or incarnation of some personage more generally accepted as divine.  The prestige of the Brahmans is sufficient to make such recognition an honour, but it is also their interest and millennial habit to secure control of every important religious movement and to incorporate rather than suppress.  And this incorporation is more than mere recognition:  the parvenu god borrows something from the manners and attributes of the olympian society to which he is introduced.  The greater he grows, the more considerable is the process of fusion and borrowing.  Hindu philosophy ever seeks for the one amongst the many and popular thought, in a more confused way, pursues the same goal.  It combines and identifies its deities, feeling dimly that taken singly they are too partial to be truly divine, or it piles attributes upon them striving to make each an adequate divine whole.

Among the processes which have contributed to form Vishnu and Siva we must reckon the invasions which entered India from the north-west.[336] In Bactria and Sogdiana there met and were combined the art and religious ideas of Greece and Persia, and whatever elements were imported by the Yueeh-chih and other tribes who came from the Chinese frontier.  The personalities of Vishnu and Siva need not be ascribed to foreign influence.  The ruder invaders took kindly to the worship of Siva, but there is no proof that they introduced it.  But Persian and Graeco-Bactrian influence favoured the creation of more definite deities, more personal and more pictorial.  The gods of the Vedic hymns are vague and indistinct:  the Supreme Being of the Upanishads altogether impersonal, but Mithra and Apollo, though divine in their majesty, are human in their persons and in the appeal they make to humanity.  The influence of these foreign conceptions and especially of their representation in art is best seen in Indian Buddhism.  Hinduism has not so ancient an artistic record and therefore the Graeco-Bactrian influence on it is less obvious, for the sculpture of the Gupta period does not seem due to this inspiration.  Neither in outward form nor in character do Vishnu and Siva show much more resemblance to Apollo and Mithra than to the Vedic gods.  Their exuberant, fantastic shapes, their many heads and arms, are a symbol of their complex and multiple attributes.  They are not restricted by the limits of personality but are great polymorphic forces, not to be indicated by the limits of one human shape.[337]

2

Though alike in their grandeur and multiplicity, Vishnu and Siva are not otherwise similar.  In their completely developed forms they represent two ways of looking at the world.  The main ideas of the Vaishnavas are human and emotional.  The deity saves and loves:  he asks for a worship of love.  He appears in human incarnations and is known as well or better by these incarnations than in his original form.  But in Sivaism the main current of thought is scientific and philosophic rather than emotional.[338]