our temperament, for it is the persistent ideal of a great nation and cannot be explained away as hallucination or charlatanism.  It is allied to the experiences of European mystics of whom St Teresa is a striking example, though less saintly persons, such as Walt Whitman and J.A.  Symonds, might also be cited.  Of such mysticism William James said “the existence of mystical states absolutely overthrows the pretension of non-mystical states to be the sole and ultimate dictators of what we may believe[48].”

These mystical states are commonly described as meditation but they include not merely peaceful contemplation but ecstatic rapture.  They are sometimes explained as union with Brahman[49], the absorption of the soul in God, or its feeling that it is one with him.  But this is certainly not the only explanation of ecstasy given in India, for it is recognized as real and beneficent by Buddhists and Jains.  The same rapture, the same sense of omniscience and of ability to comprehend the scheme of things, the same peace and freedom are experienced by both theistic and non-theistic sects, just as they have also been experienced by Christian mystics.  The experiences are real but they do not depend on the presence of any special deity, though they may be coloured by the theological views of individual thinkers[50].  The earliest Buddhist texts make right rapture (samma samadhi) the end and crown of the eight-fold path but offer no explanation of it.  They suggest that it is something wrought by the mind for itself and without the co-operation or infusion of any external influence.

13.

Indian ideas about the destiny of the soul are connected with equally important views about its nature.  I will not presume to say what is the definition of the soul in European philosophy but in the language of popular religion it undoubtedly means that which remains when a body is arbitrarily abstracted from a human personality, without enquiring how much of that personality is thinkable without a material substratum.  This popular soul includes mind, perception and desire and often no attempt is made to distinguish it from them.  But in India it is so distinguished.  The soul (atman or purusha) uses the mind and senses:  they are its instruments rather than parts of it.  Sight, for instance, serves as the spectacles of the soul, and the other senses and even the mind (manas) which is an intellectual organ are also instruments.  If we talk of a soul passing from death to another birth, this according to most Hindus is a soul accompanied by its baggage of mind and senses, a subtle body indeed, but still gaseous not spiritual.  But what is the soul by itself?  When an English poet sings of death that it is “Only the sleep eternal in an eternal night” or a Greek poet calls it [Greek:  atermona negreton hupnon] we feel that they are denying immortality.  But Indian divines maintain that deep sleep is one of the states in which the soul approaches nearest