ity.

Another striking fact connected with this doctrine is that it
seems to be a native and ineradicable growth of the Oriental
world; but appears in the Western world only in scattered
instances, and rather as an exotic form of thought. In the growing
freedom and liberality of thought, which no less than its doubt
and denial, now characterize Christendom, it seems as if the full
time had come for a greater mental and asthetic hospitality on the
part of Christians towards Hindus. The advocates of the
resurrection should not confine their attention to the repellent
or the ludicrous aspects of metempsychosis, but do justice to its
claim and its charm. The Pantheistic tendency which possessed and
overwhelmed the Brahminic mind, shaping and tinging its views
opened the whole range of sentient existences to an indiscriminate
sympathy, and made the idea of transmigration natural, and more
pleasing than repugnant. Furthermore, the Brahminic thinkers and
sages were a distinct class of men whose whole lives were absorbed
in introspective reveries and metaphysical broodings calculated to
stimulate the imagination and arouse to the keenest consciousness
all the latent marvels and possibilities of human experience, thus
furnishing the most favorable conditions for exactly such a belief
as that of transmigration, an endless series of ever varying
adventures for the imperishable soul. And the vast swarms of the
common people in the East are the passive followers of this high
caste of thinkers, abjectly accepting what they teach.
Accordingly, the mysterious doctrine of the metempsychosis has
held the entire mind, sentiment and civilization of the East,
through every period of its history, as with an irreversible
spell.

The persistent practice of various modes of profound and
rhythmical breathing by which the Brahmins perfect their
respiration, and the keen and sustained concentration of their
attention on their inner states, tend at the same time to heighten
the richness and intensity of the cerebral nerves, to unify the
connections of the lower nerve centres with them, and to fuse the
unconscious physiological processes with the conscious
psychological processes. Then the persevering disuse and
suppression of the action of their outer senses cause the objects
of the material world around them to seem more vague and dreamy
than the impressions of the ideal world within. And so the earth
with all its affairs seems an illusion, w