Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/37

 Ganges, the Sun, the Himalaya (which is the special dwelling-place of Siva), become identified with Brahma himself. So too with love, deceit, theft, avarice, as well as the sensuous powers of nature in plants and animals, so that Substance has the form of animals and the like. All these are conceived of by imagination as free and independent, and thus there arises an infinite world of Deities of particular powers and phenomena, which is notwithstanding known as subordinated to something above it. At the head of this world stands Indra, the god of the visible heavens. These gods are mutable and perishable, and are in subjection to the Supreme One; abstraction absorbs them: the power which man acquires by means of these gods strikes them with terror; indeed, Vismavitra even creates another Indra and other gods!

Thus these particular spiritual and natural Powers, which are regarded as deities, are at one time independent, and at another are regarded as vanishing, it being their nature to be submerged in the absolute unity, in Substance, and to spring into existence again out of it.

Thus the Hindus say there have already been many thousand Indras, and there will yet be more; in the same way the incarnations, too, are held to be transient. The substantial unity does not become concrete because the particular Powers return into it, but, on the contrary, it remains abstract unity; and it also does not become concrete although these determinate existences proceed out of it; rather they are phenomena with the characteristic of independence, and are posited outside of that unity.

To form an estimate of the number and value of these deities is wholly out of the question here; there is nothing which takes a fixed shape, since all definite form is wanting to this fantastic imagination. These shapes disappear again in the same manner in which they are begotten; fancy passes over from an ordinary external mode of existence to divinity, and this in like manner returns back again to that which was its starting-point.