ng." And he touched himself and said, "I am Brahma. I myself, my
real I, am God."

It sounds terribly irreverent, but he did not for a moment mean it so.
Go back to Gen. ii. 7, and try to define the meaning of the words, "the
breath of life," and you will, if you think enough, find yourself in a
position to understand how the Hindu, without revelation, ends as he
does in delusion.

But, intertwined with this central fibre of his faith, there were
strands of a strange philosophy; he held strongly the doctrine of
Illusion, by which the one impersonal Spirit, "in the illusion which
overspreads it, is to the external world what yarn is to cloth, what
milk is to curds, what clay is to a jar, but only in that illusion,"
that is, "he is not the actual material cause of the world, as clay of a
jar, but the illusory material cause, as a rope might be of a snake";
and the spirit of man "is that Spirit, personalised and limited by the
power of illusion; and the life of every living spirit is nothing but an
infinitesimal arc of the one endless circle of infinite existence."

Of course there are answers to this sort of reasoning which are
perfectly convincing to the Western, but they fail to appeal to the
Eastern mind. You suggest a practical test as to the reality or
otherwise of this "Illusion"--touch something, run a pin into yourself,
do anything to prove to yourself your own actuality, and he has his
answer ready. Though theoretically he holds that there is one, and only
one, Spirit, he "virtually believes in three conditions of being--the
real, the practical, and the illusory; for while he affirms that the
one Spirit, Brahma, alone has a real existence, he allows a practical
separate existence to human spirits, to the world, and to the personal
God or gods, as well as an illusory existence. Hence every object is to
be dealt with practically, as if it were really what it appears to be."

This is only the end of a long and very confusing argument, which I
expect I did not half understand, and he concluded it by quoting a
stanza, thus translated by Dr. Pope, from an ancient Tamil classic--

"O Being hard to reach,
O Splendour infinite, unknown, in sooth
I know not what to do!"

"He is far away from me," he said, "a distant God to reach," and when I
quoted from St. Augustine, "To Him who is everywhere, men come not by
travelling, but by loving," and showed him the words, which in Tamil are
sp