t liberty, according to the rules
of Manu, to marry a girl of any or each of the castes below his own,
provided he has besides a wife belonging to his own class, for only such
a one should perform the duties of personal attendance and religious
observance devolving upon a married woman. As regards the children born
from unequal marriages of this description, they have the rights and
duties of the twice-born, if their mother belong to a twice-born caste,
otherwise they, like the offspring of the former class of
intermarriages, share the lot of the Sudra, and are excluded from the
investiture and the _savitri_. For this last reason the marriage of a
twice-born man with a Sudra woman is altogether discountenanced by some
of the later law books. At the time of the code of Manu the intermixture
of the classes had already produced a considerable number of
intermediate or mixed castes, which were carefully defined, and each of
which had a specific occupation assigned to it as its hereditary
profession.

The self-exaltation of the first class was not, it would seem,
altogether due to priestly arrogance and ambition; but, like a prominent
feature of the post-Vedic belief, the transmigration of souls, it was,
if not the necessary, yet at least a natural consequence of the
pantheistic doctrine. To the Brahmanical speculator who saw in the
numberless individual existences of animate nature but so many
manifestations of the one eternal spirit, to union with which they were
all bound to tend as their final goal of supreme bliss, the greater or
less imperfection of the material forms in which they were embodied
naturally presented a continuous scale of spiritual units from the
lowest degradation up to the absolute purity and perfection of the
supreme spirit. To prevent one's sinking yet lower, and by degrees to
raise one's self in this universal gradation, or, if possible, to attain
the ultimate goal immediately from any state of corporeal existence,
there was but one way--subjection of the senses, purity of life and
knowledge of the deity. "He" (thus ends the code of Manu) "who in his
own soul perceives the supreme soul in all beings and acquires
equanimity toward them all, attains the highest state of bliss." Was it
not natural then that the men who, if true to their sacred duties, were
habitually engaged in what was most conducive to these spiritual
attainments, that the Brahmanical class early learnt to look upon
themselves, even