will disclose to us more satisfactory information on all these topics. The Indians, however, who ever remained total strangers to the mode of burial and treatment of the dead practised in Egypt, adopted a very different course to procure the deliverance of the human soul from transmigration:--they had recourse to philosophy--to the highest aspirings of thought towards God--to a total and lasting immersion of feeling in the unfathomable abyss of the divine essence. They have never doubted that by this means a perfect union with the Deity might be obtained even in this life, and that thus the soul, freed and emancipated from all mutation and migration through the various forms of animated nature in this world of illusion, might remain for ever united with its God. Such is the object to which all the different systems of Indian philosophy tend--such is the term of all their enquiries. This philosophy contains a multitude of the sublimest reflections on the separation from all earthly things, and on the union with the God-head; and there is no high conception in this department of metaphysics, unknown to the Hindoos. But this absorption of all thought and all consciousness in God--this solitary enduring feeling of internal and eternal union with the Deity, they have carried to a pitch and extreme that may almost be called a moral and intellectual self-annihilation. This is the same philosophy, though in a different form, which in the history of European intellect and science, has received the denomination of _mysticism_. The possible excesses--the perilous abyss in this philosophy, have been in general acknowledged, and even pointed out in particular cases, where egotism or pride has been detected under a secret disguise, or where this total abstraction of thought and feeling has spurned all limit, measure, and law. In general however, the European mind, by its more temperate and harmonious constitution, by the greater variety of its attainments, and above all, by the purer and fuller light of revealed truth, has been preserved from those aberrations of mysticism which in India have been carried to such a fearful extent, not only in speculation, but in real life and practice; and which, transcending as they do all the limits of human nature, far exceed the bounds of possibility, or what men have in general considered as such. And the apparently incredible things which the Greeks related more than two thousand years ago, respecting the recluses of India, or _Gymnosophists_, as they called those Yogis, are found to exist even at the present day; and ocular experience has fully corroborated the truth of their narratives. END OF LECTURE IV. LECTURE V. A comparative view of the intellectual character of the four principal nations in the primitive world--the Indians, the Chinese, the Egyptians, and the Hebrews; next of the peculiar spirit and political relations of the ancient Persians.