omulgated at so early a period. And on such a hypothesis it
is difficult to understand either the stress laid on the escape from
life as the highest aim or the sanctity held to attach to all kinds
of animal life. But these doctrines follow naturally on the belief
in a divine centre or focus of life from which all life emanates
for a time, to be ultimately reabsorbed. The Vaishnava reformers,
who arose subsequently, took the sun or the spirit of the sun as the
divine source of all life. They also preached the sanctity of animal
life, the transmigration of souls, and the final absorption of the
purified soul into the divine centre of life. The abolition of caste
was generally a leading feature of their doctrine and may have been
its principal social aim. The survival of the individual soul was not
a tenet of the earlier reformers, though the later ones adopted it,
perhaps in response to the growing perception of individuality. But
even now it is doubtful how far the separate existence of the
individual soul after it has finally left the world is a religious
dogma of the Hindus. The basis of Hindu asceticism is the necessity
of completely freeing the soul or spirit from all the appetites and
passions of the body before it can be reabsorbed into the god. Those
who have so mortified the body that the life merely subsists in it,
almost unwillingly as it were, and absolutely unaffected by human
desires or affections or worldly events, have rendered their individual
spark of life capable of being at once absorbed into the divine life
and equal in merit to it, while still on earth. Thus Hindu ascetics
in the last or perfect stage say, 'I am God,' or 'I am Siva,' and are
revered by their disciples and the people as divine. Both the Buddhists
and Jains lay the same stress on the value of asceticism as enabling
the soul to attain perfection through complete detachment from the
appetites and passions of the body and the cares of the world; and
the deduction therefore seems warranted that the end of the perfect
soul would be a similar reabsorption in the divine soul.

97. Decline of the caste system.

The caste system has maintained its vigour unimpaired either by
the political vicissitudes and foreign invasions of India or by
Muhammadan persecution. Except where it has been affected by European
education and inventions, Hindu society preserved until recently
a remarkably close resemblance to that of ancient Greece and Rome
i