criticism may perhaps hold good; but, as a general criticism of idealism, it is, I think, entirely untrue. The idealist starts, where every thinker must start, with provisional acceptance of the outward world as well as of the percipient self; and, in I common with all his fellow men, he invests the former with some measure or degree of reality; but, in the act of guaranteeing its reality, he guarantees (as he has discernment enough to realize) a fuller measure and a higher degree of reality to himself. Nor is the value of the latter guarantee impaired by the patent fact that it is illogical to go surety for oneself. To prove the reality of what alone enables one to prove reality is, for obvious reasons, impossible. But the Universe (as I know it) would melt into a dream-world if I could not place my self at the centre of it; and my inability to prove, or even begin to prove, that my self is real, matters little so long as Nature herself constrains me--with or without the consent of my consciousness--to postulate its reality.

In the choice between the percipient self and the objects of its perception, the thinkers of India threw the whole weight of their thought on the side of the former. The philosophy of the Far East, which has ever been dominated by the "ancient wisdom" of India, bases itself on acceptance of the self or soul, just as the philosophy of the West bases itself on acceptance of the outward world. This is a point on which I have already dwelt, and need not further enlarge. What it now concerns us to notice is that there are vast philosophical conceptions implicit in the germinal assumption

of Eastern thought, and that the thinker who speaks to us in

"The grand, sonorous, long-linked lines"

of the Upanishads, proved his greatness by the profound insight and the speculative daring with which he developed those conceptions into a world-embracing system of thought.

Let us, with the aid of the Upanishads, attempt to do his thinking for him. If in the microcosm, the world which directly and obviously centres in the individual, the self or conscious subject is real and the objects of its knowledge are by comparison unreal, must it not be the same--one instinctively argues--in the macrocosm, or totality of things? Is there not at the heart of the Universe a conscious life, and is not this all-conscious life--this Universal Self, as we may call it the supreme reality by reference to which all existent things, when their claims to reality are tested, take their several "stations and degrees"? To argue from one's own experience (whether rightly or wrongly interpreted) to the world at large is permissible, for the simple but sufficient reason that it is inevitable. The man who inclines to materialism when he makes his choice between his own self and the