It was a marvellous world which the imagination of the Brahmans had created. The gay pictures, excited and nourished in the mind of the Indians by the nature of the Ganges valley, became reflected in more and more distorted and peculiar forms in the legends and wonders of the great saints and heroes of the ancient time. The gods and spirits are perpetually interfering in the life and actions of men. The saints without intermission convulsed the sky, and played at will with the laws of nature. The more the desire for the marvellous was satisfied, the stronger it became. In order to go beyond what had been already achieved brighter colours must be laid on; the power of the imagination must be excited more vigorously, so as to enchain once more the over-excited and wearied spirit. Thus, for the Indians, the boundaries of heaven and earth gradually disappeared; the world of gods and that of men became confounded in a formless chaos. The arrangement of the orders was of divine origin; the gradations of being reached from the world-soul, through the saints, the gods and spirits, down to plants and animals. The earth was peopled with wandering souls; sacrifice, asceticism, and meditation set man free not only from the impurity of sin, but also from the laws of nature. They gave him powers transcending nature, which raised him above the earth and the gods, secured divine power for him, and carried him back to the origin and essence of all things. However fantastic this structure, the positive basis of it was supposed to be revelation or the Veda. Extensive as the commentaries became owing to the rivalry of the schools, vast as were the accumulations of ritual and legends, of verbal explanations and sentences of the saints--the main questions became only the more obscure. What saint was qualified to decide? Which school taught the correct doctrine? By whom and in what way was the Veda revealed? Were the words or the sense of the poems decisive? How were the undeniable contradictions, the opposition between various passages, to be removed? In order to obtain a firm footing the Brahmans found themselves invariably driven back to the idea of the world-soul. If in the interpretation of the words and the meaning of the Veda, in the effort to smoothe down the contradictions between them, and the necessity of finding a consistent mode of explanation and proof, the Indian acuteness and delicate power of distinction grew into a hair-splitting division of words and ideas, into the most minute and complicated logic, the conception of the world-soul, the theories of the creation, impelled them, on the other hand, to explain the whole life of the world from one source, and to compass it with one measure.