It is wholly different with the thinkers of India. They seem to be able to postulate as the beginning of things an impersonal cause, a cause without perception, thought, or consciousness. They affirm that out of unconsciousness consciousness arises. They teach that out of Brahma, the unconscious, impersonal, passionless One, emanate all material worlds and sentient beings, gods as well as men. How profoundly this conception of the First Cause has reacted on the ethical speculations of the Hindu sages and on the moral life of India will appear a little further on. [Sidenote: The god Brahma (Brahman)] But this incomprehensible, unconscious, passionless Brahma is not the Brahma of the popular faith. The masses and even the philosophers themselves must have something more concrete. So this impersonal, neuter Brahma is conceived as giving existence to the personal, masculine God Brahma (Brahman), “the progenitor of all worlds, the first-born among beings.”[227] It is very necessary for the student of Brahmanic ethics to keep in mind the distinction between the uncreated, unconditioned, impersonal Brahma and the created, conditioned, personal Brahma, since there is here laid the foundation of a double goal for rational moral striving: the goal of the ascetic whose ultimate aim is deliverance from individual existence and absorption into the absolute, unchangeable, impersonal Brahma, which means a state of eternal unconsciousness--dreamless sleep; and the goal of the multitude, whose hope and aim is blissful, though temporary, union with the personal Brahma in the heaven of the mortal, conditioned gods.[228] [Sidenote: The system of castes] The ethical evolution in India was also profoundly influenced by a prehistoric event, namely, the subjection of the original non-Aryan population of the land by an intruding Aryan people. As a result of the long and bitter struggle the two races became separated by a sharp line of race prejudice and hatred. The dark-skinned natives were reduced to a state of servitude or dependence upon their conquerors. Intermarriages between the two races were strictly prohibited, and thus the population of the conquered districts of the peninsula became divided into two sharply defined classes. These constituted a model upon which Indian society was framed. Other classes were formed, and these gradually hardened into castes, that is, into classes between which marriages were prohibited. Four great castes arose: namely, priests or Brahmans, warriors and rulers, peasants and merchants, and sudras. Below these castes were the pariahs, or outcasts, made up of the most degraded of the natives. As time passed, still other divisions were formed, every occupation coming to constitute the basis of a new caste, till society was stratified like a geologic deposit.