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think the immortality of the soul probable enough, have still cavilled at the resurrection of the flesh, as thinking it too humble and gross a conception; but if, as you say, the soul is so distinct in its kind from every particle of earth, that we cannot even conceive of ourselves as human beings, nor be what we are without some combination which is developed out of matter, and enables us to apprehend things material as we do, then it will be clear that any restoration of our full identity in a new life will require the revival of this sensuous companion of the soul; and as you see no difficulty in the conception of this subtile person's being revived, so the Christian doctrine of the body which was sown corruptible being raised incorruptible, and therefore in some way spiritualised, turns out not to have been a gross conception, but a profoundly refined one. So far I have therefore to thank you for a sort of confirmation of a Christian doctrine.

Again, I am still more pleased to find you acknowledge so decidedly the immortal soul of man as something distinct in itself, not dependent on things earthly, and not liable to death, nor yet flowing out of an undefined source of spirit, but as individual and immortal. The careful way in which you isolate this soul from any combinations or processes of matter has also an interest for my mind, as recalling somewhat the language of St Paul, an apostle of Jesus, and a bishop of his Church. For he also confesses that there was a something in him by which he was affected with passionate feelings, and which he disliked to call himself; yet without which his consciousness of his own being would have been other than it actually was; yet, again, inside he had a deeper something which he felt to be more truly himself, and which consented to the law of Right, though yet his whole being did not, but was at variance. I delight,' he says, 'I in the law of God after the inner man; but I find another law in my members*. Only there was one difference between your doctrine and that of the apostle. You wish the soul to be reminded of her distinctness until she becomes indifferent not * Epistle to the Romans.

RESPONSIBILITY-SEAT OF AGENCY.

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merely to the events of the outer world, but also, if I understand you aright, to the very actions of the entire man. Whereas St Paul wishes that inner being, in virtue of which he says, I, to suffer patiently losses or wrongs, as things both imposed on him by a Heavenly Father, and also as of little import to one who expected an eternal inheritance; as regards all actions, however, his feeling is very different; he does not attempt to persuade himself that whatever he does is the blind doing of Pracriti, in such a sense as to make him not personally responsible for it. On the contrary, he blames himself for whatever in his performance comes short of the idea on which he has fixed the eye of his mind. Here then is a difference as to which I could wish you to reconsider your doctrine. For although you call the soul purusha, and perhaps rightly, as if it were more truly ourself; yet if we are only conscious of our entire personality, or, in fact, only become men in virtue of a sensuous though subtile organism, it will seem to follow that whatever we do as one being we may suffer for as one. Remorse, shame, and despair may accompany our humanity revived in some new world, for the actions it either was guilty of, or suffered itself to be betrayed into, while it lived here. So far then I do but partially agree with your doctrine about the soul; nor indeed is the fitness of rendering the soul indifferent to moral actions a doctrine agreeable to the sacred books for which you profess not to have shaken off your reverence. Perhaps you will consider whether the human conscience, if properly cultivated, and the very instinct of right and wrong which the soul displays, if she is truly educated, instead of misguided, would not make your doctrine here nearer to St Paul, and also make it more consistent with itself.

"It seems to me rather extraordinary that you should make knowledge in the highest sense reside in the soul, but agency generally in the body as a product of Pracriti. For surely it is clear that where there is knowledge there is power, or, as an old proverb says, 'to ken is to can.' For although by power some men may mean brute force, we know that such things yield to

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SOUL AND DEITY PARTLY CORRELATIVES.

contrivance, which comes of sagacity and mental perception. I cannot therefore admit it to be reasonable that Pracriti should be said to do everything and yet be ignorant, while soul is said to know everything and yet to be impotent-these two conceptions do not well agree.

"But now, what surprised me most in your system, as it seemed also to shock the A'chárya, is this. You give the human body a soul, but you are not convinced that the vast frame of the world has any supreme soul, except so far as forms of power and intelligence may have been developed out of the sea of life, like other productions of nature. You made it clear that the beings you call gods should be described as having souls; but still you represent their divine personality, in so far as they are objects of worship, to be entirely a transitory thing, since it is an efflux of nature, and everything except soul must pass away. It does not in the least console me, that you talk of such vast periods of time; for how do I know they will be so long? or who told you anything about them? I certainly could have wished you would have persuaded our Vedantine friend that each human soul is distinct in itself, as we believe; and that he in turn would persuade you to believe in Deity as the Highest Soul, and that Deity exists at least as independently of nature, as primæval before her life, and as eternal throughout her every change or annihilation, as you conceive the human soul to be in relation to our body. Seriously, I would ask, can you think the soul of man so godlike as to have life in itself, and to survive easily any multitude of bodies until finally it exists as soul, though not as humanity, apart from flesh or blood; and do you think the supreme Deity could have no being apart from earthly shapes, or the moulding of nature?

"You say that an independent Deity could have no inducement to create a world; but can we easily limit the range over which either the ambition, or the beneficence, or the desire to expand himself in any way, of even an ordinary human being may extend? One might as well argue that Alexander of

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Macedon, or Mahmud of Ghazni, having Greece and Affghanistan to dwell in, could never have wished to overrun India. Yet the first is said to have wept for another world to conquer, and the history of the second I need not remind you of. But surely beneficence is with good men as strong a passion as the love of conquest is with kings. You see instances of it sufficiently in your own missionaries, such as those of the Bauddhas formerly, or in the life of Sancara who went about teaching. How can we venture, then, in either modesty or soundness of mind, to say that an Intelligence which must be to all others nothing less than the aggregate of worlds is to a peasant's cottage, can have the range of its beneficence restricted, or the depths of its motives. fathomed, by guesses which our ignorance makes in the dark? Pray observe, that the motives of any supreme Mind creating and ordering the universe would, from the necessity of the case, transcend our comprehension. On my theory, therefore, I am not bound to explain the divine motives; for they may have been either any out of many such as may be piously attributed to an Object of the highest reverence, or they might even be of a kind beyond our conjecture. Having once reached the footstool of a Supreme Father, I can most reasonably believe His will a mystery, and acknowledge a point beyond which I despair of pushing the inquiry, yet without, on that account, being vanquished in our great argument; whereas, upon your theory of nature, you are bound to explain everything. If science would prove the world to have been made by ignorance, or by itself, she must shew how either of them made it. Take, for example, that primary plastic matter of yours, which I can compare to nothing but infinite quicksilver, but which you describe as a sort of ubiquitous fluid, and as being in fact the bubbling seed of life. Much more I ask, as even the greatest of physical inquirers have asked, where did such a fluid get its motive? could it even be moved at all, if law as the result of design or thought did not underlie its movements? You will readily admit that it moves in subjection to certain rules, and that however truly all the

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LAW, THOUGHT, CHANCE,

forms of matter may perhaps be resolved back into one primary fluid, that fluid has at least been varied into a thousand forms of life, according to the conditions under which it has moved. There has been heat melting, cold condensing, liquid flowing, lightness flying up, and gravity tending downward-these things are not more facts historically, than the order in which they are on the whole arranged is metaphysically a thought. Indeed, I humbly conceive, metaphysically, that it would not be possible to trace back the process by thought, unless its arrangement, in fact, had been orderly, and such as proceeds from design. For if ever you arrive at things which are literally the work of chance, though it is not very easy to find such, no one then ventures to predict an order, or attempts to trace one. Thus, as to which of the myriad drops of salt water will wet each grain of sand on the shore we give no account, for it seems to be chance; but the great body of the tide we predict, and that seems to be law. The same remark of the utter uncertainty of pure chance may often be made as to the units, even when we have no doubt as to the aggregate. Thus we do not know which pigeon out of a flock will get a particular grain of corn when we throw a handful at random, though we may be certain the corn will be all eaten, and the pigeons in the mass fed. I have, in talking to Dr Wolff, already glanced at the idea of fixed proportions, according to which the primary forms into which we actually trace nature become combined together. If all these are evolutions, as you suppose, of one indissoluble fluid, they must have been evolved out of it, on some law of combination equally implying arrangement. Again, it seems a favourite theory with some of us, that time is the mental order of events, and space the capacity of arranging objects. So far as I at all understand* such an imagination, it seems very consistent with my argument for a creative mind, though not perhaps necessary to it. For just as time would be nothing to us if we did not notice it and devise ways of marking it, so that, in fact, we create human time by thinking * Confiteor tibi, Domine, me nescire adhuc quid sit tempus.-St Augustine.