o know nothing about it," said I. "I would not accuse you of a
contradiction of terms, either. I have often thought that what some
people call the 'philosophy of the nineteenth century,' is nothing after
all but the unconscious application of transcendental analysis to the
everyday affairs of life. Consider the theories of Darwin, for instance.
What are they but an elaborate application of the higher calculus? He
differentiates men into protoplasms, and integrates protoplasms into
monkeys, and shows the caudal appendage to be the independent variable,
a small factor in man, a large factor in monkey. And has not the idea of
successive development supplanted the early conception of spontaneous
perfection? Take an illustration from India--the new system of
competition, which the natives can never understand. Formerly the
members of the Civil Service received their warrants by divine
authority, so to speak. They were born perfect, as Aphrodite from the
foam of the sea; they sprang armed and ready from the head of old John
Company as Pallas Athene from the head of Zeus. Now all that is changed;
they are selected from a great herd of candidates by methods of extreme
exactness, and when they are chosen they represent the final result of
infinite probabilities for and against their election. They are all
exactly alike; they are a formula for taxation and the administration of
justice, and so long as you do not attempt to use the formula for any
other purpose, such, for instance, as political negotiation or the
censorship of the public press, the equation will probably be amenable
to solution."

"As I told you," said Isaacs, "I know nothing, or next to nothing, of
Western mathematics, but I have a general idea of the comparison you
make. In Asia and in Asiatic minds, there prevails an idea that
knowledge can be assimilated once and for all. That if you can obtain
it, you immediately possess the knowledge of everything--the pass-key
that shall unlock every door. That is the reason of the prolonged
fasting and solitary meditation of the ascetics. They believe that by
attenuating the bond between soul and body, the soul can be liberated
and can temporarily identify itself with other objects, animate and
inanimate, besides the especial body to which it belongs, acquiring thus
a direct knowledge of those objects, and they believe that this direct
knowledge remains. Western philosophers argue that the only acquaintance
a man can have