N ere ial ent 18. at be m, of le e of decadence, foreign powers took possession of the sacred kingdom, Libyans and Persians, Greeks and Romans, all found it necessary to take the gifts of Horus' and to disguise their upstart imperialism under the forms of the ancient solar theocracy, in order that the machinery of Egyptian civilisation should continue to function. Yet both in Egypt and in Western Asia, the primitive theocratic culture had begun to decline by the second half of the third millennium B.C. The rise of the great states in Egypt and Babylonia had, on the one hand, made man less dependent on the forces of Nature, and on the other hand, had brought him face to face with a new series of problems-moral and intellectual-which appear in a striking form in the early Egyptian literature of the Middle Kingdom. The song of King Intef, the Admonition of Ipuwer, the complaint of KhekheperreSonbu, and above all the so-called Dialogue of One Weary of Life with his own Soul, all bear witness to a profound criticism of life, and an intense spiritual ferment. And at the same period in Babylonia we find a similar attitude expressed in the poem of the Righteous Sufferer, the so-called Babylonian Job. Man no longer accepted the world and the state as they were, as the manifestation of the divine powers. They compared the world they knew with the social and moral order that they believed in, and condemned the former. Consequently, for the first time we get a sense of dualism between what is and what ought to be, between the way of men and the way of the gods. The state and the kingship are no longer entirely religious in the kings of the new type-those 12th Dynasty monarchs who are among the greatest and most virile monarchs that have ever reigned. We are conscious of a clear realisation of human, personal power and responsibility and at the same time of a profound disillusionment. We see this in the famous inscription which Senusret III set up at the southern boundary of Egypt bidding his subjects not to worship his statue, but to fight for it, and yet more intimately in the warning that the founder of the dynasty, Amenemhet I, gave to his son and successor. 'Fill not thy heart with a brother, know not a friend, make not for thyself intimates wherein there is no end, harden thyself against subordinates, that thou mayest be king of the earth, that thou mayest be ruler of the lands, that thou mayest increase good! * The same spirit of pride and self-reliance breathes in the fierce leonine faces of Senusret III and Amenemhet III, and distinguishes the sculpture of the 12th Dynasty from that of the Old Kingdom, which, for all its realism, was interpenetrated by a profoundly religious spirit. Hence perhaps the premature ending of this brilliant epoch, and the return after the Hyksos invasions to the traditional religiosity of the past, which was inseparable from the survival of the Egyptian state. That the new spirit of criticism and thought continued to be active is, however, proved by the appearance under the 18th Dynasty in the 14th century B.C. of Akenaten's bold attempt to institute a new solar monotheism as the state religion of Egypt and Syria. Here already in the 14th century B.C. we find the essentials of a world religion-a religion that is universal in its claims, and which attempts to find the source and first principle which lies behind all the changing phenomena of Nature. But the traditional theocratic religion-culture of the Nile valley was too strong for any such innovation, and the author of the reform went down to history as 'the criminal of Akhetaton.' But in the course of the following millennium a spiritual change of the most profound significance passed over the world, a change which was not confined to any one people or culture, but which made itself felt from India to the Mediterranean, and from China to Persia. And it brought with it a complete revolution in culture, since it involved the destruction of the old religious civilisation that was based on a co-operation with the divinised forces of Nature, and the discovery of a new world of absolute and unchanging reality beside which the natural world-the world of appearance and of earthly life-paled into a shadow and became dream-like and illusory. Alike in India and in Greece, we can trace a striving towards the conception of an invisible underlying cosmic cause or essence-Atman, Logos, the One-and of the * 'Cambridge Ancient History,' I, p. 303; Breasted, op. cit., p. 303: Ibid. 'Ancient Records of Egypt,' 1, pp. 474-483. unreality of the continual flux which makes up the phenomenal world, but it was in India that the decisive step was first taken, and it was in India that the new view of reality was followed out unwaveringly in all its practical implications. 'He who dwelling in the earth,' says Yajnavalkya, 'is other than the earth, whom the earth knows not, whose body the earth is, who inwardly rules the earth, is thy Self (Atman), the Inward Ruler, the deathless. He who dwelling in all beings, is other than all beings, whom all beings know not, whose body all beings are, who inwardly rules all beings, is thy Self, the Inward Ruler, the deathless. He unseen sees, unheard hears, unthought thinks, uncomprehended comprehends. There is no other than he who sees-hears-thinkscomprehends. He is thy Self, the Inward Ruler, the deathless. All else is fraught with sorrow.' * "This Self (Atman) is the dyke holding asunder the worlds that they fall not one into another. Over this dyke pass not day and night, nor old age, nor death, nor sorrow, nor good deeds, nor bad deeds. All ills turn away thence; for this Brahma-world is void of ill. Therefore in sooth the blind after passing over this dyke is no more blind, the wounded no more wounded, the sick no more sick. Therefore in sooth even Night after passing over this dyke issues forth as Day; for in this Brahma world is everlasting light.' t Hence the one end of life, the one task for the wise man, is Deliverance-to cross the bridge, to pass the ford, from death to life, from appearance to Reality, from time to Eternity-all the goods of human life in the family or the state are vanity compared with this. Possessed by delusion, a man toils for wife and child; but whether he fulfil his purpose or not, he must surrender the enjoyment thereof. When one is blessed with children and flocks and his heart is clinging to them, Death carries him away as doth a tiger a sleeping deer. The town-dweller's love of wife is a door of death, but the forest (i.e. the home of the hermit) is a meeting-place of the gods, says holy writ. The towndweller's love of wife is a fettering snare. The good break it and escape, the bad break it not.' All men are * Brihadaranyaka Upanishad,' III, vii, tr. L. D. Barnett. attached to children, wives and kin; they sink down in the slimy sea of sorrows like age-worn forest elephants.'* How far removed is this attitude from the simple acquiescence in the good things of this world, that is shown by the nature religions and by the archaic culture that was founded on them! The whole spirit of the new teaching is ascetic, whether it is the intellectual asceticism of the Brahman purging his soul by a kind of Socratic discipline, or the bodily asceticism of the sannyasi, who seeks deliverance by the gate of 'tapas'— bodily penance. And so there arose in India, especially in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., a whole series of 'disciplines of salvation,' that of the Jains, that of the Yoga, and many more, culminating in the greatest of them all, the Way of the Buddha. Buddhism is perhaps the most characteristic of all the religions of new universalist and absolute type, since it makes the fewest metaphysical and theological assumptions and yet presents the anti-natural world-denying conception of life in its extreme form. Life is evil, the body is evil, matter is evil. All existence is bound to the wheel of birth and death, of suffering and desire. Not only is this human life an illusion, but the life of the gods is an illusion too, and behind the whole cosmic process there is no underlying reality-neither Brahman nor Atman nor the Gunas. There is only the torture wheel of sentient existence and the path of deliverance, the via negativa of the extinction of desire which leads to Nirvana-the Eternal Beatific Silence. At first sight nothing could be further removed from the world-refusal of the Indian ascetic than the Hellenic attitude to life. Yet the Greeks of Ionia and Italy during the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. were bent, no less than the Indians, on piercing the veil of appearances and reaching the underlying reality. It is true that the Greeks set out in their quest for the ultimate cosmic principle in a spirit of youthful curiosity and free rational inquiry, and thereby became the creators of natural science. But there was also the purely religious current of Orphic mysticism, with its doctrines of re-birth and immortality, and of the progressive enlightenment and Mahabharata,' XII, ch. 175 and ch. 174, tr. L. D. Barnett. in واد emancipation of the soul from the defilements of corporal existence, which had a powerful influence on the Greek mind and even on Greek philosophy, until at last the vision of eternity, which had so long absorbed the re mind of India, burst on the Greek world with dazzling power. It was through the 'golden mouth' of Plato that the vision of the two worlds-the world of appearance, and shadows, and the world of timeless changeless Realityfound classic expression in the West. The Greek mind turned, with Plato, away from the many-coloured changing world of appearance and unreality to that other world of the eternal Forms, 'where abides the very Being with which true knowledge is concerned, the colourless, formless, intangible essence, visible only to the mind, the pilot of the soul': 'a nature which is everlasting, not growing or decaying or waxing or waning, but Beauty only, absolute, separate, simple and everlasting, which without diminution and without increase or any change in itself is imparted to the ever-growing and perishing beauties of all other things.' 'What if man had eyes to see this True Beauty, pure and unalloyed, not clogged with the pollutions of mortality and all the colours and vanities of human life,' would not all human and terrestrial things become mean and unimportant to such a one? And is not the true end of life to return whence we came, 'to fly away from earth to heaven,' to recover the divine and deific vision which once we beheld shining in pure light, pure ourselves and not yet enshrined in the living tomb which we carry about, now that we are imprisoned in the body, like the oyster in his shell.' This note, so characteristic and so unforgettable, is never afterwards wholly lost in the ancient world, and it is renewed with redoubled emphasis in that final harvest of the Hellenic tradition, which is Neoplatonism. It is easy for us to understand a few exceptional men, philosophers and mystics, adopting this attitude to life, but it is harder to realise how it could become the common possession of a whole society or civilisation. Yet in the course of a few centuries it became the common possession of practically all the great cultures of the Ancient World. It is true that Confucian China was a |