“Not a bad definition of transcendental analysis for a man who professes to know nothing about it,” said I.  “I would not accuse you of a contradiction of terms, either.  I have often thought that what some people call the ‘philosophy of the nineteenth century,’ is nothing after all but the unconscious application of transcendental analysis to the everyday affairs of life.  Consider the theories of Darwin, for instance.  What are they but an elaborate application of the higher calculus?  He differentiates men into protoplasms, and integrates protoplasms into monkeys, and shows the caudal appendage to be the independent variable, a small factor in man, a large factor in monkey.  And has not the idea of successive development supplanted the early conception of spontaneous perfection?  Take an illustration from India—­the new system of competition, which the natives can never understand.  Formerly the members of the Civil Service received their warrants by divine authority, so to speak.  They were born perfect, as Aphrodite from the foam of the sea; they sprang armed and ready from the head of old John Company as Pallas Athene from the head of Zeus.  Now all that is changed; they are selected from a great herd of candidates by methods of extreme exactness, and when they are chosen they represent the final result of infinite probabilities for and against their election.  They are all exactly alike; they are a formula for taxation and the administration of justice, and so long as you do not attempt to use the formula for any other purpose, such, for instance, as political negotiation or the censorship of the public press, the equation will probably be amenable to solution.”

“As I told you,” said Isaacs, “I know nothing, or next to nothing, of Western mathematics, but I have a general idea of the comparison you make.  In Asia and in Asiatic minds, there prevails an idea that knowledge can be assimilated once and for all.  That if you can obtain it, you immediately possess the knowledge of everything—­the pass-key that shall unlock every door.  That is the reason of the prolonged fasting and solitary meditation of the ascetics.  They believe that by attenuating the bond between soul and body, the soul can be liberated and can temporarily identify itself with other objects, animate and inanimate, besides the especial body to which it belongs, acquiring thus a direct knowledge of those objects, and they believe that this direct knowledge remains.  Western philosophers argue that the only acquaintance a man can have with bodies external to his mind is that which he acquires by the medium of his bodily sensea—­though thesa, are themselves external to his mind, in the truest sanse.  The senses not being absolutely reliable, knowledge acquired by means of them is not absolutely reliable either.  So the ultimate difference between the Asiatic saint and the European man of science is, that while the former believes all knowledge to be directly within the grasp of the soul, under certain