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The Kaliedoscope of Jaina Wisdom
sacrifices, practise penances, sing hymns, and prostrate themselves before idols, and it made people die for their faith : but Religion has never been able to prove what it promulgated, nor has it ever been able to make that old yearning for absolute and final truth become silent in the heart of man, in the middle of the orgies of its ecstasies.
At last, Philosophy took the problem into her hand. Respecting the limits drawn by science, and allowing, on the other hand, those inspirations and feelings, the procreators of Religion, to have their chance too, Philosophy began to erect her lofty buildings of daring speculation, large enough to enclose Macrocosm and Microcosm, God and Soul, Eternity and Infinite Space. She neither shared the toil and labour of science, nor the ecstasies of religion, but set to work for her own pleasure and content: calmly, serenely, like a child absorbed in silent play.
India has been her favourite haunt since many a century. Already in some of the Vedic hymns, philosophical speculation is astir. Its object is the Purusa, who represents the universe, or the question of Sat and Asat, and whether of the two was existing at the beginning of creation, or the question as to which of the Devas is worthiest to be worshipped, and whether there exists any Devas at all. Very often, its subject is Agni, the divine charioteer, who conveys the sacrificial gifts to Heaven, and all his manifold shapes. People had observed Agni, the combination of heat and light, not only on the altar, but also Agni in the sky, in the shape of sun, moon, and stars, Agni in the pebbles and rocks, Agni in the plants and in wood, particularly that of the Asvattha and the Sami trees, out of which it used to be produced by friction, for sacrificial purposes, Agni in the earth, in the shape of ignes fatui and volcanic phenomena, Agni in the air and clouds, in the shape of lightning, Agni in the waters, in the shape of the reflected light of sun and moon, and Agni in animals and in man, in the shape of bodily warmth and that of the sparkling of the living eye and its phosphorescence in darkness. This omnipresent Agni became-as Professor Johannes Hertel
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