effort, is the Vishishțâdvaita form of the Vedanta: One substance, eternal, restful, changeless, Ishvara, has two aspects, is animate and inanimate, chit and achit, conscious and unconscious, Self and Not-Self; and by its power, माया, Mayá, शक्ति, Shakti, causes an interplay of the two, for its own high pleasure which there is none other to question, without any compulsion from without. "It has two natures, the one formless, and the other form."1 "It became husband and wife."2 "It is being and nothing." Such is the second series of scripture-texts that correspond to this stage.

3

This second result, it is clear, is again only the second answer, the theory of transformation, on a higher level. Two factors are recognised, but subordinated to, made parts and aspects of, a third, which is not a third however; and the two are thus rather forcibly reduced to a pseudounity. Instead of the complete separateness of seer and seen, instead of the ordinary Sâñkhya doctrine of Purusha and Prakriti, Subject and Object, we have a complete pantheism of ensouling life and organism. The two are not only seer and seen, subject and object, desiror and desired, actor and acted on, but also soul and

1 Brihad-Aranyaka-Upanishat. II. iii. 1.

2 Ibid. I. iv. 3.

Prashna-Upanishat. ii. 5.

body, cause and instrument, desire and means of desire, actor and means of action. But the objections to the original form of the transformation-theory hold good, with only the slightest modifications, against this subtler form of it also. Why the need for, the want of, amusement and manifestation and interplay? Why so much evil and misery instead of happiness in the course of the manifestation? And what after all is the duality? Are there two, or are there not two? If two, and there must be two if there is interplay, as there self-evidently is, nothing has really been explained. Prove that one of the two is naught, is nothing, and then you will have said something! What is this mysterious mâyâ, shakti, power, which brings about the interplay? What is this unexplained power? How am I, the individual enquirer, to feel the satisfaction of being the owner, the master, and not the slave, of of that that power? How does this explanation assure me of my own freedom? Where is the law, the regular method, the reliable process, in all this manifestation and interplay and unrestrained power, which may assure me of orderliness and sequence, assure me against caprice, and be in accord with what I see in the world around? I, as an individual, do not feel my assonance with this explanation.

It does not yet lead me

to the heart of the world-process. It does not explain my life, in reference to and in connection with the world around me, systematically, satisfactorily. The laws of karma and compensation, the law of re-birth, do not fit into it quite plainly. To say that I am (i.e., the 'I' is) feeling happy in a million forms and also feeling miserable in another million does not assimilate readily with the constitution of my being. I feel the statement as something external to me. In order to be satisfied I must see the identity of the countless individual 'I's,' not only in essence but in every detail and particular.

Such are the doubts and difficulties that vitiate the second result and render it of no avail.

CHAPTER VI.

THE MUTUAL RELATION OF THE SELF AND THE NOT-SELF (Continued).

It may perhaps be useful to the reader, especially the western reader, if a rapid sketch of modern European thought on the subject is given here, showing how its developments stand at the same level, though necessarily with very great differences of method and details, as the second form of Vedânta above given in essence, and the third form current thereof also, viz., the Advaita or non-dualistic. The nature of the Advaita view will also appear in the course of this sketch.

Indian thought-in all departments of research in which we possess tangible results of it in the shape of Samskrit and Prâkrit works-has seldom lost sight of the fact that the end and aim of knowledge is, directly or indirectly, the alleviation of pain and the promotion of happiness; the end and aim of the supreme know

ledge being the alleviation of the supreme pain of the fear of annihilation, and the promotion of the supreme pleasure of the assurance of immortality and self-dependence. The dominant motive of that thought therefore is ethico-religious. Even works on grammar and mathematics do not forget to state at the outset that they subserve the attainment of mukti, liberation, salvation, in some way or other.

Modern western thought, on the other hand, has, for various reasons, historical and evolutionary, become disconnected with religion-which in its perfection and completeness is the one science of all sciences, knowledge pre-eminently, the Veda as it is named in Samskrit. The mainspring of this western knowledge is mainly intellectual, knowledge for the sake of knowledge at least as that mainspring is described by some of those in whose hands it has made progress, especially in science. This fallacy, as it is, despite its brilliant results in science and philosophy, has its own good reasons for coming into existence, as may be understood later. That it is a fallacy may be inferred, in passing, even from the one single and simple fact that public common sense and public instinct and public need have declined to rest content with a mere subjective and poetical admiration of the