Hindu race in particular. Now, no one would attempt to deny that from a Western point of view the Indian intellect is distinguished by its want of energy. But what do we mean by this? Simply that it is distinguished by its absence from that direction where in the West it is accustomed to blow. The manifestations of the Western mind are energetic in a practical direction; they exhibit theinselves by their effects on the outer world. In India there is not this form of energy; but there is another and a more intense form. The mind here does not go out, but it does

not therefore fall asleep; it goes in. It retires within itself and meditates upon the secret of its own nature. We are accustomed to think and speak of the Indian mind as an inert and sluggish thing. It is characteristically and emphatically the reverse. A man is not necessarily asleep because he is not outwardly moving. It is not too much to say that the mind of the West, with all its undoubted impulses towards the progress of humanity, has never exhibited such an intense amount of intellectual force as is to be found in the religious speculations of India. Nay, I will go further. It is not too much to say that the religious speculations of India have been the cradle of all Western speculations, and that wheresoever the European mind has risen into heights of philosophy, it has done so because the Brahman has been its pioneer There is no intellectual problem of the West which had not its earliest discussion in the East, and there is no modern solution of that problem which will not be found anticipated in Eastern lore. We must emphatically deny, therefore, that the Hindu mind is in any sense distinguished by the absence of force or energy. If I were asked to mark its distinction from the European intellect, I should say that it is the

Even those who admit that the second period of Indian history is a retrogression from the first, do not deny that it exhibits signs of mental progress—e.g., Ritter, 'History of Ancient Philosophy,'

difference between bearing and doing. The European energy is exerted in the construction of new masses; the Indian force is exhibited in the supporting of old ones. The weight of this world presses upon the mind of the Hindu. His main desire is to shake it off, to get free from it, to emancipate his inner self from the trammels of the outer day; and all the struggles of his life are directed towards this end. The fact of such an end is the disproof of anything abject or craven in his intellectual nature; and the struggle by which he seeks to compass it, subterranean and unseen as it is, exhibits a larger amount of actual power than can be witnessed in all the utilitarian movements of Western civilisation.

The question, then, still remains unanswered, How are we to account for the change of the Indian mind from optimism into despair? It cannot be explained by scenery, it cannot be referred to the inertness of the understanding; is there any other possible solution? There is; but it is one that lies not in the nature of India but in the nature of man. The searchers after causes have, in my opinion, looked too far in advance for an explanation of this problem. If they had looked into the glass of human nature, they would have found that India is here in no sense peculiar; it simply exhibits, in very pronounced and Eastern letters, the handwriting on the walls of all humanity. The transi