to our brother J.W.  Farquhar.  It is from Swedenborg, in the “Apocalypse Explained,” No. 57:—­“Every man has an inferior or exterior mind, and a mind superior or interior.  These two minds are altogether distinct.  By the inferior mind man is in the natural world together with men there; but by the superior mind he is in the spiritual world with the angels there.  These two minds are so distinct that man so long as he lives in the world does not know what is performing within himself in his superior mind; but when he becomes a spirit, which is immediately after death, he does not know what is performing in his mind.”  The consciousness of the “superior mind,” as the result of mere separation from the earthly body, certainly does not suggest that sublime condition which implies separation from so much more than the outer garment of flesh, but otherwise the distinction between the two lives, or minds, seems to correspond with that now under consideration.

What is it that strikes us especially about this substitution of the divine-human for the human-natural personality?  Is it not the loss of individualism? (Individualism, pray observe, not individuality.) There are certain sayings of Jesus which have probably offended many in their hearts, though they may not have dared to acknowledge such a feeling to themselves:  “Woman, what have I to do with thee?” and those other disclaimers of special ties and relationships which mar the perfect sympathy of our reverence.  There is something awful and incomprehensible to us in this repudiation of individualism, even in its most amiable relations.  But it is in the Aryan philosophies that we see this negation of all that we associate with individual life most emphatically and explicitly insisted on.  It is, indeed, the impossibility of otherwise than thus negatively characterizing the soul that has attained Moksha (deliverance from bonds) which has caused the Hindu consummation to be regarded as the loss of individuality and conscious existence.  It is just because we cannot easily dissociate individuality from individualism that we turn from the sublime conception of primitive philosophy as from what concerns us as little as the ceaseless activity and germination in other brains of thought once thrown off and severed from the thinking source, which is the immortality promised by Mr. Frederick Harrison to the select specimens of humanity whose thoughts have any reproductive power.  It is not a mere preference of nothingness, or unconscious absorption, to limitation that inspires the intense yearning of the Hindu mind for Nirvana.  Even in the Upanishads there are many evidences of a contrary belief, while in the Sankhya the aphorisms of Kapila unmistakably vindicate the individuality of soul (spirit).  Individual consciousness is maintained, perhaps infinitely intensified, but its “matter” is no longer personal.  Only try to realize what “freedom from desire,” the favourite phrase in which individualism is negated in these systems, implies.  Even in that form of devotion which consists in action, the soul is warned in the Bhagavad-Gita that it must be indifferent to results.