THEODICIES AND COSMODICIES 13 



innocence, to slay his father and become the husband 

 of his mother, to the desolation of his people and his 

 own headlong ruin. Or to step, for a moment, beyond 

 the chronological limits I have set myself, what con- 

 stitutes the sempiternal attraction of Hamlet but the 

 appeal to deepest experience of that history of a no 

 less blameless dreamer, dragged, in spite of himself, 

 into a world out of joint ; involved in a tangle of crime 

 and miserj 7 , created by one of the prime agents of 

 the cosmic process as it works in and through man ? 



Thus, brought before the tribunal of ethics, the 

 cosmos might well seem to stand condemned. The 

 conscience of man revolted against the moral in- 

 difference of nature and the microcosmic atom should 

 have found the illimitable macrocosm guilty. But 

 few, or none, ventured to record that verdict. 



In the great Semitic trial of this issue, Job 

 takes refuge in silence and submission ; the Indian 

 and the Greek, less wise perhaps, attempt to 

 reconcile the irreconcilable and plead for the 

 defendant. To this end, the Greeks invented 

 Theodicies ; while the Indians devised what, in its 

 ultimate form, must rather be termed a Cosmodicy. 

 For, though Buddhism recognizes gods many and 

 lords many, they are products of the cosmic process ; 

 and transitory, however long enduring, manifestations 

 of its eternal activity. In the doctrine of trans- 

 migrat on, whatever its origin, Brahminical and 

 Buddhist speculation found, ready to hand, ( 4 ) the 

 means of constructing a plausible vindication of the 

 ways of the cosmos to man. If this world is full of 



