conception of love, for which he substitutes knowledge.  Primitive Christianity conceived the connection between body and soul, the encumbering of the soul by the body, as it were, as a temptation or a punishment; according to the Vedas, it is merely a delusion to which the sage is not subject.  Before his keen vision, the deception falls to the ground, and by this very fact he is delivered.  To the feeling of Europe and Christianity, however, life and the universe are genuine, deep realities, the touchstone of the soul.  Love is the soul’s greatest treasure and the only true path to God; knowledge can never take its place.  “The divine stream of love flowing through the soul,” says Eckhart, “carries the soul along with it to its origin, to the bourne of all knowledge, to God.”

The very general identification of the Christian and Indian mystics—­a fact which is accounted for by their common metaphysical tendency—­is based on an error; Indian mysticism and Christian mysticism originated in different concepts; here the centre of all being is laid in love and in the soul of man, there it is contained in knowledge and in Brahma.  But ultimately, at the termination of the world-process, they will meet, although coming from different directions.  “While the soul worships a God, realises a God and knows of a God,” says Eckhart, “it is separated from God.  This is God’s purpose, to annihilate Himself in the soul, so that the soul, too, shall lose itself.  For God has been called God by the creatures.”  The words “The soul creates God from within, is connected with the divine and becomes divine itself,” are highly significant.  To the Vedantist the soul of man is an emanation from the world-soul:  “Although God differs from the individual soul, the individual soul does not differ from God.”  At this point it is no longer an easy matter to distinguish the feeling of the Christian mystic from the feeling of the Brahmin; though their valuations of man, life and the world differ, nay, are even opposed to each other, they finally meet in God.  We read in the Vedanta:  “The force which created and maintains the universe, the eternal principle of all being, dwells entirely and undividedly in every one of us.  Our self is identical with the supreme deity and only apparently differentiated from it.  Whosoever has mastered this truth has become at one with all creation; whosoever has not mastered it, is a stranger and a foe to all creatures.”

I do not intend to depreciate Indian wisdom; I merely desire to point out its inherent dissimilarity to Western thought; my task of laying hold of the spirit of Europe in its crises and watching its growth is bound to be advanced by this division.