English
’ There have been philosophers, especially of a theistic persuasion, who are not pre¬ pared to take leave of this fascinating topic with the sense of a baffling mystery which, however ennobling or edifying, has the inevitable effect, they think, of sterilising the philosophic impulse, or at best, paraly¬ sing it at its very inception. Lotze, for example, imbued with a laudable enthusiasm and spirit of enterprise, has the hardihood to face this most obstinate of ‘ the riddles of the Sphinx,’ and, if need be, even to pry into the secret of the Divine nature and try to encompass them from within. If ‘ God did not create the world and then leave it alone ’ but ‘ maintains the world after creating it ’ by means of a perpetual creation or a continuance of his Divine authority,—if, in short, the world be eternally part and parcel of the Divine nature— what, as he significantly asks, does such ‘ a world gain by being created? ’ To this pertinent question as to the inner meaning of creation, Lotze gives the following answer : ‘ God permitted the thought which at first was only His own to become the thought of other spirits; or He caused this world of spirits to arise in which His continual influence and operation cftuses His own cosmic thoughts to * Appearance and Reality, pp. 226, 627. JTVA AND JAGAT 305 arise and figure as the appearance of an outer world surrounding them and capable of being perceived by them,’* and concludes with the characteristic dictum that ‘ creation is of spirits and of spirits alone.’f ' God’s motive in creating the world ’ is ‘ the expansive love which urges Him to communi¬ cate His holiness to other beings ’—in short ‘ to multiply His own holiness in us.’J Although an admirer of Lotze, Bosanquet would at once take exception to the phrase ‘ creation of creators ’ which lie denounces as a mere self-contradiction. But it is unfortunate that Bosanquet should have under¬ stood the term ‘ Creator ’ in a literal and absolute sense. The finite individual is, in a sense, self- created by its own action ; in another sense it has come to he what it is because of the pressure of the whole universe or system: of things at that focal point. The origin of such finite centres, with some measure of otherness and independence, is exactly what is sought to be conveyed by so apparently enigmatical and epigrammatic a phrase as * creation of creators.’ We have already seen how Samkara responded in a similar situation and met the requirements of un¬ derivative self-hood collaterally with those of crea¬ tive unity in his own construction of the relation between the Creator and the created beings endowed ah iniHo with free initiative and agency. But Samkara himself did not make much of that explana¬ tion ; for it was a mere statement of the fact of * Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion, pp. 91-92. t Ibid, p. 91. t Ibid, p. 99, 89 306 A SYSTEMATIC STUDY OP THE VEDIMTA individuation. Saipkara, however, would not go so far as to read a motive into the creative activity of the Lord—no matter whether it be the motive of ' compassion ’ or of ‘ multiplying holiness in us ’— on pain of making it ‘ teleological * in the ordinary sense. He modestly disclaims any intention of prying into the secrets of the Divine Life, and in¬ vokes the category of ‘ purposiveness without a purpose ’ or the sesthetico-teleological conception of Jiln, which, though not self-explanatory or satis¬ factory as a principle of philosophic explanation, can aspire to that rank so far as it is read in the context of the Divine nature as Ananda, for it is only ananda which is essentially self-communica¬ tive and self-revealing. Creation proceeds out of the abundance of the joy of the Creator. But the end of creation cannot he an abstract or universal bliss anterior to concrete and specific forms of blessedness and joy. Every form of bliss or ananda is ipso facto concrete and individual. An abstract blessedness or joy, * moving about in a world not realised,’ is a contradiction in terms. Each indivi¬ dual is an object of a unique, specific interest for the Creator, and as such infinite and eternal. Just as the poet* says :— “ If eyes were made for seeing Then beauty is its own excuse for being,”— so the Ved&ntic teacher, emulating ‘ the sweet reasonableness ’ of the poet, might argue that if Brahman or the Creator were strictly to he con- * Emerson, The Bhodora. JIVA AND JAG\T 307 ceived as of the very stuff of ‘ Ananda,’ then the world of Jivas as affording the richly diversified enjoyment of such a Being lias its own rdison d’etre. God tastes an infinite joy. In infinite wavs,' says* Browning; all created beings are the living embodiments, or incarnations of the blessedness or ananda of the Creator, affirms Samkara following in the footsteps of the tfruti texts that are so often quoted : or fra snaifa *11®^ ‘ ‘ Verily from Ananda, do all these creatures originate, it is as ananda-begotten that they live and move and have their being (in ananda ) and it is unto ananda that they re-enter and disappear.” But there is just the danger of mis¬ interpreting the nature of this original Ananda. “ We must not suppose,” as Lotze has so well and convincingly put it, “ that it lies in the abstract form in the mind as an end forethought to be made real in the world.Every real pleasure is different from every other, just as one colour is different from another...so,‘whenever we really feel pleasure, we but recognise and enjoy a peculiar specific value, attaching to its stimulus and to no other. Pleasure in general, on the other hand, answers to the colour which never exists as such. We must not then assume that in God there first exists an idea of pleasure as yet general and formless, and that He subsequently looks for forms through which to realise it. Without separation or loss of unity the * Paracelsus. 308 A SYSTEMATIC STUDY OF THE VEDANTA Divine activity issues in an inexhaustible wealth of forms, which to us, when in our reflection we com¬ pare them, appear to have been calculated for this presupposed end of universal pleasure, whereas in fact each of them directly and of itself represents a special value, which is for God Himself an object of peculiar and definite pleasurableness, and affects ourselves with a feeling which is a more or less remote copy of His.”* Thus it is substantiated that God or the Creator as ananda is co-eval and co-eternal with a world of finite individuals or created beings. While postulating a creative unity, in this concept of ananda (which, it is to be noted by the way, fulfils the festhetieo-teleologieal need of an intensification or multiplication of the original bliss, f Samkara never loses sight of gradations of value accounting for gradation in existence in the creative or individuating principle which is essen¬ tially unitary in nature in his recognition of or Now, what is, ac¬ cording to Samkara, the criterion or principle of individuality, which is constitutive of a graded hierarchy in creation? It is not, in the first place, the logical principle of non-contradiction or what is the same thing—of inclusiveness and harmony, as in Bradley and Bosanquet in particular. It is, to say the least of it, a merely formal principle, hard- • Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion, pp. 124-25. t afl utfN* ftmu—Chcindogya Upanishad, IV. iii. 2. jtVA AND JAGAT 309 ly different from bare tautology. The very fact that a thing exists bears testimony to the internal harmony it presupposes—without which it would have no title to exist. Samkara, however, lays un¬ mistakable emphasis on the concrete fact of indivi¬ duality, on the total existence of living centres of experience. Strictly speaking, it is by an abuse of language that the term ‘ value ’ is often extended to purely unconscious facts, either collectively or dis- tributively. Nature, as Kant argued long ago, otherwise regarded as a machine, receives the name of a ‘ realm ’ or ‘ kingdom ’ only when viewed in relation to rational beings as its ends. It acquires in that context a unity which otherwise does not belong to it. It belongs to the whole as an element in a self-supporting system. All values, therefore, are necessarily conscious values. The dumb, mute, strivings of nature below the threshold of conscious¬ ness find an articulate expression in finite centres of experience which are, as it were, so many focal points at which the vast externality of nature is gathered up and internalized. Lotze in an im¬ passioned utterance,of his in his ‘ Mikrokosmos ' proceeds, by way of his strictures on cognition con¬ ceived as a ‘ barren rehearsal ’ of a finished reality, to observe: ‘ ‘ The beauty of colours and tones, warmth and fragrance, are what Nature in itself strives to produce and express, but cannot do so by itself; for this it needs as its last and noblest instru¬ ment the sentient mind, which alone can put into words its mute striving and, in the glory of sentient intuition, set forth in luminous actuality what all the motions and gestures of the external world were 310 A SYSTEMATIC STUDY OF THE VEDANTA vainly endeavouring to express.”* This is what Prof. Pringle-Pattison seeks to convey by the phrase, ‘ man as organic to the world.’ It is interesting to note that Samkara anticipated this description of jjivas or individuals furnished with the sense-organs that reveal the presence of secondary qualities in the objective world. “The Sruti holds,” as Samkara elaborates the point in his commentary on the Brhaddranyaka-Upanishad,i “ the sense-organ to be kindred, homogeneous or continuous with the objects and not heterogeneous thereto, i,e., a genus by itself.