what speculative doctrine he chooses, but he must not
eat, drink, or marry, save in accordance with the custom of his
caste. Compare Asoka on toleration; 'The sects of other people all
deserve reverence for one reason or another' (Rock Edict xii; V. A.
Smith, _Asoka_, 2nd edition (1909), p. 170).

11. Mir Salamat Ali is a stanch Sunni, the sect of Osman; and they
are always at daggers drawn with the Shias, or the sect of Ali. He
alludes to the Shias when he says that one of the seventy-two sects
is always ready to take in the whole of the other seventy-one.
Muhammad, according to the traditions, was one day heard to say, 'The
time will come when my followers will he divided into seventy-three
sects; all of them will assuredly go to hell save one.' Every one of
the seventy-three sects believes itself to be the one happily
excepted by their prophet, and predestined to paradise. I am
sometimes disposed to think Muhammad was self-deluded, however
difficult it might be to account for so much 'method in his madness'.
It is difficult to conceive a man placed in such circumstances with
more amiable dispositions or with juster views of the rights and
duties of men in all their relations with each other, than are
exhibited by him on almost all occasions, save where the question of
_faith_ in his divine mission was concerned.

A very interesting and useful book might be made out of the history
of those men, more or less mad, by whom multitudes of mankind have
been led and perhaps governed; and a philosophical analysis of the
points on which they were really mad and really sane, would show many
of them to have been fit subjects for a madhouse during the whole
career of their glory. [W. H. S.]

For an account of Muhammadan sects, see section viii of the
Preliminary Dissertation in Sale's Koran, entitled, 'Of the Principal
Sects among the Muhammadans; and of those who have pretended to
Prophecy among the Arabs, in or since the Time of Muhammad'; and T.
P. Hughes, _Dictionary of Islam_ (1885). The chief sects of the
Sunnis, or Traditionists, are four in number. 'The principal sects of
the Shias are five, which are subdivided into an almost innumerable
number.' The court of the kings of Oudh was Shia. In most parts of
India the Sunni faith prevails.

The relation between genius and insanity is well expressed by Dryden
(_Absalom and Achitopfel_):

Great wits are sure to madness near allied,
And thin partitions do their b