that I put in the water exists for ever; (though I perceive it not by my eyes it is felt by my tongue).' (Unto him) said (his father), 'Verily, such is the case with the Truth, my child. Though you perceive it not, it nevertheless pervades this (body). That particle which is the soul of all this is Truth; it is the Universal Soul. O Swetaketu, Thou art that'" (Ch. Up., ch. vi. sec. 13, p. 113).
Similar notions of an all-pervading and infinite Being are found in the Bhagavat-Gita, a theological episode inserted in the great epical poem known as the Mahabharata. There Vishnu is not merely the ordinary god Vishnu of Indian theology; but the universe itself is expressed as an incarnation of that deity who is seen in everything and himself is everything. "I am the soul, O Arjuna," thus he addresses his mortal pupil, "which exists in the heart of all beings, and I am the beginning and the middle and also the end of existing things" (Bh. G., ch. x. p. 71).
Again, Vishnu thus describes himself in language which translated into ordinary prose, would serve to convey the idea embodied in Mr. Herbert Spencer's Unknowable:—
"Know that that brilliance which enters the sun and illumines the whole earth, and which is in the moon, and in fire, is of me. And I enter the ground and support all living things by my vigor; and I nourish all herbs, becoming that moisture of which the peculiar property is taste. And becoming fire, I enter the body of the living, and being associated with their inspiration and expiration, cause food of the four kinds to digest. And I enter the heart of each one, and from me come memory, knowledge, and reason" (Ib., ch. xv. p. 100).
Nor did the writers of the Veda and the commentaries thereupon omit to look above the concrete forms of the mythological gods who people their Pantheon to a more comprehensive and less comprehensible primordial Source. The gods were unfitted to serve as explanations of the origin of the universe by reason of the theory that they were not eternal, and that they came into existence subsequently to the creation of the world. The writer of a hymn in the tenth book of the Rig-Veda asserted that "the One, which in the beginning breathed calmly, self-sustained, is developed by . . . its own inherent heat, or by
