s embodied in literature,
architecture, and painting. And this taste, as expressed in religion,
isolates Brahmanic and Hinduistic India,
placing her apart, both from the gloom of Egypt and the grace of
Greece; even as in her earliest records she shows herself individual,
as contrasted with her Aryan kinsfolk. Like Egypt, she feels her dead
ever around her, and her cult is tinged with darkness; but she is fond
of pleasure, and seeks it deliriously. Like Greece, she loves beauty,
but she loves more to decorate it; and again, she rejoices in her
gods, but she rejoices with fear; fear that overcomes reason, and
pictures such horrors as are conjured up by the wild leaps of an
uncurbed fancy. For an imagination that knows no let has run away with
every form of her intellectual productivity, theosophy as well as art.
This is perceptible even in her ritualistic, scientific, and
philosophical systems; for though it is an element that at first seems
incongruous with such systems, it is yet in reality the factor that
has produced them. Complex, varied, minute, exact, as are the details
which she loves to elaborate in all her work, they are the result of
this same unfettered imagination, which follows out every fancy,
pleased with them all, exaggerating every present interest, unconfined
by especial regard for what is essential.[16] This is a heavy charge
to bring, nor can it be passed over with the usual remark that one
must accept India's canon as authoritative for herself, for the taste
of cosmopolitan civilization is the only norm of judgment, a norm
accepted even by the Hindus of the present day when they have learned
what it is. But we do not bring the charge of extravagance for the
sake of comparing India unfavorably with the Occident. Confining
ourselves to the historical method of treatment which we have
endeavored heretofore to maintain, we wish to point out the important
bearings which this intellectual trait has had upon the lesser
products of India's religious activity.

Through the whole extent of religious literature one finds what are
apparently rare and valuable bits of historical information. It is
these which, from the point of view to which we have just referred,
one must learn to estimate at their real worth. In nine cases out of
ten, these seeming truths are due only to the light imagination of a
subsequent age, playing at will over the records of the past, and
seeking by a mental caper to leap over what it f