is not God, who looks upon the Deity as
subordinate to powers void of holiness and nobility, the man who will
not see in God the highest force in the world of nature and in the
realm of the spirit. In this sense the Brahmans are thorough atheists.
According to them, the universe with all that is in it--gods, men, and
lower things--is created and governed by an iron law of soulless
natural necessity. It has arisen by emanation from a cosmic Principle,
Prajapati, "the Lord of Creatures," an impersonal being who shows no
trace of moral purpose in his activity. Prajapati himself is not
absolutely the first in the course of nature. The Brahmanas, the
priestly books composed in this period to expound the rules and mystic
significance of the Brahmanic ceremonies, give us varying accounts of
his origin, some of them saying that he arose through one or more
intermediate stages from non-existence (TB. II. ii. 9, 1-10, SB. VI.
i. 1, 1-5), others deriving him indirectly from the primitive waters
(SB. XI. i. 6, 1), others tracing his origin back to the still more
impersonal and abstract Brahma (Samav. B. I. 1-3, Gop. B. I. i. 4).
All these are attempts to express in the form of myth the idea of an
impersonal Principle of Creation as arising from a still more abstract
first principle. We have seen the poets of the Rig-veda gradually
moving towards the idea of a unity of godhead; in Prajapati this goal
is attained, but unfortunately it is attained by sacrificing almost
all that is truly divine in godhead. The conception of Prajapati that
we find in the Brahmanas is also expressed in some of the latest hymns
of the Rig-veda. Among these is the famous Purusha-sukta (RV. X. 90),
which throws a peculiar light on the character of Prajapati. It is in
praise of a primitive Purusha or Man, who is, of course, the same as
Prajapati; in some mysterious manner this Purusha is sacrificed, and
from the various parts of his body arise the various parts of the
world. The idea conveyed by this is that the universe came into
existence by the operation of the mystic laws revealed in the
Brahmanic rituals, and is maintained in its natural order by the same
means. The Brahmanas do not indeed often assert on their own authority
that Prajapati was himself sacrificed in order to produce the world,
and in fact they usually give other accounts of the creation; but as
their authors live in a rarefied atmosphere of mystical allegory in
which fact and fancy are c