If the Sraddha-offering gives pleasure to beings that are dead,

Then to give a viaticum to people who travel here on earth, would be useless.

If those who are in heaven derive pleasure from offerings,

Then why not give food here to people while they are standing on the roof?

As long as he lives let a man live happily; after borrowing money, let him drink Ghee,

How can there be a return of the body after it has once been reduced to ashes?

If he who has left the body goes to another world, Why does he not come back again perturbed by love of his relations?

Therefore funeral ceremonies for the dead were ordered by the Brâhmans.

As a means of livelihood, nothing else is known anywhere.

The three makers of the Vedas were buffoons, knaves, and demons.

The speech of the Pandits is (unintelligible), like Garphari Turpharî.

The obscene act there (at the horse sacrifice) to be performed by the queen has been

Proclaimed by knaves, and likewise other things to be taken in hand.

The eating of flesh was likewise ordered by demons.'

This is certainly very strong language, as strong as any that has ever been used by ancient or modern materialists. It is well that we should know how old and how widely spread this materialism was, for without it we should hardly

understand the efforts that were made on the other side to counteract it by establishing the true sources or measures of knowledge, the Pramânas, and other fundamental truths which were considered essential both for religion and for philosophy. The idea of orthodoxy, however, is very different in India from what it has been elsewhere. We shall find philosophers in India who deny the existence of a personal god or Îsvara, and who, nevertheless, were tolerated as orthodox as long as they recognised the authority of the Veda, and tried to bring their doctrines into harmony with Vedic texts. It is this denial of the authority of the Veda which, in the eyes of the Brahmans, stamped Buddha at once as a heretic, and drove him to found a new religion or brotherhood, while those who followed the Sâmkhya, and who on many important points did not differ much from him, remained secure within the pale of orthodoxy. Some of the charges brought by the Bârhaspatyas against the Brâhmans who followed the Veda are the same which the followers of Buddha brought against them. Considering therefore, that on the vital question of the authority of the Veda the Sâmkhya agrees, however inconsistently, with orthodox Brahmanism and differs from the Buddhists, it would be far easier to prove that Buddha derived his ideas from Brihaspati than from Kapila, the reputed founder of the Sâmkhya. If we are right in the description we have given of the unrestrained and abundant growth of philosophical ideas in ancient India, the idea of borrowing, so natural to us, seems altogether out of place in India. A wild mass of guesses at truth

was floating in the air, and there was no controlling authority whatever, not even, as far as we know, any binding public opinion to produce anything like order in it. Hence we have as little right to maintain that Buddha borrowed from Kapila as that Kapila borrowed from Buddha. No one would say that the Hindus borrowed the idea of building ships from the Phenicians, or that of building Stupas from the Egyptians. In India we move in a world different from that which we are accustomed to in Greece, Rome, or Modern Europe, and we need not rush at once to the conclusion that, because similar opinions prevail in Buddhism and in the Sâmkhya-philosophy of Kapila, therefore the former must have borrowed from the latter, or, as some hold, the latter from the former.

Though we can well imagine what the spirit of the philosophy of the ancient Indian heretics, whether they are called Kârvâkas or Bârhaspatyas, may have been, we know, unfortunately, much less of their doctrines than of any other school of philosophy. They are to us no more than names, such as the names of Yâgñavalkya, Raikva, or any other ancient leaders of Indian thought mentioned in the Upanishads, and credited there with certain utterances. We know a few of the conclusions at which they arrived, but of the processes by which they arrived at them we know next to nothing. What we may learn from these utterances is that a large mass of philosophical thought must have existed in India long before there was any attempt at dividing it into six well-defined channels of systematic philosophy, or reducing it to writing. Even when the names of certain individuals, such

as Gaimini, Kapila, and others, are given us as the authors of certain systems of philosophy, we must not imagine that they were the original creators of a philosophy in the sense in which Plato and Aristotle seem to have been so.

Common Philosophical Ideas.

It cannot be urged too strongly that there existed in India a large common fund of philosophical thought which, like language, belonged to no one in particular, but was like the air breathed by every living and thinking man. Thus only can it be explained that we find a number of ideas in all, or nearly all, the systems of Indian philosophy which all philosophers seem to take simply for granted, and which belong to no one school in particular.

The best known of these ideas, which belong to India rather than to any individual philosopher, is that which is known under the name of Metempsychosis. This is a Greek word, like Metensomatosis, but without any literary authority in Greek. It corresponds in meaning to the Sanskrit Samsâra, and is rendered in German by Seelenwanderung. To a Hindu the idea that the souls of men migrated after death into new bodies of living beings, of animals, nay, even of plants, is so self-evident that it was hardly ever questioned. We never meet with any attempt at proving or disproving it among the prominent writers of ancient or modern times. As early as the period of the Upanishads we hear of human souls being reborn both in animal and

in vegetable bodies. In Greece the same opinion was held by Empedocles; but whether he borrowed this idea from the Egyptians, as is commonly supposed to have been the case, or whether Pythagoras and his teacher Pherecydes learnt it in India, is a question still hotly discussed. To me it seems that such a theory was so natural that it might perfectly well have arisen independently among different races. Among the Aryan races, Italian, Celtic, and Scythic or Hyperborean tribes are mentioned as having entertained a faith in Metempsychosis, nay, traces of it have lately been discovered even among the uncivilised inhabitants of America, Africa, and Eastern Asia. And why not? In India certainly it developed spontaneously; and if this was so in India, why not in other countries, particularly among races belonging to the same linguistic stock? It should be remembered, however, that some systems, particularly the Sâmkhyaphilosophy, do not admit what we commonly understand by Seelenwanderung. If we translate the Sâmkhya Purusha by Soul instead of Self, it is not the Purusha that migrates, but the Sûkshmasarîra, the subtile body. The Self remains always intact, a mere looker on, and its highest purpose is this recognition that it is above and apart from anything that has sprung from Prakriti or nature.

2. Immortality of the Soul.

The idea of the immortality of the soul also should be included in what was the common property of all Indian philosophers. This idea was so completely taken for granted that we look in vain for any elaborate arguments in support of it. Mortality