Europeans as a rule have an innate dislike and mistrust of the doctrine that the world is vain or unreal.  They can accord some sympathy to a dying man who sees in due perspective the unimportance of his past life or to a poet who under the starry heavens can make felt the smallness of man and his earth.  But such thoughts are considered permissible only as retrospects, not as principles of life:  you may say that your labour has amounted to nothing, but not that labour is vain.  Though monasteries and monks still exist, the great majority of Europeans instinctively disbelieve in asceticism, the contemplative life and contempt of the world:  they have no love for a philosopher who rejects the idea of progress and is not satisfied with an ideal consisting in movement towards an unknown goal.  They demand a religion which theoretically justifies the strenuous life.  All this is a matter of temperament and the temperament is so common that it needs no explanation.  What needs explanation is rather the other temperament which rejects this world as unsatisfactory and sets up another ideal, another sphere, another standard of values.  This ideal and standard are not entirely peculiar to India but certainly they are understood and honoured there more than elsewhere.  They are professed, as I have already observed, by Christianity, but even the New Testament is not free from the idea that saints are having a bad time now but will hereafter enjoy a triumph, parlously like the exuberance of the wicked in this world.  The Far East too has its unworldly side which, though harmonizing with Buddhism, is native.  In many ways the Chinese are as materialistic as Europeans, but throughout the long history of their art and literature, there has always been a school, clear-voiced if small, which has sung and pursued the joys of the hermit, the dweller among trees and mountains who finds nature and his own thoughts an all-sufficient source of continual happiness.  But the Indian ideal, though it often includes the pleasures of communion with nature, differs from most forms of the Chinese and Christian ideal inasmuch as it assumes the reality of certain religious experiences and treats them as the substance and occupation of the highest life.  We are disposed to describe these experiences as trances or visions, names which generally mean something morbid or hypnotic.  But in India their validity is unquestioned and they are not considered morbid.  The sensual scheming life of the world is sick and ailing; the rapture of contemplation is the true and healthy life of the soul.  More than that it is the type and foretaste of a higher existence compared with which this world is worthless or rather nothing at all.  This view has been held in India for nearly three thousand years:  it has been confirmed by the experience of men whose writings testify to their intellectual power and has commanded the respect of the masses.  It must command our respect too, even if it is contrary to