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APPENDIX.
XXXV
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Our author.
Jainism.
name and form and figure. This additional notion you now engraft on your earlier conception of the fourth state, removing from your hallucination of the mental blankness of deep-sleep the mark of personality and "separateness," and leaving it a dream about pure and simple nothing by an invisible dreamer. This accounts for the wild enthusiasm about the state of deep-sleep which is apparent in your otherwise beautiful metaphor. The statement of Sister Deomata, which you accept, to the effect that the deep-sleep state is a withdrawing from the many to the one, from the manifested to the power that manifests (p. 233) is a pure assumption. It is no argument to say that because we feel refreshed after sound sleep, therefore deep sleep must signify the merger of the soul in the Absolute. Sleep is refreshing because during the hours of rest the physical system is enabled to absorb and dispose of the poisonous secretions of matter in certain sensitive parts of the nervous system caused by the activities of the life of wakefulness.
No need to dwell any longer on the point ; there is so little in common between the two systems that if one of them be the path to nirvana, the other must necessarily lead to bondage and pain.
To conclude, the Dream Problem would have been better written if its talented author had kept his mind in touch with the concrete reality, and taken the trouble to test the logical value of every statement to be made. Above all, it is incumbent on all writers to remember that thorny questions cannot be disposed of by making sweeping assertions, like the one on p. 273, to the effect that Vedanta is the basis of all religions. A clear issue should be framed as to each and every such point, and no opinion should be hazarded without a full and careful examination of all the available evidence and of the arguments both for and against each side's view,
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