vii THE TWO ORDERS 119 



self, smaller than a grain of mustard seed and wider than 

 the heavens, passes through all the transformations that 

 make up the life of the world. It lives in every man and 

 in every insect. It does not come into being nor perish, 

 but is the subject of an infinity of incarnations in the bodily 

 prison. Or does it really change or suffer at all? By 

 austerity, by self -repression, by knowledge, by retirement 

 into the innermost recesses of the mind we may each of us 

 find that self, and be at one with the central essence of 

 things, and for him who is so at one and so at peace the 

 husks of the body, the wrappings of sense fall away, the 

 web of Maya is brushed aside and the reality appears one 

 and unchangeable. The world of space and time, the 

 world of the finite individual, it would seem, is all delusion, 

 and we are left to ask ourselves, is delusion itself some- 

 thing real, is error, though it contains no truth, something 

 that truly exists and has a meaning and an importance for 

 the life of the one? 



The final tendency of spiritual Monism is clear, but it 

 "becomes clear only to show the insuperable difficulties that 

 would flock about it if pushed to the bitter end, of which 

 not the least violent is the practical one that life must be bent 

 by the strongest, most violent efforts to the supreme work 

 of negating and overcoming that flesh, that outer world 

 which does not in reality exist, to conquering an illusion 

 which in a world that is all Spirit has no intelligible source. 



(6) The theoretical and moral paradoxes of a spiritual 

 interpretation of the world-order may lead by reaction to 

 mere scepticism which is the abandonment of any attempt 

 at a consistent theory, or they may lead to a more cautious 

 reconstruction of the spiritual order avowedly on the basis 

 of practical needs and with an abandonment avowed or 

 half avowed of the search for the ultimate truth. The 

 second was the line of thought which in the East cul- 

 minated in the great system of Buddhism. Here there 

 is in a sense no theory of ultimate reality, for the world 

 as known to us has no reality, at least no substantial reality. 

 It is a world of Impermanence, of flux. Yet it is a world 

 in which we may have to play our part, and our part is to 



