has been the deadlock between religion and science. Theology and evolution, church and laboratory, faith and fact, have been declared irreconcilable, and any meeting or rapprochement between them impossible. It is, then, highly exciting and a tremendous moment for the modern in search of truth, when he discovers that four thousand years ago in the forest hermitages of her ancient seers, India achieved the impossible.

When our proud Western civilization was yet undreamed of, in those forest retreats of the early Indian philosophers, logic and God, accurate science and profound spirituality, did meet, were reconciled-nay more, permanently welded together-and have thus remained in that country, through the ages. By a curious irony, to be brought to-day from the pure peaks of the Himalayas to the top-heavy magnificence of the skyscraper sheltering its spiritual starvation. A scientific religion! India might pardonably ask Miss Katherine Mayo if this is not as important as a scientific system of sanitation?

"Hinduism": what a strange medley of grotesque images that word evokes in most Occidental minds.

enough, throughout the Sanskrit language of this intensely religious people, any word signifying "religion." There is, instead, the word dharma-that which is to be held fast or kept: the law of life, "the eternal and immutable principles which hold together the universe in its parts and in its whole." And within that general law there is a religion, a natural path and belief, for every type of man and every grade of intelligence from the lowest fetishism of the illiterate Pariah, to the highest absolutism of the yogi who has literally "realized God."

"All religions," said one of the greatest of Hindus, Swami Vivekananda, "are so many attempts of the human soul to grasp and realize the Infinite-each determined by the conditions of its birth and association and each of them marking a stage of progress." It has been this inclusive viewpoint, this broad and comprehensive spirit, that has made of India "a perfect university of religious culture," including every shade of spiritual thought and conception.

The Hindus worship God in three aspects: first, the Absolute God, the impersonal and changeless Principle,

the Unity behind all these varieties of phenomenal life; second, the Immanent God, "God-with-attributes," the Universal Soul immanent in and through all (corresponding with the Universal Mind of the Western metaphysicians); third the Personal God appearing to man in form-the Lords Krishna, Rama, Buddha and others; these, like the Personal God of the Christians, being considered as Incarnations of the Second Person of the Hindu Trinity.

Hindu seers say that the Absolute, the Ultimate Reality, is a state of Spirit or consciousness, pure and simple; unlimited by any concept of time or space, and untouched by any relation. Permanent or absolute reality is that which exists in the same condition throughout all time. The real never changes. And the ultimate object of the Hindu religion, and the ultimate goal of every Hindu -however humble his immediate form of worship-is to "realize" or enter into that state of the Absolute, or all-comprehending and all-blissful

consciousness.

But while this Absolute state is Reality, and (Hindus declare) can be experienced, must eventually be experienced by every one of us-our ordinary life is a relative existence, which has a relative value for us while we are in it. This relative existence is simply a reflection or misreading of the Absolute; the vision of it vanishes for the liberated soul, but remains for the yet unliberated and ignorant. And this relative existence has two aspects: microcosmic and macrocosmic, individual and collective. Just as the universe and the aggregate of tiny individuals of which it is composed

are one in principle and interdependent, so also are the Universal Soul and its aggregate of individual souls that energize the small individual bodies. "Samashti" or "collected" equals the Universal Soul or God; "Vyashti" or "analyzed" equals the individual soul. The existence of the one necessitates the existence of the other.

The amount of good in the world being vastly in excess of the amount of bad, the sum total may be said to be All-Good. Omnipotence and Omniscience are obvious qualities from the very fact of totality. So this is the Hindu "God-with-Attributes," God the Cause and Controller of the relative universe.

These seem to us highly philosophical conceptions. To hundreds of thousands of Hindus-to every Hindu school-boy-they are as real and familiar as is the story of Jesus to the boy and man of the West. But the non-intellectual masses of Hindus, like the masses of Europeans and Americans, worship a Personal God-God in the human form of some God-man, or Incarnation of all pure and perfect qualities. However, the Hindus never claim any one such "divine" man as the only Incarnation and Son of God. Wherever certain qualities and a certain state of "Godconsciousness" appear-whether in the Buddha, or Krishna, the Lord Rama or the Lord Christ-there they see and worship a divine being And to them every holy man is a savior.

Then there are the lesser gods and goddesses whom we call "idols," but whom Hindus consider as attributes of the Immanent God—as Ganesh, God of Wisdom; Sarasvati, Goddess

of Learning; Lakshmi, Goddess of Beauty and Wealth, and so on. They stand as do the saints in Christian theology, each for some special quality and form of good; and their images-so little understood by the tourist and missionary-are designed dramatically to call to mind that special quality. Ganesh, representing Wisdom, is pictured in the form of an elephant, because that great beast typifies the acme of knowingness and power. Hanuman, representing the highest Service and Devotion, is pictured as a monkeybecause, it is supposed, the original Hanuman of the great Indian epic, who helped the Lord Rama with never-failing faithfulness and devotion, was one of the monkey-like aborigines of Lower India. And so on, throughout the Hindu pantheon. The Hindus say that the vast majority of men need some concrete form round which to center their thoughts and aspirations; and that they use these forms of their images for this purpose, just as people of other religions use crosses, crescents, pictures of saints and images of Christ. In fact, the superstition that has grown up round the gods and goddesses in India, is very like the superstition that has grown up round the magic powers attributed by the ignorant masses of the Christian world to certain saints: ability to heal, to find things, to send children and so on. Ignorance is a human, not a Hindu or a Christian quality. It is a matter of social and educational, rather than of religious, inferiority. And in the older civilizations Christian Russia, Hindu India-the masses have not had the opportunities that the newer social orders

bestow upon their children. Hence the scenes in Hindu temples, and in certain churches of Mexico and Europe, that frequently shock onlooking travelers.

So much for the Hindu ideas of God. Next, as to their ideas of Creation and the nature of the Universe.

Instead of beginning with a suppositious Creator, a person like himself, who created the world out of nothing and man in the “divine" image, and then having by hook or crook to extricate himself from this exceedingly involved philosophical situation-the Hindu begins, like every true scientist, with the facts of man's actual experience.

What is the process of creation going on around us? A seed becomes a plant, grows to a certain point, dies, and breaks up into a seed again. It undergoes a period of rest (or as the Hindus say, a period of very fine unmanifested action) beneath the ground, and once more comes forth and becomes a plant-grows, dies, and again completes the circle.

So with animals, so with men, so with rivers, mountains, great planets, and even planetary systems: everything is proceeding in these circles or cycles. The raindrop is drawn up in vapor from the ocean, changes into snow, descends upon the mountain, changes again into water, and rolls back as a great river into the mother ocean. The mountain is being slowly pulverized by rivers and glaciers into sand, the sand drifts into the ocean and is heaped layer upon layer on the ocean bed, to become the mountains of another age. The planet our earth

for example comes out of nebulous form, grows colder and colder, throws up this crystallized form on which we live, and will continue growing colder and colder until it “dies," breaks up, and returns to its first rudimentary fine form.

So with all lives and all existence that we know anything about. All creation is progressing in these cycles or waves, rising and subsiding, rising again and subsiding again. And to the universe as a whole, because of the uniformity of Nature, the same law must apply. The whole cosmos must at some time or other melt down into its causal form-sun, moon, stars, earth, all the things of which the universe is composed, must melt down and return to their finer causes. But all the things of which it is composed will live as fine forms, and out of these fine forms all things will emerge again, and earths, suns, moons and stars will once more be formed. The whole universe, just like the seed, has to work for a period in minute form-unseen, unmanifested, in what is called chaos or the beginning of creation-and only after that can it manifest itself as a fresh projection.

Out of what then has this universe been produced? Out of the preceding fine form. The manifested or grosser state is the effect, and the finer the cause. The "coming out" of the fine form, the change in position of the fine parts into the gross, is what in modern times is called evolution. But every evolution is preceded by an involution. The seed is the fine form out of which the great tree comes, but another tree was the form which had become involved in that seed. The whole of the tree was

present in it. The whole of the human being was in the embryonic protoplasm which unfolds little by little. The whole of this present universe was once infolded in the cosmic fine universe. You cannot get out of a machine anything that you have not first put into it.

This is a summary of Swami Vivekananda's very fine résumé of the Hindu cosmology and of the lessons of my own teacher in Benares.

Evolution is perfectly true, say the Hindus, but it is not complete without the complementary theory of involution. Progression in an eternal straight line is mathematically impossible. More than that, it is contrary to the facts of our known experience which facts all point to the cycle theory. So the Hindustheir philosophers of 4000 years ago

have the honor of out-sciencing science in their logical analysis of the universe. And their conclusion is that there is no such thing as any primal "creation," any more than there can be any such thing as final destruction. (Thus they antedated the Law of the Conservation of Energy by which not a foot-pound can be added to or subtracted from the ever-constant sum total.) Creation means simply manifestation, the coming forth of a new mode of something already in existence; destruction means going back to the fine causes. And thus life and all these phenomena are eternal, in the form of a flux.

Every object is the effect of some causes, and again in its turn is the cause of something else. This applies to the mind and body of the individual being, as to everything in the world. No life comes into existence

accidentally. The present birth is the result of our own past acts in previous incarnations, as our present acts are determining our future incarnations. All relative life is All relative life is severely bound by that one Law of Causation, or "Karma" as it is called in Sanskrit. And it is from this endless chain of causation, this perpetual round of the eternal wheel of birth, death, and all these recurring changes, that the Hindus (and also the Buddhists) seek liberation.

For all this is Nature. This is not God. The Absolute, the Unity behind all these changes, the Principle of Consciousness, and Light by which all these are perceived (like the sun in front of which the wheel of evolutioninvolution is turning)—that never changes. That (according to our definition given above) is eternally unaffected, eternally perfect and the same. And That is our own real Self. For Hindu philosophy boldly asserts that there is absolutely no difference between the soul and God.

Somehow or other-the Hindu frankly says he does not know how the Soul has come under the delusion that it is in bondage; that it is this body, this mind, and is in thraldom to matter. We do not know how this delusion with all its attendant miseries originated. But we do know the remedy. It is to lose the individual self-consciousness that creates all our difficulties, and to become conscious as the Absolute, Infinite, perfect and unchangeable One. And this, Hindus declare, is not a theoretical dream of a hypothetical state to be realized ages hence in some remote Heaven; but a possible and practical experience to be attained here and now in this immediate life. You are not to

take God or spiritual knowledge on any one's authority (another great point throughout the Hindu religion)

you are to find it out, and know it actually and personally for yourself. Hindu philosophers are uncompromising on the point of the entire difference between the Absolute and the relative. They do not, like so many schools of religion and metaphysics, take the relative existence and idealize it, imagine themselves doing all the things they have never been able to do and would like to do, and call that the Absolute. They do not, be it said to their unique and brilliant credit, create God in the image of man, or Heaven out of all the possessions and powers man would like to have control over. They say flatly that the Absolute and the relative are two opposite and antithetical states. You leave the one when you enter the other. And in the Hindu mind there is no question as to which state is the more desirable.

Finite life means inevitably bondage and misery-always something outside ourselves that we lack and want, ever something more that we are struggling to obtain. Therefore the ideal is the abandonment of the finite and the realization of the Infinite-the One within whom all is contained. And the realization of the Absolute state of consciousness means the negation of the consciousness of our separate individuality, as well as of all relative existence. This is the "annihilation" the West shrinks from-because Western people have misunderstood and misinterpreted this "self-extinction."

When you are reading a book, or watching an intensely interesting