tion of the Indian mind from gay to grave is itself a revelation of the message of life, an anticipative specimen of what every developed man and every developed nation does and must go through. What are the facts of the case? The beginning of all life is a search for individual happiness. By individual happiness I do not mean personal happiness; a joy which is not personal is a contradiction in terms. But the search for an individual joy is the pursuit of an object with a view to my own advantage, and to that alone. It is with this pursuit that all life begins. We start upon the course of our being with the firm conviction that each of us is an end to himself. We look upon the world as made specially for ourselves, and we expect with the utmost confidence that everything around us will minister to our pleasure. And in every case we experience a bitter disappointment. There are some instances in which the fortunes of life are unequally bestowed; but here the same lot falls impartially to all. There is not a man in this world who has not come to the conviction that his first conception of existence was

a dream, who has not arrived at the knowledge that things were not created to minister to his own individual happiness. And as his own individual happiness is at first the only kind of joy he knows, the advent of this knowledge comes to him as more than a pain-as a despair. As the conviction breaks upon him that the first hope was a delusion, and

as the light of a higher hope has not yet dawned, the impression created by the discovery must be one of blank pessimism. It was so with India. She began with the belief that the universe existed for the sake of the individual; she reverenced the powers of nature as ministers to the wants of man. She valued Agni not so much because it was light as because it brought light to some particular path of life; she worshipped Indra not so much because it was itself a source of refreshment, as because it sent rain at some specially needed time to the crops of some special man. This was her first conception of the value of nature, and it proved a delusion. She found that whatever value Agni had, it was not this value; that whatever advantage lay in the worship of Indra, it was not this advantage. She found that to the individual man Agni often failed to send his light just at the moment when it was wanted; that Indra often refused to give the shower precisely at the time and place where it was specially desired. And in the breaking of that conviction there happened to India what befalls every manan aggravated sense of the illusion life has given. Disappointed in her first expectation, she, like the rest of mankind, invested the whole world with the gloom of its transition moment. Her earliest hope had been a dream; she revenged herself by saying it was all a dream. The world in its length and breadth presented itself to her view as a scene of

vanity and vexation of spirit, as an agglomeration of vain shadows, meaning nothing and tending nowhere. It stood before her as an illusion, a dream, an assemblage of phantasies, already detected as impostures, yet, by their vivid appearance of reality, impressing the mind with a sense of care. Henceforth the problem of India became one reiterated question-how to get free. How was she to emancipate herself from those deluding shadows? How was she to get rid of those illusory cares of the sense which clogged the wings of the spirit? How was she to be lifted from this grovelling in the dust into an atmosphere congenial to the life of the soul and harmonious with the instincts of the heart?

At this stage of her history it appeared to the Indian mind as if the only chance of emancipation were material disembodiment. To rise above the world seemed impossible, except by rising above the things of the world. How was this elevation to be effected? It is quite a common thing for men who are passing through this Indian experience, to attempt an emancipation from the things of time by contemplating the hour of death. But the men who do so are actuated by the notion that the things of time are now realities. The Indian mind had arrived at a contrary belief. It was not simply that she believed there was a time ́coming when these visible things would pass away; she did not believe them to exist now. There was

no use to wait for death to find emancipation from them; they were at the present moment matters of mere imagination, and therefore there must be out of them some present mode of exit. What was that mode? The attempt to answer this question is the birth of Indian philosophy — a philosophy which directly or indirectly has dominated the whole course of human speculation. It is the transition from the hymns of the 'Rig-Veda' into the creed called Brahmanism-a creed which, dating almost from the dawn of history, has been unsurpassed in intellectual subtlety by all the subsequent efforts of the mind of man. Even at this remote date it does not appear an anachronism. It belongs as much to the nineteenth century after the Christian era as to the ninth century before it, and the student of modern times, in pondering its abstruse speculations, feels that he is breathing an atmosphere not alien to that which has come from the spirit of the German renaissance.

These efforts of the Indian mind to emancipate itself from the shadows of time will be found specially embodied in those philosophic works called the 'Upanishads,'1-a word which probably means "that which lies beneath the surface." Into any technical account of these speculations it is neither my inten

1 See Professor Max Müller's 'History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature (London, 1860); also John Muir's 'Original Sanskrit Texts,' vol. i.-iv. (London, 1858-1863).

tion nor my province to enter. I wish merely to photograph the leading features of the system, and to put them in a light which shall be intelligible. to the English mind. I shall avoid all technical language, and shall endeavour, by an attempt at lucid exposition, to make clear a subject which the grotesqueness of mythological terms has invested with a mist beyond its natural mysticism.

Brahmanism, which we have characterised as the second stage in the life of India, is the effort through despair of the world to fly from the world. But the Brahman may say, like the Psalmist in a different sense, "Whither shall I flee from Thy presence?" The world is to him an assemblage of shadows-a dream; but for that very reason it seems to present no refuge. What advantage can he get by fleeing from one shadow to another? Must not all his efforts be only a flight from illusion to illusion? Yet, as he meditates on this dark prospect, there comes to him a startling thought. He says, This world is indeed a dream; but if so, must there not be a dreamer? Does not the very fact of illusion imply the presence of one who is subject to illusion? Conceding that all the phenomena of the universe are phenomena of a dream-sleep, who is the sleeper, and who is the dreamer? Whoever he is, he must lie beneath the shadows, must be independent of the shadows, and must therefore be an ultimate refuge from the shadows.