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Shall I, however, xmderstand you to mean a doctrine of this kind ; that collective Mdyd which comprehends the three gwnasy or descriptions of appearances in the natural world, is in regard to man's senses illusory, unsubstantial, and fluctuating, but in itself, so far as it is any thing, or rather perhaps, since yon call it unsubstantial, I should say in its relation to the Deity, it is the play of the Divine energy, and scarcely even so much as the dress of thought, but the veiy thought of spirit made visible : for from the very grand and meditative character of a large part of your doctrine, I am sure you do not imagine tiiat the Deity is illuded." " Very far from it indeed," answered Vidydch&ya ; " nor do I know that any stranger has ever penetrated our meaning better than you now appear to have done. It is a pleasure to me to converse with a sober person, who, instead of cavilling at our language before he understands it, will endeavour to penetrate its meaning in a spirit amicable towards ourselves, and reverential towards the great Being of whom we inadequately reason. Hence-' forward yon at least will be in no danger of misapprehending 96 ABSTRACT OR PERSONAL. our doctrine of the nature of soul, as if we imagined its true being to be fiilly expressed by the mere metaphors applied to it in the Vedas, as for instance when it is compared to a favourite son ; nor will you accuse us of confounding it with the gross body, as some Ch^urvdcas do; nor again, as others, with the more subtle organs ; nor of making it the mere breath of life ; nor of substituting for it the sensuous and affectionate mind; nor yet will you regard us as making the soul what many Bauddhas make it, our own intelligence or self-consciousness; nor, as cer- tain Prdbhdcaras say, that ignorance or suhstratum in which our intelligence dwells changefully, being more or less from time to time ; nor again, — ^which however would be rather more plausible, and not far from the truth,-^will you consider us to compound soul out of our own intelligence and the ignorance or substratum animated by it ; nor, lastly, will you accept the term void which certain Bauddhas offer you as an adequate description of the mys- terious nature of the soul ; but deeper than all these, and beyond these, and finer than these, yet bodying them all forth so far as they have body at all, you will clearly apprehend soul to be unseen and ungrasped, being thought, knowledge, and joy, and no other than very God." " I listen thankftilly to your explanation," here said Blan- combe, " though not without a kind of awe at your conclusion. It also rather puzzles me that you speak of intelligence (Imddht) in the sense perhaps of what we generaUy term apprehension, and again, you speak of knowledge and joy, without clearly defining to whom each of them belongs. For example, whose property is intelligence?" "Intelligence," answered Vidydchdrya, "resides in organ- isation." " And organs ?" asked Blancombe. "Organs," proceeded the other, "invest soul." " Then soul," argued Blancombe, " seems to be your sub- stratum of all things, which, considering what you have assumed sold to be, is not unreasonable. Only you added that the soul is SUBJECT — OBJECT — AGENT — EFFECT. 97 veiy thonght ; but thought must belong to some one ; who then 18 the thinker?" "The thinker," answered Vidy&h&ya, "and the thought are One." ^^Here, then, I am puzzled," resumed Blancombe, "and perhaps you will be good enough to remove my difficulty." " What is it?" asked the other. " Something of this kind," proceeded Blancombe: "in saying or doing anything you start fix)m some point. That point is placed, or put down as the beginning. In short, it is the subject Thus a subject in speaking is the name which goes before the con- necting-speech, or the nominative case to the verb ; and again, a subject in action is the agent which looks at or acts upon some- thing else. The subject, then, is not the same as that some- thing else beside it, which may be called the object. Still less is it the same as its own action or contemplation, for it may cease to act or contemplate, and still be in its place. It does not then appear easy to understand people who compress the subject, and either the characteristic which may be asserted of ity or the object upon which it acts, or its action as regards that object, all into one identity ; for they seem virtually to make no difference between cause and effect, or between agent, acting, act, and thing acted upon ; so that, if the realities of the world corresponded to such men^s reasonings, all opposites and dis- tinctions, such as fathers and sons, friends and enemies, rulers and men ruled, woidd be confounded together. Some such difficulty as this appears to me to wait upon your conception of the thinker and the thought being all one. Or, again, if the thinker be merged in thought, so as to have no other self-sub- stantiality, I fear our metaphysics will be in the same danger as that ingenious fable which is in some of your Indian books, about the earth resting on an elephant, and the elephant on a tortoise with nothing xmder it ; for we shall have reasoned so as to make all things, without being balanced too against each other, hang upon nothing." M.P. 7 98 COMPREHENSION OP OPPOSITES. " Then it appears," resumed Vidy&ch&rya, " that I must go somewhat farther. It is curious that you should have fallen upon the same difficulty as Candda and other doctors of the Vaisdshica philosophy, which is employed about the particular parts of nature. They too, being ingenious men, but imable to grasp either nature or divine wisdom as one whole, thought it necessary to divide all things under certain descriptive heads, (pctddrthas) such as, perhaps, you woidd call categories. Thus they came upon the notion of there being what they called substances, and these substances they made nine in number, such as earth, water, light, soul, and the rest. Here, if it were necessary, I might remark how their own ingenuity deceived them, when they enumerated among such substances even time and space ; to which it is only wonderful that they did not add nonentity, or classification, or arrangement ; for these would be evidently as much substances as those. But it is more to the purpose for me to illustrate your difficulty by remarking, that although the Veda says distinctly, Brahm is eternal knowledge and joy, yet the followers of Canada interpret this text as meaning that Brahm is the possessor of knowledge and joy ; for they fancy that they must have what you call a subject, or a sort of substance, in which these things may reside as qua- lities, or to which they may belong as properties. Their diffi- culty then seems to be pretty much the same as your own. In the particular objection too, which you apparently have to the identification of Deity and his outshadowing, because you think there must be a certain chasm between the subject and object, or as in this case you would say, between the maker and the thing made, you again resemble Madhwa, and perhaps come very near indeed to the Pdsupatas. They have just such a conception of the creature being distinct from the Creator as I gather from your difficulty must reside in your mind. Yet pro- bably you would allow that the flowing stream may be consi- dered as one with its fountain, and that any person's preferring to distinguish them by two names does not distract their essen- PHENOMENAL NATURE — DIVINE THINKING. 99 tial oneness. Nor, again, is it to be denied that the calf, whether an embryo or just bom, may justly be called one with the cow, of whose substance in a way it comes. We, for our part, con- sider that there are two sorts of meditation, {Samddht) ; namely, one which recognises distinctions such as this between the knower and the thing known (Savikalpaca), and another, which sinking all such distinctions {Nirvikalpaca)^ lays hold of the essential oneness in the projecter and the thing projected, or in the thinker and the thought. Now this last kind of meditation, which is the highest, is neither disturbed nor puzzled by mere modifications of that which it knows to be essentially one. For instance, cold and heat are only different degrees of what is essentially one thing, namely, temperature. Or you may take for a good example, speech, and that which you call action. What underlies and animates speech is thought, for without thought it would be no longer speech, but merely noise.