the form of which he first becomes conscious, and which he (mistakenly, and yet necessarily) learns to identify with himself. He knows, and they do not think; he wills, and they show no desire; he energises, and there is no responsive movement in them. He cannot say in them, "I know," " I act," "I will"; and at length he recognises them as other selves, in mineral, vegetable, animal, human, and super-human forms, and he generalises all these under one comprehensive term, the Not-Self, that in which he, as a separated Self, is not, in which he does not know, and act, and will. He thus answers for a long time the question :

"What is the Not-Self? ”

with

"All in which I do not know and will and act."

And although truly he will find, on successive analyses, that his vehicles, one after another-save indeed, the finest film that makes him a Selfare parts of the Not-Self, are objects of knowledge, are the Known, not the Knower, for all practical purposes his answer is correct. In fact he can never know, as divisible from himself, this finest film that makes him a separated Self, since its presence is necessary to that separation, and to know it as the Not-Self would be to merge in the All.

KNOWING.

In order that the Self may be the Knower and the Not-Self the Known, a definite relationship must be established between them. The Not-Self must affect the Self, and the Self must in return. affect the Not-Self. There must be an interchange between the two. Knowing is a relation between the Self and the Not-Self, and the nature of that relation must be the next division of our subject, but it is well first to grasp clearly the fact that knowing is a relation. It implies duality, the consciousness of a Self and the recognition of a Not-Self-and the presence of the two set over against each other is necessary for knowledge.

The Knower, the Known, the Knowing these are the three in one which must be understood if thought-power is to be turned to its proper purpose, the helping of the world. According to Western terminology, the Mind is the Subject which knows; the Object is that which is known; the Relationship between them is knowing. We must understand the nature of the Knower, the nature of the Known, and the nature of the relation established between them, and how that relationship arises. These things understood, we shall indeed have made a step towards that Self-know

ledge which is wisdom. Then, indeed, shall we be able to aid the world around us, becoming its helpers and saviours; for this is the true end of wisdom, that, set on fire by love, it may lift the world out of misery into the knowledge wherein all pain ceases for evermore. Such is the object of our study, for truly is it said in the books of that nation which possesses the earliest, and still the deepest and subtlest, psychology, that the object of philosophy is to put an end to pain. For that the Knower thinks; for that knowledge is continually sought. To put an end to pain is the final reason for philosophy, and that is not true wisdom which does not conduce to the finding of PEACE.

CHAPTER I.

THE NATURE OF THOUGHT.

:

THE nature of thought may be studied from two standpoints from the side of consciousness, which is knowledge, or from the side of the form by which knowledge is obtained, the susceptibility of which to modifications makes possible the attainment of knowledge. This possibility has led to the two extremes in philosophy, both of which we must avoid, because each ignores one side of manifested life. One regards everything as consciousness, ignoring the essentiality of form as conditioning consciousness, as making it possible. The other regards everything as form, ignoring the fact that form can only exist by virtue of the life ensouling it. The form and the life, the matter and the spirit, the vehicle and the consciousness, are inseparable in manifestation, and are the indivisible aspects of THAT in which both inhere, THAT which is neither consciousness nor its

vehicle, but the ROOT of both. A philosophy which tries to explain everything by the forms, ignoring the life, will find problems it is utterly unable to solve. A philosophy which tries to explain everything by the life, ignoring the forms, will find itself faced by dead walls which it cannot surmount. The final word on this is that consciousness and its vehicles, life and form, spirit and matter, are the temporary expressions of the two aspects of the one unconditioned Existence, which is not known save when manifested as the Root-Spirit (called by the Hindus Pratyagâtman), the abstract Being, the abstract Logoswhence all individual selves, and the RootMatter (Mûlaprakṛiti) whence all forms. Whenever manifestation takes place this Root-Spirit gives birth to a triple consciousness, and this RootMatter to a triple matter; beneath these is the One Reality, for ever incognisable by the conditioned consciousness. The flower sees not the root whence it grows, though all its life is drawn from it and without it it could not be.

The Self as Knower has as his characteristic function the mirroring within himself of the NotSelf. As a sensitive plate receives rays of light reflected from objects, and those rays cause modifications in the material on which they fall,