ing
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 conception of love, for which he substitutes
knowledge. Primitive Christianity conceived the connection between body
and soul, the encumbering of the soul by the body, as it were, as a
temptation or a punishment; according to the Vedas, it is merely a
delusion to which the sage is not subject. Before his keen vision, the
deception falls to the ground, and by this very fact he is delivered. To
the feeling of Europe and Christianity, however, life and the universe
are gen