hat as a child grows into youth and
age, so the soul passes from life to life in continuity if not in
identity. Whatever the origin of the idea may have been, its root in
post-Vedic times is a sense of the transitoriness but continuity of
everything. Nothing is eternal or even permanent: not even the gods, for
they must die, not even death, for it must turn into new life.

This view of life is ingrained in Indian nature. It is not merely a
scientific or philosophical speculation, but it summarizes the outlook
of ordinary humanity. In Europe the average religious man thanks or at
least remembers his Creator. But in India the Creator has less place in
popular thought. There is a disinclination to make him responsible for
the sufferings of the world, and speculation, though continually
occupied with the origins of things, rarely adopts the idea familiar to
Christians and Mohammedans alike, that something was produced out of
nothing by the divine fiat. Hindu cosmogonies are various and discordant
in details, but usually start with the evolution or emanation of living
beings from the Divinity and often a reproductive act forms part of the
process, such as the hatching of an egg or the division of a Divinity
into male and female halves. In many accounts the Deity brings into
being personages who continue the work of world-making and such entities
as mind, time and desire are produced before the material world. But
everything in these creation stories is figurative. The faithful are not
perplexed by the discrepancies in the inspired narratives, and one can
hardly imagine an Indian sect agitated by the question whether God made
the world in six literal days.

All religious doctrines, especially theories about the soul, are matters
of temperament. A race with more power of will and more delight in life
might have held that the soul is the one agent that can stand firm and
unshaken midst the flux of circumstance. The intelligent but passive
Hindu sees clearly that whatever illusions the soul may have, it really
passes on like everything else and continueth not in one stay. He is
disposed to think of it not as created with the birth of the body, but
as a drop drawn from some ocean to which it is destined to return. As a
rule he considers it to be immortal but he does not emphasize or value
personality in our sense. In previous births he has already been a great
many persons and he will be a great many more. Whatever may be the
th