bodies nor our souls (as we commonly understand the word) are truly real[101] and he denies the reality of progress “For nothing perfect, nothing genuinely real can move.”  And his discussion of the difficulty of reconciling the ideas of God and the Absolute and specially the phrase “short of the Absolute, God cannot rest and having reached that goal he is lost and religion with him” is an epitome of the oscillations of philosophic Hinduism which feels the difficulty far more keenly than European religion, because ideas analogous to the Absolute are a more vital part of religion (as distinguished from metaphysics) in India than in Europe[102].

Nor can Indian ideas as to Maya and the unreality of matter be dismissed as curious dreams of mystical brains, for the most recent phases of Physics—­a science which changes its fundamental ideas as often as philosophy—­tend to regard matter as electrical charges in motion.  This theory is a phrase rather than an explanation, but it has a real affinity to Indian phrases which say that Brahman or Sakti (which are forces) produce the illusion of the world.

I am not venturing here on any general comparison of European and Indian thought.  My object is merely to point out that the latter contains many ideas to which British philosophers find themselves led and from which, when they have discovered them in their own way, they do not shrink.  It can hardly then be without interest to see how these ideas have been elaborated, often more boldly and thoroughly, in Asia.

BOOK II

EARLY INDIAN RELIGION

A GENERAL VIEW

BOOK II

In this book I shall briefly sketch the condition of religion in India prior to the rise of Buddhism and in so doing shall be naturally led to indicate several of the fundamental ideas of Hinduism.  For few old ideas have entirely perished:  new deities, new sects and new rites have arisen but the main theories of the older Upanishads still command respect and modern reformers try to justify their teaching from the ancient texts.

But I do not propose to discuss in detail the religion of the Vedic hymns for, so far as it can be distinguished from later phases, it looks backward rather than forward.  It is important to students of comparative mythology, of the origins of religion, of the Aryan race.  But it represents rather what the Aryans brought into India than what was invented in India, and it is this latter which assumes a prominent place in the intellectual history of the world as Hinduism and Buddhism.  The ancient nature gods of the wind and the dawn have little place in the mental horizon of either the Buddha or Bhagavad-gita and even when the old names remain, the beings who bear them generally have new attributes.  Still, Vedic texts are used in modern worship and in many respects there is a real continuity of thought.