[225] Wedgwood (The Moral Ideal, 3d ed., p. 22) suggestively likens the reduction to unity of the various gods of polytheism to the correlation of the physical forces—light, heat, electricity, and magnetism. Just as all these are found to be merely different manifestations of a single force or energy, so are all the deified phenomena of nature at last discovered to be but different manifestations of a single primal power—the One, the Supreme, the Eternal. This correlation of the gods, this reduction of polytheism to monotheism, holds the same place in the records of the religious and moral evolution of the race that the correlation of the physical forces holds in the records of the progress of science.
[226] There may be some philosophers and scientists who profess materialism, and who make an infinite and eternal unconscious energy the primal cause of all things. But this is a philosophy of the universe which has never secured a wide acceptance in the West.
[227] Oldenberg, Buddha (1882), p. 59.
[228] Hopkins, The Religions of India (1895), p. 356.
[229] This was the work of the Brahmans, who, to secure the ascendancy of their own class, falsified and misinterpreted the sacred books.
[230] Laws of Manu (Sacred Books of the East, vol. xxv), i. 31, 87.
[231] Cf. Hearn, Kokora, chap. xii.
[232] Laws of Manu, vi. 63.
[233] Ibid. xii. 9, 53–58. The germs out of which this system was developed by the Brahmans formed a part of the animistic conception of the world held by the conquered natives. By the sixth century B.C. the system had been fully elaborated. See Rhys Davids, Hibbert Lectures (1881), pp. 16 f.
[234] The theory was also undoubtedly in part the creation of the same ethical necessity that called into existence the purgatory of the medieval Church. The reincarnations have for aim and purpose not merely retribution, but expiation and purification.