that have exercised an immense and abiding influence on the spiritual life of India.  There is the same difficulty in assigning definite dates to the Upanishads, though many of the later ones bear the post-mark of the various periods of theological evolution with which they coincided.  Only some of the earliest ones are held by many competent authorities to be, in the shape in which they have reached us, anterior to the time when India first becomes, in any real sense, historical; but there is no reason to doubt that they represent the progressive evolution into different forms of very ancient germs already present in the Vedas themselves.  They abound in the same extravagant eclecticism, leading often to the same confusions and contradictions that Hindu theology presents.  The Sankhya Darshana, or system, recognising only a primary material cause from which none but finite beings can proceed, regards the universe and all that exists in it and life itself as a finite illusion of which the end is non-existence, and its philosophic conceptions are atheistic rather than pantheistic.  In opposition to it the Vedantic system of mystic pantheism, whilst also seeing in this finite world a mere world of illusion, holds that rescue from it will come to each individual soul after a more or less prolonged series of rebirths, determined for better or for worse by its own spirituality according to the law of Karma, not in non-existence, but in its fusion with God, whose identity with the soul of man is merely temporarily obscured by the world illusion of Maya.  Only the inconceivable is real, for it is God, but God dwells in the heart of every man, who, if and when he can realise it and has detached himself from his unworthy because unreal surroundings, is himself God.  Akin to Vedantic mysticism is the Yoga system, which teaches extreme asceticism, retirement into solitude, fastings, nudity, mortification of the flesh, profound meditation on unfathomable mysteries, and the endless reiteration of magic words and phrases as the means of accelerating that ineffable fusion of God and man.  The materialism of the Sankhya and the idealism of the Vedanta combine to provoke the reaction of yet another system, the Mimansa, which stands for the eternal and divine revelation of the Vedas, codifies, so to say, their theology into liturgical laws, admits of no speculation or esoteric interpretation, and seems to subordinate the gods themselves to the forms of worship that consecrate their existence.

Of all the doctrines that these early speculations evolved, none has had a more enduring influence on Hinduism than that of the long and indeed infinite succession of rebirths through which man is doomed to pass before he reaches the ultimate goal either of non-existence or of absorption into the divine essence.  For none has done more to fortify the patriarchal principle which from the earliest times governed the tribal family, and to establish the Hindu conception of the family as it prevails to the present