most personal experience of Christ, and centuries after his death the nations rediscovered it as their highest value.  It entitled Christianity to become the natural religion of Europe, and the soul of its new system of civilisation.  It formed the most complete contrast to all Asiatic cults, Brahminism and Buddhism, a fact which, since Schopenhauer, one is inclined to overlook.  To the Indian, the soul of man is not an entity; his consciousness is a republic, as it were, composed of diverse spiritual principles and metaphysical forces which are not centralised into an “I-centre,” but exist impersonally, side by side.  This may be a great conception, but it is foreign to the feeling of the citizen of Europe.  To the latter the I, the soul, the personality, is the pivot round which life turns.  The evolution of the European world-feeling is in the direction of the independent development of all psychical forces and their fusion into a unity of ever-increasing intimacy.  New values will be created, but the fusing power of the soul will strive with growing intensity to co-ordinate and unify the internal and external life; personality will recreate the world in conformity with its own purposes, that is to say, it will found the system of objective civilisation.  The incapacity of the Indian to produce a civilisation perfect in every direction is explained by his one-sided, morally-speculative thought.  The world is to him nothing but a moral phenomenon, he admits no other explanation; he seeks its true meaning and the possibility of its salvation in the realisation of the vanity of life, not in the liberating deed, and not in the inward change.

The kernel of matured and spiritualised Christianity, which reached its apex in the German mystics, lies in the soul of man, eager to shed everything which is subjective and accidental, and become spirit, profound, divine reality.  Eckhart, the great perfecter of this European religion, deliberately and in direct contradiction to the dogma of his time, placed man above the “highest angels,” whom he considered subject to limitations; “man,” he argues, “thanks to his freedom, is able to reach a goal to which no angel could aspire.  For he is always new, infinitely exalted above the limitations of the angels and all finite reason.”  Of the relationship between the soul and God he says; “The soul of the righteous man shall be with God, his equal and compeer, no more and no less.”  The Upanishads, on the other hand, maintain that the core of the world is not to be found in the soul of the individual but in Brahma, the universal soul, outside whom there is no reality.  “The individual soul is but a phantasm of the universal soul, as the reflection of the sun in the water is but a phantasm of the sun.”  The sole purpose of the world is the extinction of individual consciousness, its absorption in Brahma, the end of all suffering:  “When feeling has ceased, pain must cease, too, and the world be delivered.”  The Indian lacks the central