Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/628

 NEW BOOKS. 615 life of the beast, so is love the life of the spirit. Being is to be developed by and through natural, designed relativity ; through the harmonious union and communion of spirits with each other, and with the Father of Spirits this is the true unity of Being, the true service of God." In spite of what the author calls its " not very orderly elaboration," there is much in the book that is philosophically suggestive. It is illustrated by the results of multifarious reading, especially among the philosophers and poets. The Cosmology of the Rigveda. An Essay. By H. W. WALLIS, M.A., Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. Published by the Hibbert Trustees. London : Williams & Norgate, 1887. Pp. xii., 130. " The object of this essay," the author says, " is not so much to present a complete picture of the cosmology of the Rigveda, as to supply the material from which such a picture may be drawn. The writer has endeavoured to leave no strictly cosmological passage without a reference, and to add references to illustrative passages when they appeared to indicate the direction in which an explanation may be sought." The result is a very full account of the imagery by which the JRishis represented the origin of "things, under the heads of " The Building of the World," "Generation" and "The Sacrifice" (cc. i.-iii., pp. 16-90). The general conclusion may best be summarised in the author's own words : " We have now passed in review the three most circumstantial explanations of the origin of the world. In the first chapter it was regarded as a work of art ; and since the principal manufacture known to the men of the time was the working of wood, the world was pronounced a production of builders and joiners. In the second chapter the origin of the world was ascribed to the agency of that visible process which is the cause of all natural, as opposed to mechanical, production. In the argument of this chapter (c. iii.) the origin of the world was supposed to have been effected by a similar instrumentality to that which is represented as the most efficacious in the hands of man, the formal sacrifice. The three explana- tions are not mutually exclusive ; any two of them or all three are frequently combined together in one verse. The classification adopted in this essay is, therefore, to be regarded as one of practical convenience only. Further, it must not be supposed that what is here described as the system of the Rishis was their exclusive possession. There may have been laymen whose views were more sacerdotal than those of the priests ; as there may have been, and doubtless were, priests to whom speculation was dearer than ritual. On the other hand, a classification based on later forms of thought would have been positively misleading. We may very easily persuade ourselves that in some isolated verse we have discovered the starting-point of a later philosophy, where the comparison of similar passages shows that it was only the poverty of our imagination which confined the meaning within our own particular range of thought. The Rigveda must be made its own commentary. It is a not infrequent occurrence that a whole complex of modern ideas finds its most happy and appropriate expression in an old term, or a proper name or attribute, or in the words of an ancient saying. The words themselves have contributed nothing to the formation of the ideas ; they had lost their first meaning and were fast falling into oblivion, when the breath of a spirit from another sphere inspired them with a new vitality." The great difference of the speculations of the Veda from those of the Upanishads and of later philosophy is that the former are more disinterested ; representing the origin of the world in analogy with the known modes of the production of things, but with no thought of purpose. The three chapters above referred to are preceded by an introduction on the distinguishing charac-