the Greeks is love of knowledge, of the Phoenicians and Egyptians love of money. If he borrowed no money, he certainly borrowed no philosophy from his Egyptian friends.

When of late years the ancient literature of Egypt, Babylon, Persia, India, and China, came to be studied, there were not wanting Oriental scholars who thought they had discovered some of the sources of Greek philosophy in every one of these countries. But this period also has passed away. The opinions of Bohlen, Röth, Gladisch, Lorinser, and others, are no longer shared by the best Oriental scholars. They all admit the existence of striking coincidences on certain points and special doctrines between Oriental and Occidental philosophical thought, but they deny the necessity of admitting any actual borrowing. Opinions like those of Thales that water is the origin of all things, of Heraclitus that the Divine pervades all things, of Pythagoras and Plato that the human soul migrates through animal bodies, of Aristotle that there are five elements, of Empedokles and the Orphics that animal food is objectionable, all these may easily be matched in Oriental philosophy, but to prove that they were borrowed, or rather that they were dishonestly appropriated, would require far stronger arguments than have yet been produced.

Indian Philosophy autochthonous.

Let us remember then that the conclusion at which we have arrived enables us to treat Indian philosophy as a perfectly independent witness. It was different. with Indian religion and mythology. In comparing Indian religion and mythology with the religion and

mythology of Greeks and Romans, Celts and Teutons, the common Aryan leaven could still be clearly perceived as working in all of them. Their rudiments are the same, however different their individual growth. But when we come to compare Indian philosophy with the early philosophies of other Aryan nations, the case is different. M. Reville, in his learned. work on the American religions, has remarked how the religions of Mexico and Peru come upon us like the religions of another planet, free from all suspicion of any influence having ever been exercised by the thought of the old on the thought of the new world. The same applies not indeed to the religion, but to the philosophy of India. Apart from the influence which belongs to a common language and which must never be quite neglected, we may treat the earliest philosophy of India as an entirely independent witness, as the philosophy of another planet; and if on certain points Indian and Greek philosophy arrive at the same results, we may welcome such coincidences as astronomers welcomed the coincidences between the speculations of Leverrier and Adams, both working independently in their studies at Paris and Cambridge. We may appeal in fact to the German proverb, Aus zweier Zeugen Mund, Wird alle Wahrheit kund, and look upon a truth on which Bâdarâyana and Plato agree, as not very far from proven.

LECTURE IV.

THE RELATION OF PSYCHOLOGICAL TO PHYSICAL

ONE

AND ANTHROPOLOGICAL RELIGION.

The Constituent Elements of Religion.

NE of the greatest difficulties in studying ancient religions is the entire absence of any systematic arrangement in their Sacred Books. We look in vain for anything like creeds, articles of faith, or a welldigested catechism. It is left therefore to ourselves to reduce the chaos of thoughts which they contain to some kind of order.

This has been attempted in various ways.

Sometimes the doctrines contained in them have been arranged in two classes, as dogmas to be believed (theology), and as rules of conduct to be obeyed (ethics). Sometimes scholars have collected all that refers to the outward ceremonial, and have tried to separate it from what was believed about the gods. But in most religions it would be almost impossible to separate ethics from dogma, while in its origin at least ceremonial is always the outward manifestation only of religious belief. Of late these outward or sacrificial elements of religion have received great attention, and a long controversy has been carried on

as to whether sacrifice was the real origin of all religion, or whether every sacrifice, if properly understood, presupposes a belief in gods to whom the sacrifices were offered.

The theory, supported chiefly by Professor Gruppe, that sacrifice comes first and a belief in gods afterwards seems to me utterly untenable, if not selfcontradictory. An offering surely can only be an offering to somebody, and even if that somebody has not yet received a name of his own, he must have been conceived under a general name, such as celestial, immortal, divine, powerful, and all the rest.

It is no new discovery, for instance, that many of the hymns of the Rig-veda presuppose the existence of a highly developed ceremonial, but to say that this is the case with all, or that no hymns were composed except as auxiliary to a sacrifice, betrays a strange ignorance of palpable facts. Even the hymns which. were composed for sacrificial purposes presuppose a belief in a number of gods to whom sacrifices are offered. If a hymn was to be used at the morning sacrifice, that very morning sacrifice owed its origin to a belief in a god manifested in the rising sun, or in a goddess of the dawn. The sacrifice was in fact as spontaneous as a prayer or a hymn, before it became traditional, technical, and purely ceremonial. On this point there cannot be two opinions, so long as we deal with facts and not with fancies.

My own Division.

In my Lectures on Natural Religion, I have preferred a different division, and have assigned one course to each of what I consider the constituent

parts of all religions. My first course of Lectures was purely introductory, and had for its object a definition of Natural Religion in its widest sense. I also thought it necessary, before approaching the subject itself, to give an account of the documents from which we may derive trustworthy information about Natural Religion as it presents itself to us in the historical growth of the principal religions of the world.

My second course, which treated of Physical Religion, was intended to show how different nations had arrived at a belief in something infinite behind the finite, in something invisible behind the visible, in many unseen agents or gods of nature, till at last, by the natural desire for unity, they reached a belief in one god above all those gods. We saw how what I called the Infinite in nature, or that which underlies all that is finite and phenomenal in our cosmic experience, became named, individualised, and personified, till in the end it was conceived again as beyond all

names.

My third course, which treated of Anthropological Religion, was intended to show how different nations arrived at a belief in a soul, how they named its various faculties, and what they imagined about its fate after death.

While thus my second course was intended as a history of the discovery of the Infinite in nature, my third course was intended to explain the discovery of the Infinite in man.

It remains for me to treat, in this my last course, of the relation between these two Infinites, if indeed there can be two Infinites, or to explain to you the ideas which some of the principal nations of the world