Some Scriptures which are regarded as authoritative lie at the back of all the great religions. Thus Hindūism has the Veda. The word means knowledge, and this knowledge is of that which is eternally true. It is the knowledge of the Logos, the knowledge of the Lord of a universe; the knowledge of what _is_, not of what _seems_; the knowledge of realities, not of phenomena. This abides ever in the Logos; it is part of Himself. In its manifested form, as revealed for the helping of man, it becomes the _Vedās_, and in this form goes through many stages, until finally little of the original remains. All Hindū schools of philosophy acknowledge the supreme authority of the Vedas; but after this formal acknowledgment is made, the intellect is allowed to range freely at its will—to inquire, to judge, to speculate. Rigid as Hindūism is in its social polity, it has ever left the human intellect free; in philosophy, in metaphysic, it has ever realised that truth should be sought, and no penalty inflicted on error; error being sufficiently penalised by the fact that it _is_ error, and breeds misfortunes under natural laws. Even to-day that ancient liberty is maintained, and a man may think and write as he will provided that he follows in practise the social customs of his caste. The Hindū divides all knowledge into two types—the supreme and the lower. In the lower he places all his sacred books—following in this the dictum of an Upanishad[5]—together with all other literature, all science, all instruction; in the category of the supreme he places only “the knowledge of Him by whom all else is known.” There you have Hindūism in a nutshell. When once supreme knowledge has been attained and illumination has been experienced, all Scriptures become useless. This is asserted plainly and boldly in a well-known passage in the _Bhagavad Gītā_: “All the Vedas are as useful to an enlightened Brāhmana as is a tank in a place covered over with water.”[6] What need of a tank when water is everywhere? What need of Scriptures when the man is enlightened? Revelation is useless to the man to whom the Self is revealed.