truth; that there is a difference which is fundamental between reverence and hatred towards the Supreme Being, between love and hatred towards your fellow man. And yet, be it remembered, physiology claims that these essentially differing principles are merely nerve vibrations, affecting different portions of the brain. If this be so, and there exists nothing beyond, then one nerve vibration must be as good as another, since all occur under the mandate of inexorable law; the vibration representing selfishness is quite as worthy as that representing benevolence, that representing lust as that representing chastity. If the nerve vibration and cell are the final arbiters and end all, then distinction between these or other so-called principles must be inexplicable. And so indeed the human race regards them in reference to every class of animals except itself. Right and wrong, selfishness and benevolence, lust and chastity are never referred to as applicable to animals. merely, and yet philosophy claims they could be with equal propriety, except there be a something in man beyond mere nerve vibrations, connecting fibers, and cells. In the view of physiology this distinction is a grand mistake, and all obligation must merge into self-interest for the present. "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." The inexorable. law of nature is the survival of the fittest in the grand struggle of life. Why not let it have its full sway and work out its largest results? Why not let the weak, the tainted, the deformed ones, whether by inheritance or acquirement, go to the wall? Why not stamp out misery and suffering, and leave only the strong and vigorous to perpetuate themselves for their brief day in this changing world? Why not eradicate that grandest mistake humanity has ever made, namely, its relation to something beyond this life? If life be a mere nerve vibration, so soon to end in darkness, can physiology show a reason why it should go on year after year, as it does in myriads of cases, in suffering and agony? Why do we fan the flickering flame of life so carefully and anxiously in the cancerous and consumptive, when nature would end all so sweetly and quickly in the night of eternal sleep? Surely nature mocks us when she leads us to watch over and care for these weak and suffering ones, in the vain belief that there is a something we call sacred

within each one,-a something which survives the crumbling atoms of the physical nature.

And yet philosophy claims that humanity has not made a mistake; that it is on the right course; that our hospitals and our churches are beacon-lights on the tops of the dark mountains of life, which cast cheering rays of light into the mysteries beyond.

Finally. Philosophy claims that physiology makes no adequate explanation of, or indeed, provision for, absolute knowl edge. According to her theory, all knowledge must be relative to the individual or the species, and consequently might be and must be something different, or mean something else to beings created with other nervous organizations.

To illustrate two and two make four; a half is less than the whole of anything: these statements are samples of what are termed certain truths or mathematical axioms. As truths they cannot be made clearer by any demonstration which we can devise, nor can we by any possibility conceive how they could be otherwise than they are. In the view of physiology, however, one and one make two, two and two make four, rather than any other number, because, and only because these figures produce the requisite number or character of vibrations in the nerves leading to the "ideational arc" of the brain; and if the brain were differently constructed, or any other number of these vibrations could be produced by these mathematical integers, then their combination might actually make some other number, as five, or three, or seven. Applying the same theory to our knowledge of the external world, a tree is a tree only because the rays of light reflected from it upon the retina of the eye, and thence to the brain produce the requisite character of vibration; a horse is a horse for the same reason, and so of the whole external world. There is nothing absolute and real; all is relative and may be unreal. This is the legitimate deduction from the theory of physiology as to knowledge, and it cannot be seen how there could be any other except upon the theory of a something within the brain which perceives.

Philosophy, however, claims that there is such a thing as absolute knowledge; that a half of anything would be less than

the whole, that two and two would be four as they now are, without reference to the construction of human brains; that if the senses of the whole human race were hallucinated, so that the nerves of the eye and the ear conveyed, as they actually sometimes do, other than what we now term normal impressions; or if there were no such organs in the universe as brains, still the earth, and all nature, and all absolute truth would exist and be as they now are. A tree would still be a tree, a plant a plant; number, time and space would be as they now are; and she claims that the conviction of the human race in all ages of the civilized world has been in accord with such a view; and yet that such a view can be true, only on the bypothesis of a personality in man, an entity capable of absolute knowledge, time, space and number, and entering into relations with the external world through the agency of its

senses.

As we cannot conceive of events in the universe without a cause, so there can exist no events, the possibilities of which do not exist within the cause. Somewhere, and at some time in the æons of the past that first great Cause began to manifest what now appears as the universe of worlds, all acting upon, and being acted upon, each by every other, even to the minutest particle that floats in the sunbeam of to-day. Millions and millions of sunlit worlds are whirling with inconceivable velocity through the realms of space in the silence of eternity, and yet under the bond of a law which binds in its grasp each atom of matter. The human mind instinctively climbs through the dizzy heights and distances of time and space, of worlds and systems of worlds, to that Great Cause of all things. In the infinity of Its manifestations and effects it beholds the evidences of design and order, purpose and knowledge, which demand its homage and reverence, and not in particles of sand or atoms of dust.

ARTICLE IV.-THE HISTORIC RELIGIONS OF INDIA.

I. BRAHMANISM.

COUSIN. History of Philosophy.

MAX MÜLLER. Lectures and others Papers.

J. F. CLARKE. Ten Great Religions.
EDWIN ARNOLD. The Light of Asia.

THE lately awakened interest in Comparative Religion is a legitimate movement of the human mind, under the conditions of the present age. It is no more possible that Christianity should continue to be viewed only in the partial lights and relations recognized in past ages, than that government, or social order, or chemistry, or geology should rest in similar immobility. And why should not the vast theme, the response of humanity to the silent claims of conscience, and of God upon it,-engage the attention of men, as one of the noblest realms of natural science?

The works named above, and others, have awakened such interest in the mind of the writer in the Historic Religions of India, that he has thought that a brief abstract of their history, and character, might be of service to some whose attention has been occupied in other directions. No attempt will be made at original investigation, but simply to collate, and digest, and sometimes to reflect, I quote so freely from the writers named, especially Müller and Clarke, that specific acknowledgments would be cumbersome.

To trace the stream of Aryan migration, from the plains of India back, through the valley of the Indus, and over the mountains of Cabul, to the earliest known seats of the race-the elevated pastures of Central Asia; and especially to notice the methods of study, by which, from linguistic sources, the dim, unwritten history of those primeval ages has been partially constructed, would be a tale of fascinating interest, but exceeding the limits of the present undertaking.

Suffice it to say, the ancestors of the Aryan family,—the Hindus, Persians, Greeks, Latins, Kelts, Teutons, and Slavs,three thousand years before the Christian era, living, as yet undivided, in the regions of the Oxus, and the Jaxartes, were a pastoral, though a settled people; the grade of their civilization appearing in the use of such words as, the names of various domestic animals, cereals, with instruments for growing and grinding them, several metals, spinning, weaving, and pottery, doors, windows, and fire-places, cloaks, boiled and roasted meat, and soup, swords, lances, bows, arrows, and shields, laws, games, wind instruments of music, the dance, and many others indicating the same general manner of life. These names being the same in all the daughter languages above mentioned, must have been derived from the speech of the parents before the separation of the children, that is, were in use in the ancient Asiatic home, and indicate the mode of life then prevailing. These people had also a decimal numeration, a year of three hundred and sixty days, a community of herds and pastures, with stables in the center of the village; and the words for daughter and dairy-maid were the same. The chief powers of nature were worshiped. but as yet without an official priesthood.

Migrating southward, the race separated into two, one continuing into the valley of the Indus, and so into India; the other turning westward, and overspreading the sandy plains of Persia. Perhaps the ancestors of the Greek, and other western branches of the family, were already on their way north of the Caspian and the Euxine, toward Europe.

India was already inhabited; but by whom, we know little more than that they belonged to the Turanian family. They were driven by the invaders southward, where Turanian tongues, Tamil, Telegu, Canarese, etc., still prevail, spoken by people of darker skin, smaller but wiry frame, and restless eye, congeners of whom may be found in out-of-the-way places, throughout India to-day.

The language of the Aryan Hindus was the Sanskrit; of which, itself no longer a living but a learned and sacred tongue, the Hindi, Bengali, Mahratti, etc., are modern dialects, and Prakrit a vulgar one. The Hindustani is a dialect formed