driven to embrace in his latest freakish book, "Back to Methuselah." Mr. Shaw began political and literary life as a Fabian Socialist. He never had the patience and the philosophy which he preached to others. But he has always been fundamentally serious and earnest. A few years ago he announced a new theology, but ethically and socially he remained true to his conception of Evolution and of Christianity. The world, he contended, must return to Religion and must reorganize its economic and material life in accordance with the spirit and essence of Christian doctrine. In Fabian Socialism, he asserted, lay the solution of the world's tragic problems, for that form of Socialism alone embodies the ideals common to Christians and scientific evolutionists. But where does he stand today? He despairs of humanity. He abandons hope. Human beings, as he knows them, have neither the wisdom nor the character required by Socialism. They will fumble, muddle, blunder, and eventually destroy what civilization there is unless, unless they succeed, by wishing and willing, in prolonging the average span of life to three hundred years! And how would a generation of Metheuselahs solve the great problem of human conduct? By establishing Socialism? No; by further willing to abolish the body and become pure spirit!

Count Tolstoy, in his final phase of mysticism, invited humanity to commit suicide by taking vows of celibacy and heroically putting an end to the reproduction of the race. Shaw, though in sympathy with Tolstoy, cannot urge such a counsel of perfection on his contemporaries. He knows them too well-and he has humor. So he postpones the catastrophe, but at bottom he is a pessimist of the extremest type. He cannot join the destructive radicals, so he evolves out of his inner consciousness a pseudo-scientific mysticism of his own. Science and human nature have cruelly disappointed him he has recourse to magic!

Now, neither of these alternatives is even remotely related to science, to history or to common sense. Terrible are indeed the sins and blunders of poor, groping, perplexed humanity. The world war was an indictment of our culture, our science, our international labor and reform organization, our trade and commerce, that was hard-almost impossible-to meet. There is no occasion for astonishment in the fact that the war caused dismay, despair and bitterness even among persons of exceptional poise and breadth of view. But after further and deeper reflection. what conclusion does the normal mind reach? Why, the conclusion

that humanity has the power and the opportunity to direct its own. moral and social development, and to eradicate or mitigate practically all the evils which offend our sense of justice and our generous sentiments. Our problems are grave and difficult, but none of them is insoluble. Indeed, to use the words of Prof. Stewart Paton in a new book on "Human Behavior," "The hope for the progress of civilization today has probably a more substantial basis to rest upon than at any other period in the history of the human race." Tens of thousands of earnest men and women are grappling with the questions we have inherited from the past-racial, national and class questions. Democracy has many faults, but its one supreme virtue is its inevitable insistence on equality of opportunity and the elimination of special privilege. Peace and social harmony are incompatible with privilege, and there is but little doubt as to which will have to "go." Special privilege-that's the enemy. must be routed in every field which it has invaded. It breeds war at home and abroad. It is the child of avarice and greed and ignorance. It is responsible for the substitution of exploitation for service and fair dealing. Fight privilege and you attack the tap root of the worst features of our civilization.

Having realized this truth, and having enlisted a greater army in the campaign against privilege than was ever organized to defend civilization, shall we fritter away our strength by quarreling violently about little paper schemes and ingenious Utopias? Shall we despair of humanity because of differences among reformers. just when an opportunity is offered of putting aside minor issues. and launching a world-wide campaign for international and interclass justice?

The slow, inert majority, to repeat, will follow neither the wild and frantic revolutionists nor disillusioned mystics like Bernard Shaw, whose ideas are fundamentally anti-social and unhistorical. The majority will follow constructive and reasonable leaders who know how to appeal to the best instead of the worst elements in human nature; who expect no miracles but who have faith and courage; who build on the rocks of natural bias and legitimate self-interest-which are reconcilable with sound Altruism-rather than in the sands of an imaginary, super-human freedom from bias and self-regarding motives.

Humanity longs for such leadership and is certain to follow it. in the long run. Fanaticism of the all-or-nothing temper, dogmatism and arid mysticism will have their small, local and ephemecal

triumphs. Pessimism may be fashionable among the "superior" few who refuse to accept humanity, if not the universe, as it is. But the generality of mankind will pursue the even tenor of its empirical way, profit by trial and error, cross no bridges before reaching them and applying no solutions to problems not thoroughly dramatized and realized. The true scientific spirit makes allowance for the conservatism of the mass and is only amused by the antics of the social quacks and the theatrical revolutionists. It has faith in human nature and in human reason.

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN ANCIENT INDIA.

THE

BY HARDIN T. MCCLELLAND.

I. VEDIC SPECULATION.

HE great difficulty attached to our customary search for an orderly chronological development of a nation's life and thought is, particularly in the case of ancient India, that the records which come down to us are so seldom in perfect series that we are at a loss to really understand what were causes and what were effects of any certain element in that series. The internal evidence of ancient Indian records is so vaguely given out or the method of their composition is so abstracted from related external events, that the thread of historical continuity is altogether too tenuous, too fragle to permit our weaving from it a very strong fabric of knowledge; nor, as is sometimes sadly the case with other ancient climes, can we tailor enough cloth to keep out the chill of our utter ignorance of past civilizations, religions and philosophies.

When dealing with the cultural heritage of Modern India, even when represented by the polished eclecticism of such leading lights as Tagore or the two Swamis Dayanand and Vivekananda, we cannot help noticing that this historical difficulty stands to the forefront to a greater degree possibly than with any other of the world's major nations. And as the early religious writers of ancient India, thru a limitation either of intellectual or practical interest, show an almost total lack of the historical sense, so does our attempt to find temporal sequence in all things valued culturally by them suffer in proportion to our own lack of definite historical data. It is therefore reasonable when proposing an interpretation of such a land of mystic calm and joyous exaltation, to take our pattern of treatment from the Hindus themselves. That is, to estimate their aspirations toward Reality and Wisdom, not as a chronological exfoliation but as a slowly developed psychological introspection into the exact nature of the human soul, its divine derivation, its hazardous evolu

tion into maturity, its even more hazardous exercise of moral choice and purpose, and the necessity of its final redemption from the Karmic wheel of the finite world. If they were content to build their religious ideals on the ability of the individual to raise himself again to God, even tho temporarily torn away from Him by having been born into the material world, we should be content to build our interpretation of those ideals on the same or correlative grounds.

First, it is well to distinguish between those aspirational systems which are religious thru being expressions of faith in prayer, ceremony and codes of piety, and those which are philosophical thru leing consistent endeavors toward a direct and reasonably intelligible understanding of Divine Law, Truth, Righteousness and all those sacred qualities ascribed to, derived from, or at least heuristic of the Supreme Self of the Universe. Under this distinction the religious and philosophical systems of ancient India may be ranged according to their general outline and characteristic attitude. Thus, as showing more elements of religion than of philosophy in what they aspired to experience and believe in, we may enumerate those expressions of reverence and devotion usually grouped with the literatures of exhortation and supplication variously indexed under such terms as the Vedas, the Upanishads, Brahmanism, Buddhism, and Krishnaism. While those systems showing efforts more philosophical than religious in their expressions of metaphysical analyses and synthetic instruction would be arranged so as to include the Purva Mimamsa, Vedanta, Samkhya, Nyaya Vaiseshika, Voga, the Jains and Lokayätikans. In this order we seem to be following the course of popular development, perhaps not the chronological order but rather what seems to have been the order in which the different schools of faith and wisdom commanded the highest relish and widest pursuit in the minds and conduct of their respective devotees.

The first expressions of religious faith and aspiration which indelibly marked the noble souls of Ancient India were later known by the general term Veda, simply "knowledge" or "understanding." though originally called Trayi Vidya or "three-fold wisdom" of hymns (Rig Veda), tunes (Sama Veda), and prayers (Yajur Veda), the whole being later on supplemented with the Atharva hymns dealing with domestic relations and exhorting the people's attention to secular dutes. They soon came to have a certain recognized ritual, but their expression and instruction was for a long