e connected with equally
important views about its nature. I will not presume to say what is the
definition of the soul in European philosophy but in the language of
popular religion it undoubtedly means that which remains when a body is
arbitrarily abstracted from a human personality, without enquiring how
much of that personality is thinkable without a material substratum.
This popular soul includes mind, perception and desire and often no
attempt is made to distinguish it from them. But in India it is so
distinguished. The soul (atman or purusha) _uses_ the mind and senses:
they are its instruments rather than parts of it. Sight, for instance,
serves as the spectacles of the soul, and the other senses and even the
mind (manas) which is an intellectual _organ_ are also instruments. If
we talk of a soul passing from death to another birth, this according to
most Hindus is a soul accompanied by its baggage of mind and senses, a
subtle body indeed, but still gaseous not spiritual. But what is the
soul by itself? When an English poet sings of death that it is "Only the
sleep eternal in an eternal night" or a Greek poet calls it [Greek:
atermona negreton hupnon] we feel that they are denying immortality. But
Indian divines maintain that deep sleep is one of the states in which
the soul approaches nearest to God: that it is a state of bliss, and is
unconscious not because consciousness is suspended but because no
objects are presented to it. Even higher than dreamless sleep is another
condition known simply as the fourth state[51], the others being waking,
dream-sleep and dreamless sleep. In this fourth state thought is one
with the object of thought and, knowledge being perfect, there exists no
contrast between knowledge and ignorance. All this sounds strange to
modern Europe. We are apt to say that dreamless sleep is simply
unconsciousness[52] and that the so-called fourth state is imaginary or
unmeaning. But to follow even popular speculation in India it is
necessary to grasp this truth, or assumption, that when discursive
thought ceases, when the mind and the senses are no longer active, the
result is not unconsciousness equivalent to non-existence but the
highest and purest state of the soul, in which, rising above thought and
feeling, it enjoys the untrammelled bliss of its own nature[53].

If these views sound mysterious and fanciful, I would ask those
Europeans who believe in the immortality of the soul what, in thei