such a question. The word “why” means that we want a
reason. And our question is absurd because we are asking
a reason for reason. Why is it better to be rational means
simply, “how is reason rational.” To {312} doubt it is a
self-contradiction. Or, to put the same thing in another
way, reason is the Absolute. And to ask why it is better
to be rational is to demand that the ultimate should be
expressed in terms of something beyond it. Hence modern
science has no philosophy of evolution, whereas Aristotle
has. [Footnote 16]
[Footnote 16: See H. S. Macran’sHegel’s Doctrine of For-
mal Logic(Clarendon Press), Introduction, section on the
Conception of Evolution, to which I am much indebted in
the above paragraphs.]
The main idea of pantheism is that everything is God. The
clod of earth is divine because it is a manifestation of De-
ity. Now this idea is all very well, and is in fact essential to
philosophy. We find it in Aristotle himself, since the entire
world is, for him, the actualization of reason, and reason is
God. But this is also a very dangerous idea, if not supple-
mented by a rationally grounded scale of values. No doubt
everything is, in a sense, God. But if we leave it at this, it
would follow that, since everything is equally divine, there
is no higher and lower. If the clod of earth, like the saintli-
est man, is God, and there is no more to say of the matter,
then how is the saint higher than the clod of earth? Why
should one ever struggle towards higher things, when in
reality all are equally high? Why avoid evil, when evil is
as much a manifestation of God as good? Mere pantheism
must necessarily end in this calamitous view. And these
deplorable effects explain the fact that Hinduism, with all
its high thinking, finds room for the worship of cows and
snakes, and, with all its undoubted moral elevation, yet al-
lows into its fold the grossest abominations. Both these
features are due to the pantheistic placing of all things on
a par as equally {313} divine. Not of course that Hin-
duism has not a sort of doctrine of evolution, a belief in a
higher and lower. As everyone knows, it admits the belief
that in successive incarnations the soul may mount higher
and higher till it perhaps rejoins the common source of all
things. There is probably no race of man so savage that it
does not instinctively feel that there is a higher and lower,
a better and worse, in things. But the point is that, al-
though Hinduism has its scale of values, and its doctrine of
development, it has no rational foundation for these, and
though it has the idea of higher and lower, yet, because this
is without foundation, it lets it slip, it never grips the idea,
and so easily slides into the view that all is equally divine.
The thought that all is God, and the thought that there are
higher and lower beings, are, on the surface, opposed and
inconsistent theories. Yet both are necessary, and it is the
business of philosophy to find a reconciliation. This Aristo-
tle does, but Hinduism fails to do. It asserts both, but fails
to bring them to unity. Now it asserts one view, and again
at another time it asserts the other. And this, of course,
is connected with the general defect of oriental thinking,
its vagueness. Everything is seen, but seen in a haze, in
which all things appear one, in which shapes flow into an-
other, in which nothing has an outline, in which even vital
distinctions are obliterated. Hence it is that, though ori-
ental thought contains, in one way or another, practically