rent character from all his
predecessors. Brahma is an intellectual deity. He is a thinker, a
knower, he is the "Mahan Atma" or great spirit, which sits in
unbroken calm above the change and distraction of the universe. In
rendering Mahan Atma by great spirit, however, we are anticipating.
Atma, originally breath or life, comes, afterwards, to mean the
person, the self when all that is accidental is removed from it, the
essential, innermost self. Now Brahma is the great self, the inmost
essence of all things, which was before them, and is unaffected by
their changes. But man also has an atma, a self; it may be very small
and lodge in a part of the body where it cannot be detected, but it
is there, and the small atma is the same as the great one. By what
physiological doctrines this is upheld, cannot here be traced; but
the notion of the atma, the great form of which in Brahma is
identical with its small form in man, lies at the basis of Brahmanic
thought.

[Footnote 2: On the etymology of Brahma see Mr. Max Mueller's _Hibbert
Lectures_, p. 366.]

In Brahma one god has been reached, but he has been reached by
thinking away from him everything concrete. All predicates are
unsuitable to him, as any predicate implies a limitation; he can only
be described in negatives, or in questionable metaphors. He is meant
to satisfy the religious craving for a being quite free from any
imperfection and entirely supreme--and it is the penalty of this that
he has no clear outline or character. And how indeed is he to be
related to the world? This world of change and decay, of
disappointment and sorrow, what has the perfect being to do with
that? Did he make it, and is he responsible for it? The answer to
this in Hindu thought is that the world is due to Maya, illusion. It
was due to an aberration in Brahma, which is represented in various
ways, that the transition was made from the one to the many, and this
error has been productive of all that has been suffered on the earth.
Or else it is held that it was not Brahma who became subject to
illusion, but that the illusion resides in man's views and thoughts
about the world; and if a man could free himself from the meshes of
Maya by recognising that the world is an illusion, and that nothing
exists but Brahma only, then he would have done something for his own
emancipation, the Brahma in him would be free from illusion, and he
would also have done something, though little, for the salvat