Page:Life in India or Madras, the Neilgherries, and Calcutta.djvu/409

Rh imaginary being will burst, and all relapse again into Brahm.

Such are the vain dreams, the “philosophy, falsely so called," with which multitudes of the most intellectual of the Hindus delude themselves and their followers. All distinctions of right and wrong, all moral responsibility, all motives to virtue, are thus destroyed; sin and holiness, vice and virtue, are equally vain and illusory. A selfish enjoyment of all the good they can attain in this deceptive existence becomes the only object of life. Truly, “thinking themselves wise, they have become fools."

The philosophers of the, or system of two existences, advocate the reality of two separate substances—spirit and matter, and recognise them as entering into the composition of the universe; but how the union of the two is effected, and upon what terms is a point of debate. Some say that matter is eternal, and only modified in its forms by the sakti or energy of the deity; others that it is something emanating from the deity himself. Pantheism, or the belief that God is every thing, is deeply rooted in the minds of the masses. The soul, they believe, is but a portion of the divine Spirit united to a portion of matter; and even that