nations, it may be at least seen that helpful clues exist to lead the explorer. The doctrine of mighty nature-spirits, inhabiting and controlling sky and earth and sea, seems to expand in Asia into such ideas as that of Mahâtman the Great Spirit, Paramâtman the Highest Spirit, taking personality as Brahma the all-pervading universal soul[1]—in Europe into philosophic conceptions of which a grand type stands out in Kepler's words, that the universe is a harmonious whole, whose soul is God. There is a saying of Comte's that throws strong light upon this track of speculative theology: he declares that the conception among the ancients of the Soul of the Universe, the notion that the earth is a vast living animal, and in our own time, the obscure pantheism which is so rife among German metaphysicians, are only fetishism generalized and made systematic.[2] Polytheism, in its inextricable confusion of the persons and functions of the great divinities, and in its assignment of the sovereignty of the world to a supreme being who combines in himself the attributes of several such minor deities, tends toward the doctrine of fundamental unity. Max Müller, in a lecture on the Veda, has given the name of kathenotheism to the doctrine of divine unity in diversity which comes into view in these instructive lines:—
'Indram Mitram Varunam Agnim âhur atho
divyah sa suparno Garutmân:
Ekam sad viprâ bahudha vadanti Agnim
Yamam Mâtariçvânam âhuh.'
'They call him Indra, Mitra, Varuna, Agni; then he is the beautiful-winged heavenly Garutmat: That which is One the wise call it in divers manners; they call it Agni, Yama, Mâtariçvan.'[3]
- ↑ See Colebrooke, 'Essays,' vol. ii. Wuttke, 'Heidenthum,' part i. p. 254. Ward, 'Hindoos,' vol. i. p. xxi. vol. ii. p. 1.
- ↑ Comte, 'Philosophie Positive.' Cf. Bp. Berkeley's 'Siris'; and for a modern dissertation on the universal æther as the divine soul of the world, see Phil. Spiller, 'Gott im Lichte der Naturwissenschaften,' Berlin, 1873 (note to 2nd ed.).
- ↑ 'Rig- Veda,' i. 164, 46. Max Müller, 'Chips,' vol. i. pp. 27, 241.
