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wood, stone or any mineral matter for the sake of raising up in our mind a clear image of God corresponding to it. For, is it not utterly impossible for us to conceive of an object that we have not previously seen or heard, touched or smelled or tasted? It is the deep-felt longing of the human mind for a concrete thing to meditate upon that has brought into existence a multitude of temples not only in the Tamil country where its number is comparatively very large but also in other ancient civilized countries such as Egypt, Babylonia, Chaldea in the west, and Mexico and Peru in the east. We cannot close this part of our subject relating to idol-worship better than in the words of Dr. Edward Caird taken from his masterly treatment of "The Evolution of Religion." His words rus as follows:-
"To represent God as a mere object is, as we have seen, to express the divine in an inadequate form, in a form that, at least, cannot be made fully adequate to the idea; for the principle of unity in all objects and subjects cannot be properly represented as one object among others. But, at the same time, it is also true that in some sense the whole is involved in every part of the universe, and therefore any part of it may for a time be taken as a type of the whole. *** When the spiritual cannot yet be separated from the natural, it is of the highest importance that the natural object which represents the spiritual should be, as it were, transfigured by the imagination, so that it may, so far as possible, symbolically take the place of the spiritual.
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Viewed in this light how significant is the worship paid to Sivalinga in the great temples that burst so magnificently on the sight of the travellers all over the south of India, must become apparent to all who have a right - thinking mind. I cannot pursue the treatment of this topic farther in a short preface like this. For a detailed explanation of the origin and meaning of the Sivalinga- worship the reader is referred to my Tamil lectures on "The Image-worship” and “Sivalinga" and to my English lecture on "The Conception of God as Rudra".
Now, as to the second entity of the Saiva Siddhanta: "The aggregate of all Souls." From the tiniest and the most simple
