he has "taken to be the earliest and universal impression of Nature upon men—the impression of endless and pitiless changes".[1] Pitiless? Only to that strange practical fallacy which is one of our most fatal obstacles to a valid optimism, the love of fixity; the love of that Unchanging which is only another name for Death; the cult of the static as the key to life which has to be replaced by the cult of the dynamic, if we would rightly interpret and apply even the facts which we collect or group under either term. Siva thus, according to Sir A. Lyall, "exhibits by images, emblems, and allegorical carvings the whole course and revolution of Nature, the inexorable law of the alternate triumph of life and death—morsjanua vitæ—the unending circle of indestructible animation".[2] But beyond even this vast generalisation, "Vishnu, on the other hand, impersonates the higher evolution; the upward tendency of the human spirit".[3] And these pregnant suggestions are summed up in the contention that "we thus find running through all Hinduism, first the belief in the migration of spirits when divorced from the body, next their deification, and latterly their identification with the supreme abstract divinities reappear again in various earthly forms; so that there is a continual passage to and fro between men and gods, gods and men. And thus we have the electric current of all-pervading divine energy completing its circle through diverse forms, until we reach the conception of all Nature being possessed by the divinity".[4] Here, as the lecturer shows us, we reach the limit of the doctrine of pantheism, which he takes to be the "intellectual climax of the evolution of natural religion".[5] He puts first the adoration of innumerable spirits, and sees these gradually collected into main channels, running into anthropomorphic moulds, and yet further condensing into the Brahmanic Trinity. "And as all rivers end in the sea, so every sign, symbol, figure, or active energy of divinity, is ultimately regarded as the outward expression" of a "single universal divine potency".[6] At this point comes an important reminder: the writer disclaims the theory that "the deification of humanity accounts for all Hinduism; for in India every visible presentation of force, everything that can harm or help mankind is worshipped, at first instinctively and directly,
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General Theory and Classification Section.
