Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/175

156 always imperfect immediacy of the brute data of sense, but through a finding of a final and ideally perfect Immediate Fact.

Historically, as I have said, Mysticism first appears in India. Its early history is recorded in the Upanishads. But this early history contains already essentially the whole story of the Mystic faith. These half philosophical, half dogmatic treatises, compounded in a singular fashion of folk-lore, of legend, of edifying homily, and of reflective speculation, have for a number of years been best known to English readers through Professor Max Müller’s Sacred Books of the East. They have lately been made more accessible than before, to the philosophical student, by the translations and comments of Professor Deussen, of Kiel, himself a learned representative of a modern philosophical Mysticism of the Schopenhauerian type. I venture upon no independent opinion as to the composition and chronology of these early Hindoo works. I take as simply as possible what upon their face they seem to contain. I read as well as I can Deussen’s systematic interpretation of their general sense; and then, as I try to restate this sense in my own way, I find, amidst all the numerous doctrinal varieties of these various Hindoo Scriptures, this main thought concerning the ultimate definition of Being.

What is, is at all events somehow One. This thought came early to the Hindoo religious mind. For the sake of its illustration and defence, the thinkers of the Upanishads seize, at first, upon every legend, upon