ever around her, and her cult is tinged with darkness; but she is fond of pleasure, and seeks it deliriously.  Like Greece, she loves beauty, but she loves more to decorate it; and again, she rejoices in her gods, but she rejoices with fear; fear that overcomes reason, and pictures such horrors as are conjured up by the wild leaps of an uncurbed fancy.  For an imagination that knows no let has run away with every form of her intellectual productivity, theosophy as well as art.  This is perceptible even in her ritualistic, scientific, and philosophical systems; for though it is an element that at first seems incongruous with such systems, it is yet in reality the factor that has produced them.  Complex, varied, minute, exact, as are the details which she loves to elaborate in all her work, they are the result of this same unfettered imagination, which follows out every fancy, pleased with them all, exaggerating every present interest, unconfined by especial regard for what is essential.[16] This is a heavy charge to bring, nor can it be passed over with the usual remark that one must accept India’s canon as authoritative for herself, for the taste of cosmopolitan civilization is the only norm of judgment, a norm accepted even by the Hindus of the present day when they have learned what it is.  But we do not bring the charge of extravagance for the sake of comparing India unfavorably with the Occident.  Confining ourselves to the historical method of treatment which we have endeavored heretofore to maintain, we wish to point out the important bearings which this intellectual trait has had upon the lesser products of India’s religious activity.

Through the whole extent of religious literature one finds what are apparently rare and valuable bits of historical information.  It is these which, from the point of view to which we have just referred, one must learn to estimate at their real worth.  In nine cases out of ten, these seeming truths are due only to the light imagination of a subsequent age, playing at will over the records of the past, and seeking by a mental caper to leap over what it fails to understand.  To the Oriental of an age still later all the facts deducible from such statements as are embodied in the hoary literature of antiquity appear to be historical data, and, if mystic in tone, these statements are to him an old revelation of profoundest truth.  But the Occidental, who recognizes no hidden wisdom in palpable mystification, should hesitate also to accept at their face value such historical notes as have been drafted by the same priestly hand.

Nor would we confine the application of this principle to the output of extant Brahmanic works.  The same truth cuts right and left among many utterances of the Vedic seers and all the theories built upon them.  To pick out here and there an ipse dixit of one of the later fanciful Vedic poets, who lived in a period as Brahmanic (that is, as ritualistic) as is that which is represented by the actual ritual-texts, and attempt to reconstruct the original form of divinities on the basis of such vagaries is useless, for it is an unhistorical method which ignores ancient conditions.