orship and philosophy in India. There were popular deities
and rites to which the Brahmans were not opposed and which they
countenanced when it suited them. What takes place in India to-day
took place then. When some aboriginal deity becomes important owing to
the prosperity of the tribe or locality with which he is connected, he
is recognized by the Brahmans and admitted to their pantheon, perhaps
as the son or incarnation of some personage more generally accepted as
divine. The prestige of the Brahmans is sufficient to make such
recognition an honour, but it is also their interest and millennial
habit to secure control of every important religious movement and to
incorporate rather than suppress. And this incorporation is more than
mere recognition: the parvenu god borrows something from the manners
and attributes of the olympian society to which he is introduced. The
greater he grows, the more considerable is the process of fusion and
borrowing. Hindu philosophy ever seeks for the one amongst the many
and popular thought, in a more confused way, pursues the same goal. It
combines and identifies its deities, feeling dimly that taken singly
they are too partial to be truly divine, or it piles attributes upon
them striving to make each an adequate divine whole.

Among the processes which have contributed to form Vishnu and Siva we must
reckon the invasions which entered India from the north-west.[336] In
Bactria and Sogdiana there met and were combined the art and religious
ideas of Greece and Persia, and whatever elements were imported by the
Yueeh-chih and other tribes who came from the Chinese frontier. The
personalities of Vishnu and Siva need not be ascribed to foreign
influence. The ruder invaders took kindly to the worship of Siva, but there
is no proof that they introduced it. But Persian and Graeco-Bactrian
influence favoured the creation of more definite deities, more personal and
more pictorial. The gods of the Vedic hymns are vague and indistinct: the
Supreme Being of the Upanishads altogether impersonal, but Mithra and
Apollo, though divine in their majesty, are human in their persons and in
the appeal they make to humanity. The influence of these foreign
conceptions and especially of their representation in art is best seen in
Indian Buddhism. Hinduism has not so ancient an artistic record and
therefore the Graeco-Bactrian influence on it is less obvious, for the
sculpture of the Gupta period does not seem