estiny. Every action is important for it helps
to determine the character of the next life, but this next life, even if
it should be passed in some temporary heaven, will not be essentially
different from the present. Before and behind there stretches a vista of
lives, past, present and to come, impermanent and unsatisfying, so that
future existences are spoken of not as immortality but as repeated
death.

4

This sense of weary reiteration is increased by two other doctrines,
which are prevalent in Hinduism, though not universal or uncontested.
The first of them identifies the human soul with the supreme and only
Being. The doctrine of Samsara holds that different forms of existence
may be phases of the same soul and thus prepares the way for the
doctrine that all forms of existence are the same and all souls parts
of, or even identical with the Atman or Self, the divine soul which not
only pervades the world but _is_ the world. Connected with this doctrine
is another, namely, that the whole world of phenomena is Maya or
illusion. Nothing really exists except the supreme Atman: all perception
of plurality and difference is illusion and error: the reality is unity,
identity and rest. The development of these ideas leads to some of the
principal systems of philosophy and will claim our attention later. At
present I merely give their outlines as indicative of Hindu thought and
temperament. The Indian thinks of this world as a circular and unending
journey, an ocean without shore, a shadow play without even a plot. He
feels more strongly than the European that change is in itself an evil
and he finds small satisfaction in action for its own sake. All his
higher aspirations bid him extricate himself from this labyrinth of
repeated births, this phantasmagoria of fleeting, unsubstantial visions
and he has generally the conviction that this can be done by knowledge,
for since the whole Samsara is illusion, it collapses and ceases so soon
as the soul knows its own real nature and its independence of phenomena.
This conviction that the soul in itself is capable of happiness and in
order to enjoy needs only the courage to know itself and be itself goes
far to correct the apathy which is the great danger of Indian thought.
It is also just to point out that from the Upanishads down to the
writings of Rabindranath Tagore in the present day Indian literature
from time to time enunciates the idea that the whole universe is the
man