gle. In his hands there rests a full moon, which is reflected
in the waters at his feet. The Vedanta has taught for thousands of years
what some of the German philosophers began to preach at the end of last
century and the beginning of this one, namely, that everything objective
in the world, as well as the world itself, is no more than an illusion,
a Maya, a phantom created by our imagination, and as unreal as the
reflection of the moon upon the surface of the waters. The phenomenal
world, as well as the subjectivity of our conception concerning our
Egos, are nothing but, as it were, a mirage. The true sage will never
submit to the temptations of illusion. He is well aware that man will
attain to self-knowledge, and become a real Ego, only after the entire
union of the personal fragment with the All, thus becoming an immutable,
infinite, universal Brahma. Accordingly, he considers the whole cycle of
birth, life, old age, and death as the sole product of imagination.

Generally speaking, Indian philosophy, split up as it is into numerous
metaphysical teachings, possesses, when united to Indian ontological
doctrines, such a well developed logic, such a wonderfully refined
psychology, that it might well take the first rank when contrasted with
the schools, ancient and modern, idealist or positivist, and eclipse
them all in turn. That positivism expounded by Lewis, that makes each
particular hair on the heads of Oxford theologians stand on end,
is ridiculous child's play compared with the atomistic school of
Vaisheshika, with its world divided, like a chessboard, into six
categories of everlasting atoms, nine substances, twenty-four qualities,
and five motions. And, however difficult, and even impossible may
seem the exact representation of all these abstract ideas, idealistic,
pantheistic, and, sometimes, purely material, in the condensed shape of
allegorical symbols, India, nevertheless, has known how to express all
these teachings more or less successfully. She has immortalized them in
her ugly, four-headed idols, in the geometrical, complicated forms of
her temples, and even in the entangled lines and spots on the foreheads
of her sectaries.

We were discussing this and other topics with our Hindu
fellow-travellers when a Catholic padre, a teacher in the Jesuit College
of St. Xavier in Bombay, entered our carriage at one of the stations.
Soon he could contain himself no longer, and joined in our conversation.
Smiling