the Vedanta philosophy. Only we must take care not to
mistake the moral Self, that finds fault with the active Self, for the
Highest Self that knows no longer of good or evil deeds.

Long before I had worked and thought out this problem as the
fundamental truth of all philosophy, it presented itself to me as if
by intuition, long before I could have fathomed it in its metaphysical
meaning. I had just heard of the death of a dear little child, and was
standing in our garden, looking at a rose-bush, covered in summer with
hundreds of rose-buds and rose-flowers. While I was looking I broke
off one small withered bud from the midst of a large cluster of roses,
and after I had done so a question came to me, and I said to myself,
What has happened? Is it only that one small bud is dead and gone, or
have not all the other roses been touched by the breath of death that
fell on it? Have they not all suffered from the death of their sister,
for they all spring from the same stem, they all have their life from
the same source? And if one rose suffers, must not all the others
suffer with it? Then all the buds and flowers of the cluster seemed to
me to become one, as it were a family of roses, and each single bud
seemed but the repetition of the same thing, the manifestation of the
same thought, namely the thought of the rose. But my eyes were carried
still further, and the stem from which the bunch of roses sprang was
lost with other stems in a branch, and it was that branch on which all
the roses of the branchlets and stems depended, and without which they
could not flower or exist. The single roses thus became identified
with the branch from which they had sprung, and by which they lived. I
wondered more and more, and after another look all the branches with
all their branchlets became absorbed in the stem, and the stem was the
tree, and the tree sprang from a seed, or as it is now called, the
protoplasm; but beyond that seed there was nothing else that the eye
could see or the mind could grasp. And while this vision floated
before my eyes I thought of my little friend, and the home from which
she had been broken off, and the same vision which had changed the
rose-bush with all its flowers, and buds, and branchlets, and
branches, into a stem and a tree, and at last into one invisible germ
and seed, seemed now to change my little friend and her brothers and
sisters, her parents too and all her family, into one being which,
like an