NOWHERE perhaps does mysticism fill so large a place as in India.
Nevertheless, since we are not writing a history of mysticism, we
may content ourselves with the consideration of the most influential
of the Yoga ¹ systems, that of Patanjali, accessible in the English
language since 1914. ²

To the historians of metaphysics this text is of great importance inasmuch
as it forms, in the words of the translator, "a bridge between the philosophies
of ancient India and the fully developed Indian Buddhism and the religious
thought of to-day in Eastern Asia." Psychologists also will find much to interest
them in this book besides that which it is our special task to bring out, for
its conceptions of the mind and its workings are surprisingly different from
those of the Western world. India's thinking has gone in different directions
and dug different ruts from those in which the western mind has imbedded itself.
Interesting instances of first attempts at psychological analyses and classi-
fications may be found on pages 8, 31, 34, 60, 235, and 327.The philosophical foundation of this Yoga is the Vedanta metaphysics.
Its main articles may be briefly formulated in three propositions:

1.	Individuals possess merely illusory existence. There is really no distinction between Brahman and souls or selves. The self is Brahman. Is is false perception, false knowledge, that leads to the opposition of selves to Brahman or ultimate reality.
2.	The supreme aim of man is emancipation from individual existence; i.e., absorption into Brahman.
3.	This absorption is achieved when the illusion of the soul's separate existence vanishes--when the identity of the individual self with the universal self is realized. Thus, emancipation from rebirth does not come by good works but by understanding: "from knowledge comes emancipation." That know- ledge consists in the immediate perception of the identity of the soul with Brahman.

This Vedanta doctrine is too abstruse and stands in too obvious antagonism
with one of the most tenacious instinctive tendencies of human nature (self-
preservation and enhancement) to recommend itself to the average person.
The illusoriness of individual existence, the identity of the self with Brahman,
the absorption in the All as the goal of man, are too remote from the conceptions
and desires of the average man to become part of his common-sense philosophy
Are, then, the rank and file shut off from the religion of Brahman? Not at all.
In India as elsewhere religious philosophy comes down to those who cannot
ascend to it. Alongside of the esoteric doctrine sketched above, there grew

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