In the Brahmanas we can follow the growth of a luxuriant theology for the use of the masses which, in so far as it was polytheistic, tended to the infinite multiplication of gods and goddesses and godlings of all types, and in so far as it was pantheistic invested not only men, but beasts and insects and rivers and fountains and trees and stones with some living particle of the divine essence pervading all things; and we can follow there also the erection on the basis of that theology, of a formidable ritual of which the exclusive exercise and the material benefits were the appanage of the Brahman. But we have to turn to a later collection of writings known as the Upanishads for our knowledge of the more abstract speculations out of which Hindu thinkers, not always of the Brahmanical caste, were concurrently evolving the esoteric systems of philosophy that have exercised an immense and abiding influence on the spiritual life of India. There is the same difficulty in assigning definite dates to the Upanishads, though many of the later ones bear the post-mark of the various periods of theological evolution with which they coincided. Only some of the earliest ones are held by many competent authorities to be, in the shape in which they have reached us, anterior to the time when India first becomes, in any real sense, historical; but there is no reason to doubt that they represent the progressive evolution into different forms of very ancient germs already present in the Vedas themselves. They abound in the same extravagant eclecticism, leading often to the same confusions and contradictions that Hindu theology presents. The Sankhya Darshana, or system, recognising only a primary material cause from which none but finite beings can proceed, regards the universe and all that exists in it and life itself as a finite illusion of which the end is non-existence, and its philosophic conceptions are atheistic rather than pantheistic. In opposition to it the Vedantic system of mystic pantheism, whilst also seeing in this finite world a mere world of illusion, holds that rescue from it will come to each individual soul after a more or less prolonged series of rebirths, determined for better or for worse by its own spirituality according to the law of Karma, not in non-existence, but in its fusion with God, whose identity with the soul of man is merely temporarily obscured by the world illusion of Maya. Only the inconceivable is real, for it is God, but God dwells in the heart of every man, who, if and when he can realise it and has detached himself from his unworthy because unreal surroundings, is himself God. Akin to Vedantic mysticism is the Yoga system, which teaches extreme asceticism, retirement into solitude, fastings, nudity, mortification of the flesh, profound meditation on unfathomable mysteries, and the endless reiteration of magic words and phrases as the means of accelerating that ineffable fusion of God and man. The