Indian religions have more spirituality and a greater sense of the Infinite than our western creeds and more liberality.  They are not merely tolerant but often hold that the different classes of mankind have their own rules of life and suitable beliefs and that he who follows such partial truths does no wrong to the greater and all-inclusive truths on which his circumstances do not permit him to fix his attention.  And though some Indian religions may sanction bad customs, sacrifice of animals and immoral rites, yet on the whole they give the duty of kindness to animals a prominence unknown in Europe and are more penetrated with the idea that civilization means a gentle and enlightened temper—­an idea sadly forgotten in these days of war.  Their speculative interest can hardly be denied.  For instance, the idea of a religion without a personal God may seem distasteful or absurd but the student of human thought must take account of it and future generations may not find it a useless notion.  It is certain that in Asia we find Buddhist Churches which preach morality and employ ritual and yet are not theistic, and also various systems of pantheism which, though they may use the word God, obviously use it in a sense which has nothing in common with Christian and Mohammedan ideas.

India’s greatest contribution to religion is not intellectual, as the mass of commentaries and arguments produced by Hindus might lead us to imagine, but the persistent and almost unchallenged belief in the reality and bliss of certain spiritual states which involve intuition.  All Indians agree that they are real, even to the extent of offering an alternative superior to any ordinary life of pleasure and success, but their value for us is lessened by the variety of interpretations which they receive and which make it hard to give a more detailed definition than that above.  For some they are the intuition of a particular god, for others of divinity in general.  For Buddhists they mean a new life of knowledge, freedom and bliss without reference to a deity.  But apart from such high matters I believe that the mental training preliminary to these states—­what is called meditation and concentration—­is well worth the attention of Europeans.  I am not recommending trances or catalepsy:  in these as in other matters the Hindus are probably prone to exaggerate and the Buddha himself in his early quest for truth discarded trances as an unsatisfactory method.  But the reader can convince himself by experiment that the elementary discipline which consists in suppressing “discursive thought” and concentrating the mind on a particular object—­say a red flower—­so that for some time nothing else is present to the mind and the image of the flower is seen and realized in all its details, is most efficacious for producing mental calm and alertness.  By such simple exercises the mind learns how to rest and refresh itself.  Its quickness of apprehension and its retentive power are considerably increased, for words and facts imprinted on it when by the suppression of its ordinary activities it has thus been made a tabula rasa remain fixed and clear.