We would recommend all who care about India, or thought,
or religious philosophy to read with attention the paper in the Fortnightly Review on "The Theological Situation in India" signed by Vamadeo Shastri. It is an extraordinarily able statement of the present drift of Hindoo opinion when not affected by English education and the utilitarian philo- sophy. The Shastri evidently believes that a revival of Hindooism is taking plaCe, and that thoughtful minds in India are once more plunging into metaphysical speculation, with the result that they are affirming more strenuously than ever the great Hindoo dogma that Natnre is nothing but a phenomenon, a shadow thrown by the self-existent Light in which all spirit—the only ultimate reality—must ultimately merge. To read it is to feel one is dreaming, but there are dreams that instruct, and this is one of them. Of the main fact that the Hindoo mind is becoming active again and in the old directions, there is, we believe, no doubt whatever, our Gallio-like rule leaving the thoughtful free beyond all precedent. Whether the revival is favourable to that rule the Shastri does not decide, though we gather from a scattered hint or two he thinks it is not; but the question is not important. What is interesting is the fresh growth of a system of thought which, though it is not in itself Pagan, shelters, as the Shastri acknowledges, Paganism, even in outré forms, while it sends out the abler minds on an everlasting quest which never discovers, much less brings back, a Holy Grail.
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