Sk. Sat, as the only reality; they both have learnt to look upon the manifold of experience as doubtful, as phenomenal, if not erroneous, and as the result of name and form (μορφὰς ὀνομάζειν, namartpa). But the differences between the two are considerable also. The Eleatic philosophers are Greeks with a strong belief in personal individuality. They tell us little about the soul, and its relation to the One Being, still less do they suggest any means by which the soul could become one with it, and recognise its original identity with it. There are some passages (Zeller, p. 488) in which it seems as if Parmenides had believed in a migration of souls, but this idea does not assume with him the importance which it had, for instance, among the Pythagoreans. The psychological questions are thrown into the background by the metaphysical problems, which the Eleatic philosophers wished to solve, while in the Upanishads the psychological question is always the more prominent.

LECTURE XI.

SUFIISM.

I

Religion, System of Relations between Man and God.

ALLUDED in a former lecture to a definition of

religion which we owe to Newman. What is religion,' he writes (Univ. Serm., p. 19), 'but the system of relations between me and a Supreme Being.' Another thoughtful writer has expressed the same idea, even more powerfully. Man requires,' he said, 'that there shall be direct relations between the created and the Creator, and that in these relations he shall find a solution of the perplexities of existence 1.'

This relationship, however, assumes very different forms in different religions. We have seen how in the Vedanta it was founded on a very simple, but irrefragable syllogism. If there is one being, the Vedântist says, which is all in all, then our soul cannot in its substance be different from that being, and our separation from it can be the result of nescience only, which nescience has to be removed by knowledge, that is, by the Vedanta-philosophy.

We saw in the Eleatic philosophy of Greece, the same premiss, though without the conclusion deduced from it, that the soul cannot form an exception, but

must, like everything else, if not more than everything else, share the essence of what alone is infinite, and can alone be said truly to exist.

Sufism, its Origin.

We shall next have to consider a religion in which the premiss seems to be wanting, but the conclusion. has become even more powerful, I mean the Sufiism among the Mohammedans.

As the principal literature of Sufiism is composed in Persian, it was supposed by Sylvestre de Sacy and others that these ideas of the union of the soul with God had reached Persia from India, and spread from thence to other Mohammedan countries. Much may be said in support of such a theory, which was shared by Goethe also in his West-Östlicher Divan. We know of the close contact between India and Persia at all times, and it cannot be denied that the temperament and the culture of Persia lent itself far more naturally to the fervour of this religious poetry than the stern character of Mohammed and his immediate followers. Still we cannot treat Sufiism as genealogically descended from Vedântism, because Vedântism goes far beyond the point reached by Sufiism, and has a far broader metaphysical foundation than the religious poetry of Persia. Sufism is satisfied with an approach of the soul to God, or with a loving union of the two, but it has not reached the point from which the nature of God and soul is seen to be one and the same. In the language of the Vedanta, at least in its final development, we can hardly speak any longer of a relation between the soul and the Supreme Being, or of an approach of the soul to, or of

a union of the soul with God. The two are one as soon as their original and eternal oneness of nature has been recognised. With the Sufis, on the contrary, the subject, the human soul, and the object, the divine spirit, however close their union, remain always distinct, though related beings. There are occasional expressions which come very near to the Vedanta similes, such as that of the drop of water being lost in the ocean. Still, even these expressions admit of explanation; for we are told that the drop of water is not lost or annihilated, it is only received, and the Persian poet when he speaks of the soul being lost in God need not have meant more than our own poet when he speaks of our losing ourselves in the ocean of God's love.

Tholuck seems to have been one of the first to show that there is no historical evidence for the supposition that Sufism is founded on an ancient Persian sect, prior to the rise of Islam. Sufiism, as he has proved, is decidedly Mohammedan in origin, and its first manifestations appear early in the second century of the Hedjra.

Mohammed said indeed in the Korân1, 'In Islam there is no monachism'; but as early as 623 A. D., fortyfive men of Mekka joined themselves to as many others of Medîna, took an oath of fidelity to the doctrines of the prophet and formed a fraternity, to establish community of property, and to perform daily certain religious practices by way of penitence. They took the name of Sufi, a word that has been derived from sûf, wool, a hair-cloth used by penitents in the

1 See the 'Awariful-Ma'ârif, translated by Lieut.-Col. H.Wilberforce Clarke, 1891, p. 1.

early days of Islam, or from sûfîy, wise, pious, or from safî, pure, or from safâ, purity.

Abstract of Suf Doctrines.

The principal doctrines of Sufiism have been summed up by Sir W. Jones as follows: The Sufis believe that the souls of men differ infinitely in degree, but not at all in kind, from the divine spirit of which they are particles, and in which they will ultimately be absorbed; that the spirit of God pervades the universe, always immediately present to His work, and consequently always in substance; that He alone is perfect in benevolence, perfect truth, perfect beauty; that love of Him alone is real and genuine love, while that for other objects is absurd and illusory; that the beauties of nature are faint resemblances, like images in a mirror, of the divine charms; that, from eternity without beginning to eternity without end, the supreme benevolence is occupied in bestowing happiness, or the means of attaining it; that men can only attain it by performing their part of the personal covenant between them and the Creator; that nothing has a pure absolute existence but mind or spirit; that material substances, as the ignorant call them, are no more than gay pictures presented continually to our minds by the sempiternal artist; that we must beware of attachment to such phantoms and attach ourselves exclusively to God, who truly exists in us, as we exist solely in Him; that we retain even in this forlorn state of separation from our Beloved, the idea of heavenly beauty and the remembrance of our primeval vows; that sweet musick, gentle breezes,

1 Sir W. Jones, Works, 1807, vol. iv. p. 212.