I shall here remark, without attempting to explain, the striking contrast in the religion of the same nation between the most subtile metaphysic theology and the grossest idolatry. In the latter, the symbolical representation prevails; it is known, that in its immoderate use they have entirely abandoned the normal proportions of the human form, and by the multiplication of members banished all fitness and beauty. Their plastic and graphic typification of an all-mighty, all-bestowing, and all-resuming God, with its three, four, five heads, so many and more arms, is repulsive; in their poetry he frightens us with innumerable mouths, eyes, breasts, arms, and legs, grinding between his teeth the generations of men, who precipitate themselves into his mouth like rivers into the ocean, or flies into fire.[136]
The psychology of the Hindus is not less abstruse than the rest of their metaphysics. We have already mentioned the soul among the twenty-five categories as neither a production nor productive. The Indian philosophers distinguish spirit and soul, that is, a rational soul and a mere sensitive principle. The first is supposed enveloped with a subtile, shadowy form of the most delicate material ether. Some hold the soul to be incased in three sheaths, the intellectual, the mental, and the organic or vital sheath.[137] According to different views the vital spirit is _Máya_ herself, or an emanation of Máyá, in any case the illusive manifestation of the universe.
This ingenuous conception seems to have taken deep and complete possession of the Hindus; it dominates in their most subtile abstractions, and embodies itself in a thousand forms to their vivid and luxuriant imagination. The _Saktians_, a sect wedded to sensual materialism, represent Máyá as a _Saktí_ or energy of Siva; she is “the mother of the universe;” “non-entity finds no access to this creator, the garment of perishableness does not sit right upon the body of this fascinating empress; the dust of nothingness does not move round the circle of her dominion; the real beings and the accidental creatures of the nether world are equally enamoured and intoxicated with desire before her.” Above the six circles, into which the Hindus divide the human body, is “the window of life, and the passage of the soul, which is the top and middle of the head, and in that place is the _flower of the back_ of one thousand leaves: this is the residence of the glorious divinity, that is, of the world-deceiving queen, and in this beautiful site reposes her origin. With the splendor of one hundred thousand world-illuminating suns, she wears, at the time of rising, manifold odoriferous herbs and various flowers upon her head, and around her neck: her resplendent body is penetrated with perfumes of divers precious ingredients, such as musk, safran, sandal, and amber, and bedecked with magnificent garments; in this manner, she is to be represented.”[138] Thus we see the poetical imagination of the Hindus, playing, as it were, with abstruseness, materializing what is spiritual, and spiritualizing what is material.