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and Preserver of all things, but he calls him Atman, THE 
Str. ‘The one Atman or Self, he says, 1s, praised in many 
ways owing to the greatness of the godhead. And he then 
goes on to say :—“ The other gods are but so many members 
of the one Atman, Sclf; and thus it has been said that the 
poets compose their praises according to the multiplicity of 
the natures of the beimgs whom they praise.” Professor Max 
Miiller appears always { to translate Atman by “ Self,’ and his 
scholarship I am quite ready to bow before as one of the 
proudest monuments of this nineteenth century. But IL 
cannot divest myself of the conviction, first conceived in 
India, that the earliest meaning of Atman was spirit (does not 
the word still remain in the Greek atmos, atme?). It 1s the 
word that the pundits have, I believe, uniformly suggested for 
the translation of the Scripture “Spirit.” If this be the 
original meaning of Atman, what a remarkable parallel we 
have to ‘‘ God is a Spirit, » «The Spirit of God moved upon 
the face of the waters.” Atman is, of course, the Self; but 
the word signifying spirit may well always have been used to 
express the real Hgo. At all events, the conception of the 
Great Self, whether originally conceived as spirit or not, is a 
very exalted one, and can be traced back to the Vedas at 
least, furnishing a presumption that the word and idea existed 
long before. 
This is the one particular word which survived, to a pre- 
eminent degree, in the later philosophical period of Hindu 
religion. Professor Max Miiller regards the idea of the 
Atman as the fruit of a development of thought, “ advancing 
to perfect clearness and definition.”? He says:—‘“‘ Here the 
development of religious thought, which took its beginning in 
the hymns, attains to its fulfilment; the circle becomes 
complete. Instead of comprehending the One by many 
names, the many names are now comprehended ” (t.e., in the 
period of the Vedinta philosophy) ‘to be The One. The old 
names are openly discarded; even such titles as Pragipati, 
lord of creatures ; Visvakarman, maker of all things; Dhatri, 
creator, are put aside as inadequate. The name now used is 
an expression of nothing but the purest and highest subjective- 
ness,—it is Atman, The Self, far more abstract than our 
Ego,—the Self of all things, the Self of all the old mytho- 
logical gods,—for they were not mere names, but names 
intended for something; lastly, the Self in which each 
individual Self must find rest, must come to himself, must find 
his own true Self.” But I think the true idea of the Atman 
existed long before, as indeed we, have evidence from the Veda ; 
and I think the development of the Veddnta was a develop- 
