But by and by even this belief ceased to satisfy them, for how could man hope to liberate himself from the bondage of endless change as long as, seeking only a happier existence, he was content to be a citizen of the changeable? Let him seek reunion with Brahma, of which he is an emanation. So here again, while the Westerns were finding the path which would lead them from polytheism to theism, and were growing into nobler conceptions of what the individual self should be, the speculative ascetics of the East, in a life of meditation far apart, were trying to subside rather than rise into Brahma the Absolute as a river reunites with the ocean. In their earlier Brahmanas their fathers knew nothing of Brahma as deity, and at no time did Brahma mean to the Indian what deity meant to the Western Aryan. Polytheism in India never became theism in the old Greek sense, nor even Pantheism in our nineteenth-century sense. The mysterious all-pervading Presence was indeed early detected by the Indians as the “Breath” of all things, but the name employed by them to distinguish it signified only the universal self. In no sense was it the conscious author, but only the irrepressible source of things because reflected upon by illusion. Brahma Atman was neither the infinitely intelligent nor the perfectly blessed, in our sense of the word. It was simply thought without cognition, beatitude without consciousness. “The Hindu never thinks of asserting that Brahma knows or even has consciousness, but always that Brahma is knowledge.” “It is simply impersonal being, absolute unity contrasted with disruption, from which existence, as an emanation wholly and only evil, because originating in a mistake, must move through endless cycles of change, until the way of escape be discovered and followed by which the erratic spark may be absorbed in the central fire.”[97] Such a speculation was manifestly an advance upon Vedic materialism, which sought to bring down the gods to the side of man as useful guardians, and upon early Brahmanism which sought by sacrifice to force them to do man’s will, and by and by to elevate man to their level. In endeavouring, however, to abstract its disciples from the superstitions of the priests, it tampered with the foundations of religion. It never attempted to propitiate the gods—for, even if superior to man, they were as much involved in the labyrinth of transmigration as he was himself,—but it professed in a universe of illusion to have discovered the only real. It dared to name the Absolute; so, withdrawing from the world, it practiced austerities for the sake of illumination, gave itself up to meditation to reduce the personal self to an abstraction, and endeavoured thus to escape from the necessity of existence in time and space into “passionless, characterless being.”