they are so depicted[730] but it
will be observed that the animal kingdom is placed between the hells and
humanity, obviously not as having its local habitation there but as
better off than the one, though inferior to the other, and perhaps if we
pointed this out to the Hindu artist he would smile and say that his
many storeyed picture must not be taken so literally: all states of
being are merely states of mind, hellish, brutish, human and divine.

Grotesque as Hindu notions of the world may seem, they include two great
ideas of modern science. The universe is infinite or at least
immeasurable[731]. The vision of the astronomer who sees a solar system
in every star of the milky way is not wider than the thought that
devised these Cakkavalas or spheres, each with a vista of heavens and a
procession of Buddhas, to look after its salvation. Yet compared with
the sum of being a sphere is an atom. Space is filled by aggregates of
them, considered by some as groups of three, by others as clusters of a
thousand. And secondly these world systems, with the living beings and
plants in them, are regarded as growing and developing by natural
processes, and, equally in virtue of natural processes, as decaying and
disintegrating when the time comes. In the Agganna-Sutta[732] we have a
curious account of the evolution of man which, though not the same as
Darwin's, shows the same idea of development or perhaps degeneration and
differentiation. Human beings were originally immaterial, aerial and
self-luminous, but as the world gradually assumed its present form they
took to eating first of all a fragrant kind of earth and then plants
with the result that their bodies became gross and differences of sex
and colour were produced.

No sect of Hinduism personifies the powers of evil in one figure
corresponding to Satan, or the Ahriman of Persia. In proportion as a
nation thinks pantheistically it is disinclined to regard the world as
being mainly a contest between good and evil. It is true there are
innumerable demons and innumerable good spirits who withstand them. But
just as there is no finality in the exploits of Rama and Krishna, so
Ravana and other monsters do not attain to the dignity of the Devil. In
a sense the destructive forces are evil, but when they destroy the world
at the end of a Kalpa the result is not the triumph of evil. It is
simply winter after autumn, leading to spring and another summer.

Buddhism having a stronger