too by disease,—as a dog dieth,—knows not what he is saying: for he has missed the root of the whole matter. Even, the Avatar of sorrow and suffering must come before there can be the Avatar of divine joy ; the human limitation must be assumed in order to show how it can be overcome; and the way and the extent of the over- coming, whether internal only or external also, depends upon the stage of the human advance ; it must not be done by a nonhuman miracle.
The question then arises, and it is the sole real diffi- culty, for here the intellect falters and stumbles over its own limits, how is this human mind and body assumed ? For they were not created suddenly and all of a piece, but by some kind of evolution, physical or spiritual or both. No doubt, the descent of the Avatar, like the divine birth from the other side, is essentially a spiritual phenomenon, as is shown by the Gita’s dtmdnain sryama, it is a soul-birth ; but still there is here an attendant physical birth. How then were this human mind and body of the Avatar created? If we suppose that the body is always created by the hereditary evolution, by in- conscient Nature and its immanent Life-spirit without the intervention of the individual soul, the matter becomes simple. A physical and mental body is prepared fit for the divine incarnation by a pure or great heredity and the descending Godhead takes possession of it. But the Gita in this very passage applies the doctrine of reincarnation, boldly enough, to the Avatar himself, and in the usual theory of reincarn-. ation the reincarnating soul by its ‘past’ spiritual and psychological evolution itself determines and in a way prepares ils own mental and physical body. The
