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evolution of pantheism or theism (though usually with a pantheistic tinge) out of the worship of nature forces
seems clear. These gods or forces are seen to melt into one another and to be aspects of one another, until the
mind naturally passes on to the idea that they are all manifestations of one force finding expression in human
consciousness as well as in physical phenomena. The animist and pantheist represent different stages but not
different methods of thought. For the former, every natural object which impresses him is alive; the latter
concurs in this view, only he thinks the universe is instinct with one and the same life displaying itself in
infinite variety.
One difficulty incidental to the treatment of Asiatic religions in European languages is the necessity, or at any
rate the ineradicable habit, of using well-known words like God and soul as the equivalents of Asiatic terms
which have not precisely the same content and which often imply a different point of view. For practical life it
is wise and charitable to minimize religious differences and emphasize points of agreement. But this
willingness to believe that others think as we do becomes a veritable vice if we are attempting an impartial
exposition of their ideas. If the English word God means the deity of ordinary Christianity, who is much the
same as Allah or Jehovah--that is to say the creator of the world and enforcer of the moral law--then it
would be better never to use this word in writing of the religions of India and Eastern Asia, for the concept is
almost entirely foreign to them. The nature spirits of which we have been speaking are clearly not God: when
an Indian peasant brings offerings to the tomb of a deceased brigand or the Emperor of China promotes some
departed worthy to be a deity of a certain class, we call the ceremony deification, but there is not the smallest
intention of identifying the person deified with the Supreme Being, and odd as it may seem, the worship of
such "gods" is compatible with monotheism or atheism. In China, Shang-ti is less definite than God[105] and
it does not appear that he is thought of as the creator of the world and of human souls. Even the greater Hindu
deities are not really God, for those who follow the higher life can neglect and almost despise them, without,
however, denying their existence. On the other hand Brahman, the pantheos of India, though equal to the
Christian God in majesty, is really a different conception, for he is not a creator in the ordinary sense: he is
impersonal and though not evil, yet he transcends both good and evil. He might seem merely a force more
suited to be the subject matter of science than of religion, were not meditation on him the occupation, and
union with him the goal, of many devout lives. And even when Indian deities are most personal, as in the
Vishnuite sects, it will be generally found that their relations to the world and the soul are not those of the
Christian God. It is because the conception of superhuman existence is so different in Europe and Asia that
Asiatic religions often seem contradictory or corrupt: Buddhism and Jainism, which we describe as atheistic,
and the colourless respectable religion of educated Chinese, become in their outward manifestations
unblushingly polytheistic.
Similar difficulties and ambiguities attend the use of the word soul, for Buddhism, which is supposed to hold
that there is no soul, preaches retribution in future existences for acts done in this, and seeks to terrify the evil
doer with the pains of hell; whereas the philosophy of the Brahmans, which inculcates a belief in the soul,
BOOK II. EARLY INDIAN RELIGION. A GENERAL VIEW 49
Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I.
seems to teach in some of its phases that the disembodied and immortal soul has no consciousness in the
ordinary human sense. Here language is dealing with the same problems as those which we describe by such
phrases as the soul, immortality and continuous existence, but it is striving to express ideas for which we have
little sympathy and no adequate terminology. They will be considered later.
But one attitude towards that which survives death is almost universal in Eastern Asia and also easily
intelligible. It finds expression in the ceremonies known as ancestor worship. This practice has attracted
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