Under "Mysticism," in the _Encyclopædia Britannica_, we read: "Our consciousness of self is the condition under which we possess a world to know and to enjoy; but it likewise isolates us from all the world beside. Reason is the revealer of nature and God; but, by its acts, reason seems the thing reasoned about. Hence mysticism demands a faculty above reason, by which the subject shall be placed in immediate and complete union with the object of his desire--a union in which the consciousness of self has disappeared, and in which, therefore, subject and object are one." The Great Self, or Immanent Power--expressions barely communicable to the understanding by the rather restrictive sounding and abrupt terminology of the word "God"--perhaps nearer in thought to the Will in Nature of Schopenhauer--with which the Brahmins of India sought communion, has been to them from time immemorial the Alpha and Omega of their being. When religion steps in it is a frame of mind, not a set of opinions. They cannot in truth be called superstitious; they are, to coin a word, _substitious_. They sink, plummet-wise, into the fathomless; the line is severed, and they are lost in the depths and caverns of nescience. The concrete, with them, has always ranked lower than the abstract. Vamadéo Shastri, writing in the _Fortnightly Review_ of November, 1898, on the theological situation in India, says:-- In Europe, as I understand, your churches have long ago closed the era of unlimited metaphysical speculation, retaining only certain mysterious dogmata that are authoritatively prescribed as facts--that are not philosophical discoveries, but are declarations of revealed truth. You have drawn up your creeds; you have settled finally all essential beliefs in future rewards and punishments, in man's redemption from sin and resurrection, and, above all, in a Divine Personality. You have numbered and ended the list of your sacred books; you look for no fresh revelation; you have regulated by ordinances the rites and ceremonies which unite the worshippers and divide the Churches.... But I want you to understand that we are still wandering in the metaphysic wilderness, and that Christianity, returning at last after an interval of so many centuries, finds us still engaged on the same problems as those which occupied the schools of Antioch and Alexandria and the secret professors of the Jewish Kabbala. We have never yet set limits, either by philosophic criticism or by ecclesiastic ordinance, to the range of free inquiry or to the thinking faculty. We cannot submit to the restrictions placed by faith upon inquiry into mysteries; we are driven by our mental constitution to overleap the bounds of sentient experience, and to construct, like your ancient heretics, some intelligible theory of the unconditioned.