2. Conversely the Hindoo view of existence launches itself with just the same immediacy over this very abstraction from all sense into the wildest flood of it. Inasmuch, however, as the immediate and consequently unbroken identity of both sides is in this view cancelled, and instead of this the element of _difference_ within this identity has become the basic principle of the type itself, this very contradiction plunges us with no mediating connections from the Finite into the Divine, and again from this latter into what is most transitory of all; and we live and move among _simulacra_, which rise up entirely as the growth of this alternating process, a kind of witches' world, where the definition of every shape eludes our grasp as we endeavour to seize it, is converted all at once into its opposite, or straddles away into mere inflated enormities. The general modes under which Hindoo art manifests itself may be summarized under the three following points of view: (_a_) In the first place we find the full hugeness of the content of the Absolute is imposed by the imagination upon the _sensuous_ in its aspect of singularity in such a way that this particular thing is itself, in its own form and station, taken completely to represent such a content and to exist as such for the imaginative sense. In the Râmâyana, for example, the friend of Râma, namely, the prince of apes Hanuman, is a principal personage, and he accomplishes the bravest of exploits. And generally we may observe that among the Hindoos the ape is revered as Divine, and we find, in fact, an entire city of apes. In the ape, as this point of singularity, the infinite content of the Absolute is envisaged and adored. It is just the same with the cow, Sabalâ, which in the Râmâyana during the episodic treatment of the expiations of Visvamitra, appears clothed with immeasurable power. If we take a glance on higher planes we find entire families in India--even though the individual here be merely a vacant and monotonously vegetating life-unit--in whom the Absolute itself, as this concrete reality, is adored in its immediate life and presence as God. This same coincidence is found in Lamaism. Here, too, a single individual receives the highest worship due to the present God. In India, however, this honour is not exclusively paid to one man. Every Brahmin proves at once his claim from the day of his birth in his own caste to be ranked as Brahman, and possesses that second birth of the Spirit which identifies his humanity with God, in the way of Nature through his actual bodily birth, so that the crown of the most Divine itself is immediately referred back upon the entirely commonplace fact of physical existence. For although the Brahmin is under the most sacred obligation to read the Vedâs, and attain by this means an insight into the secrets of Deity, this duty can be actually carried out in the most perfunctory way without detracting in the least from the Brahmin's own divinity.