, unconditioned, Deity. To the
pantheist, let us remember, there is Deity, but there are no real
deities; there is a Godhead, but there are no real persons in the
Godhead. In the view of the pantheist, when we see aught else divine or
human than this all-embracing Deity or Godhead, it is only a
self-created mist of the dim human eye, in which there play the
flickering phantasms of deities and human individuals and things. "In
the Absolute, there is no thou, nor I, nor God," said Ramkrishna, a
great Hindu saint who died in 1886.[78] In Hindu phraseology, every
conception other than this all-comprehending Deity is _Maya_ or
delusion, and salvation is "saving knowledge" of the delusion, and
therefore deliverance from it. The perception of _manifoldness_ is Maya
or illusion, says a modern pro-Hindu writer. And again, "To India, all
that exists is but a mighty curtain of appearances, tremulous now and
again with breaths from the unseen that it conceals."[79]

[Sidenote: Maya is implied in Pantheism.]

[Sidenote: The outcome of Maya.]

The doctrine of Maya is, of course, a postulate, a necessity of
Pantheism. Brahma is the name of the impersonal pantheistic deity. First
among the unrealities, the outcome of Maya or Illusion or Ignorance, is
the idea of a supreme _personal_ God, Parameswar, from whom, or in whom,
next come the three great personal deities, namely, the Hindu Triad,
Brahm[=a] (not Brahma), Vishnu, and Siva,--Creator, Preserver, and
Destroyer respectively. These and all the other deities are the product
of Maya, and thus belong to the realm of unreality along with
Parameswar.[80] Popular theology, on the other hand, begins with the
three great personal deities.

[Sidenote: The Hindu Text-book transforms Pantheism into Monotheism.]

Now come we again to the Text-book. Rightly, as scholars would agree, it
describes the predominant philosophy of Hinduism as pantheistic. The
Text-book, however, goes farther, and declares all the six systems of
Hindu philosophy to be parts of one pantheistic system.[81] The word
pantheism, I ought to say, does not occur in the Text-book. But here is
its teaching. "All six systems," we are told, "are designed to lead man
to the One Science, the One Wisdom which saw One Self Real and all else
as Unreal." And again, "Man learns to climb from the idea of himself as
separate from Brahma to the thought that he is a part of Brahma that can
unite with Him, and finally [to the thought] th