CHAPTER II.

THE FIRST AND SECOND ANSWERS.

Thus we find that the Jîva doubts and asks for immortality alone, and in the doubting and the asking he ever instinctively feels that the answer lies in a basic unity' of some sort or other, and that peace can never be found in an unreconciled and conflicting 'many.' This feeling conditions his search throughout for reasons inherent in the world-process, as will appear later.

The first answer that the Jîva shapes for himself to the great question, the first tentative solution of this overpowering doubt, is embodied in the view which is called the आरम्भवाद, ârambha-vâda, the theory of a beginning, an origination, a creation of the world by an agency external to the questioner. From so

called fetish-worship to highest deism and theism, all may be grouped under this first class of answer.

Instinctively or intelligently, the Jîva sees that effects do not arise without causes; that

what is not effected by himself must be caused by another; that he himself (as he then regards himself) is an effect and that his cause must be another; that whatever is the more permanent, the older, is the cause of the temporary, the younger; and he finally infers and believes that his well-being, permanence, immortality, lies in, is dependent on, his cause, his creator. From such working of the mind arise the multifarious forms of faith, beginning with belief in and worship of stone and plant and animal, and ending in belief in and worship of a personal First Cause. The general form of worship is the same throughout, i.e., prayer for some benefit or grace. The accompanying condition of worship is the same also, viz., giving assurance of humility in order to evoke benevolence in the object of worship, by prostration and obeisance and sacrifice of objects held most dear, to prove (sometimes, alas! with cruellest heartrending, though at others with a most beautiful and most noble self-surrender) that they are not held dearer than that worshipped object.

This first answer is a religion as well as a philosophy, but the Jîva finds not rest for long therein.

The concrete material idols fail again and again; and so does the mental idol. The

incompatibility of evil and suffering with a being who is at once omnipotent, omniscient, and all-good; the unsatisfied need for an explanation why a personal being who is perfect should create a world at all, and how he can create it out of nothing-as he must, if it is not to be coexistent with and so at least to some extent independent of himthese distressing doubts, insoluble on 'the theory of a beginning,' that have always shaken faith first in the power and goodness of the creator and then in his very existence, inevitably, earlier or later, wrench the earnestlyenquiring Jiva away from his anchorage in that theory, and set him adrift again, again asearching.

The truth that underlies this first answer, in all its forms, he will discern again when he has obtained what he now wants so urgently.

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His next haven of rest, the second answer, is the fum, pariṇâma-vâda, the theory of change, transformation, evolution and dissolution, by the interaction of two factors. a great generalisation he reduces all all the phenomena of the universe to two permanent elements, present always, universally, under all circumstances, throughout all the changes that he sees and feels.

The materialism and agnosticism which

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believe in Matter and Force,' and declare all else unknown; the ordinary Sâñkhya doctrine of 'Purusha and Prakriti,' 'Ego and non-Ego,' 'Self and not-Self,' 'Spirit and Matter'-all fall under this second category. Most of the philosophies of the world are here; the variations as to detail are endless, but the view that the universe is due to two finals is common to them all.

At this stage, if the duality be made the basis of a religion at all, the believer proclaims the factor of good as superior to the factor of evil, and assigns to it a final triumph, regarding God as prevailing over Satan, Hormuzd over Ahriman, Purusha over Prakriti, Spirit over Matter, in a vague undefined way, sacrificing strict logic to the instinctive need for unity, which, as said before, conditions the search throughout. But where the two are seen as equal, as in the Sâñkhya, religion vanishes, no practice corresponds to the theory.

Thus a

current Samskrit verse belonging to the Sâñkhya system describes Purusha as 'lame,' and Prakriti as 'blind.' The struggle between the two weakens both; each factor neutralises the other. There is no worship in the absence of a one supreme to worship. Only philosophy remains, a belief wavering and satisfactionless; for an explanation by two eternals, a plurality of

infinites, each unlimited and yet not interfering with the unlimitedness of the other though existing out of and independently of it-such an explanation is no explanation at all. It is a contradiction in terms; it is mere arbitrariness; there is no order, no certainty, no law, no reason in it. However correct it may be as a generalised statement of indubitable facts, viz., an endlessness of spirit and an endlessness of matter, those facts themselves remain unexplained, unreconciled, impossible to understand.

The truth that underlies this belief also will appear when the final answer is found.