identifying the cosmic principle, the power behind the world, with a spiritual principle, conceived either as the source of being or as the source of ethical order.* Primitive man had already found the Transcendent immanent in and working through nature as the supernatural.
The new religions found it in thought as the supreme Reality and in ethics as the Eternal Law. And consequently, while the former still saw the spiritual world diffused and confused with the world of matter, the latter isolated it and set it over against the world of human experience, as Eternity against Time, as the Absolute against the Contingent, as Reality against Appearance, and as the Spiritual against the Sensible.
This was indeed the discovery of a new world for the religious consciousness. It was thereby liberated from the power of the nature daimons and the dark forces of magic and translated to a higher sphere—to the Brahma-world—” where there is not darkness, nor day nor night, not being nor not-being, but the Eternal alone, the source of the ancient wisdom,” to the Kingdom of Ahura and the Six Immortal Holy Ones, to the world of the Eternal Forms, the true home * This may not appear obvious in the case of Buddhism. It is, however, implicit in the doctrine of Karma as the ground of the world process.
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