The Scented Garden

100 The Atheist. session of any Englishman, he will probably be puzzled ; this note may enlighten him. The plate I saw — but could not buy — was some 18 inches square, nearly as flexible as platinum foil, and con- tained some 320,000 characters, at a rough esti- mate. The 1,000 pounds’ weight seems to me an absurd overstatement. 3. Refers, in all probability, to the reddening of the buttocks. The Persians supposed the smaller capillary blood vessels to be nerves. 4. Imam — a leader of prayer. Muslim have no “ priests ” in the sense of paid mediators. 5. Mushtari — also Birjis [Persian text] is the planet Jupiter. Most nations seem to attribute a blue or violet colour to it ; for mystical reasons, doubtless, but also because (to my eyes at least) it actually has that colour. 6. I suspect, maugre Mahbub’s head, that this is “ writ sarcastic.” The pompous old dullard must have seemed to our lively Abdullah very much as Southey did to Byron. Yet the Eastern is a terrible slave to convention, and may perhaps acquiesce in Hafiz as the undergraduate of to-day acquiesces in Milton. 7. The central thought of these two chapters is represented in the Buddhist philosophy, per- haps ; but in the Hindu practice, certainly. It is true that the Hindu claims the extinction of self in Parabrahm (Jivatma in Paramatma) as the pheno- menon in question ; but this is clearly a petitio principii, since we can always retort that any per- ception however glorious is less than the brain which perceives it. The Hindu would (idly) retort that this perception was not the phenomenon, but only one’s very partial and imperfect memory the- reof. And the logician would retort — and we should soon get quite beyond the limits of a note.