10 SOCIAL CULTURE 



Time and space according to the first form of religion that is to 

 say, according to the first completed thought arrived at by the social 

 intelligence of the race are illusions and producers of illusions. All 

 illusions arise in the primordial distinction of subject and object 

 which constitutes the lapse into consciousness out of primeval unity 

 which is not subject and object. 1 This thought of Kapila becomes 

 the basis of the religion of Buddhism, the religion founded on the 

 simple idea of transcendence of the one First Cause above all causality. 

 This is opposite to the religion of the Bible, which reveals the divine 

 as a One that is goodness. Goodness is so gracious as to create and 

 give independent reality to nature and man, in short, to make 

 man able to sin and to defy the First Cause his Creator. Here 

 emerges for the first time the idea of sin. Man, as maya or illusion, 

 is not created nor is he a creator of things or events; his deeds are 

 only seeming, for he does not possess true reality himself. But 

 with the doctrine of theism, man has an eternal selfhood given him 

 and is responsible for the acts of his will ; he can sin and repent. 



He can choose the ethical and form in himself the image of God, 

 or on the other hand he can resist the divine and create an Inferno. 



While theism commands man to renounce selfishness, pantheism 

 commands to renounce selfhood. 



Theism contains in it as a special prerogative the possibility of 

 meeting difficulties insoluble to pantheism. It has solved the great 

 difficulty of conceiving a First Cause so transcendent that it is no 

 cause of the world and man. For theism sees the necessity of good- 

 ness and righteousness in the First Cause, and hence finds the world 

 and man in the divine mind. But it, too, sees divine sovereignty 

 and does not lose that thought in its theory of man and nature. 

 Nature is full of beings that perish, notwithstanding the fact that 

 they come from a perfect Creator. The history of man is full of sin 

 and rebellion against goodness and righteousness. But our theistic 

 insight knows that God is holy; that he possesses perfect goodness 

 and righteousness. The exclusive contemplation of the imperfec- 

 tions of man and even of his best works leads to the pantheistic 

 denial of the world and to despair as to man's salvation before the 

 sovereign First Cause. The religion of theism often lapses towards 

 Orientalism in its condemnation of nature and history as empty of 

 all good. Whenever it has gone so far that it blasphemes the First 

 Cause by limiting divine goodness, the church has given a check to 

 this tendency and ushered in an epoch of missionary effort, wherein 

 the true believer leaves off his excessive practice of self-mortification 

 and devotes himself, like St. Francis, to the work of carrying salvation 

 to the lost. It goes out like St. Dominic to save the intellect and to 

 have not only pious hearts but pious intellects that devote their lives 

 'Memorial verses of the Sankhya Karika, nos. xxi, xxii, xxiv, Ixii, Ixiv. 



