[Sidenote:  Indian Pantheism.]

The forgotten singers and preachers of this prehistoric wisdom were as much haunted as we ourselves are with the harassing questions suggested by sin and sorrow, by life and death, and by aspirations after a higher state.  And many, perhaps we may say most of them, found comfort in the thought that essentially they belonged to an all comprehensive and infinite Life, in which, if they acted purely and nobly, their seeming personality might be merged and find peace.  Their frame of mind was religious rather than philosophical.  But their philosophy was naturally conformed to it; and in their contrast of the bewildering variety of finite visible things with the unity of the Eternal Being of which all are phases, those ancients were in close sympathy with the thoughts of the modern meditative saunterer by field and river and wood.

[Sidenote:  Differences between Ancient and Modern Conditions of Thought.]

But the enormous interval of time separating us from those early Indian thinkers necessarily involves very great differences in conditions of thought.  And we should not be surprised if amidst much in their writings that stirs our sympathy, there is also a great deal which is to us incongruous and absurd.  Therefore, it may be well before quoting these writings to note one or two points marking an almost incommensurable difference between their mode and ours of regarding the world.

[Sidenote:  1.  Survival In their day of Fetishistic and Animistic Ideas.]

1.  First, they were much less removed than we are from the influence of fetishistic and animistic traditions.  Even in the Greek and Roman classics the casual reader is often revolted by the grossly absurd stories told of gods and heroes.  And, indeed, it is impossible to conceive of the amours of Zeus (or Jove), for instance, with Leda, Europa or Danae as having been first conceived during an age marked by the poetic genius and comparative culture evinced in the most ancient epics.  But the most probable solution of the puzzle is that the earliest civilization inherited a number of animal stories, such as are characteristic of savagery in all parts of the world, and that the first literary generations into whose poetic myths those stories were transferred, being as much accustomed to them as to other surroundings of their childhood, such as bloody sacrifices, mystic expiations, and fantastic initiations, saw no incongruity in anything told them of the gods.  Besides, as those wild myths were associated with sacred rites, the inveterate conservatism of religion, which insisted on stone knives in sacrifices long after bronze and iron came in, was likely enough to maintain the divine importance of those fables, just as the historicity of Balaam’s ass and Jonah’s whale is in some churches piously upheld still.

[Sidenote:  2.  Ancient Ignorance of Natural Order.]