then looked forward to an entrance into the heaven of Yama, and participation in the joys of that heaven with the company of the fathers, was past. While all other nations almost without exception regarded death as the worst of evils, and painfully sought to secure continuance after death, the Indians were now tortured by the apprehension that they could not die, that they must live for ever, they filled with terrors their conception of life after death, of the endless series of regenerations to a perpetually new life. Was there really no mercy on earth or in heaven, no grace, no means of release from these never-ending torments? Was the long series of sacrifices with their endless prescripts for every step, the multitude of rules of purification, the performance of penance for every stain, absolutely indispensable if the Brahmans themselves allowed that this whole sanctity of works merely bestowed merits of a second rank, and that the treasure even of good works could be exhausted by time? Was this arrangement of castes and the observance of their duties absolutely irrevocable? The Brahmans required the study of the Veda not only from their own order but also from the Kshatriyas and the Vaiçyas. Did not the book of the law contain the requirement (p. 184) that every Dvija, after satisfying the duties of his order, and of the father of a family (Grihastha) should become an eremite (Vanaprastha) and penitent (Sannyasin)? Had not the Sankhya, the doctrine of Kapila, called in question the merit of the sacrifice and the customs of purification? Asceticism, it is true, again removed the distinctions of the orders; the power of penance, the mortification of the pleasures of sense and the body, carried back the members of the three upper orders in a similar way by sanctification, through a greater or less application of penance, into Brahman; the legends and the Epos showed by the example of Viçvamitra that a man could rise by the power of penance from a Kshatriya to a Brahman. Hence all Dvijas, in strictly logical sequence, could reach supreme salvation by mortification of the body; and it was easy from these premisses to draw the conclusion that little or nothing depended on descent; that the degree of asceticism and the depth of meditation was everything. If this was the case with sanctification by works; if birth in any one of the three higher orders did not prevent a man from attaining the highest sanctification by asceticism, could the castes be really different races, different emanations from Brahman, and distinct forms of his being? Was the nucleus of the system, the doctrine of the world-soul, so firmly established as the Brahmans maintained? Had not the philosophy of the Brahmans already passed from scholasticism to heterodoxy? Did it not deny, in the Sankhya doctrine, the authority of the Veda, the existence of the gods, and the Brahmanic world-soul? As we have seen, the teaching of Kapila left only two existences; nature and