of philosophical schools, have contradicted each other.'

This rejection of reason and reasoning, though not unfamiliar to ourselves, seems certainly strange in a philosopher; and it is not unnatural that Samkara should have been taunted by his adversaries with using reason against reasoning. You cannot,' they say, 'maintain that no reasoning whatever is wellfounded, for you yourself can found your assertion that reasoning has no foundation, on reasoning only. Moreover, if all reasoning were unfounded, the whole course of practical human life would have to come to an end.' But even this does not frighten Samkara. As all reasoning is admittedly founded on perception and inference, he replies, 'that although with regard to some things reasoning is known to be well founded, with regard to the matter in hand there will be no escape, i.e. reasoning cannot there escape from the charge of being ill-founded. The true nature of the cause of the world on which final emancipation depends cannot, on account of its excessive abstruseness, even be thought of without the help of the holy texts; for it cannot become the object of perception because it does not possess qualities such as form and the like, and, as it is devoid of characteristic signs or qualities, it cannot lend itself to inference and other means of right knowledge.'

Here we approach a very difficult question, and/ have possibly to admit a weak link in the strong chain armour of both Bâdarâyana and Samkara. How is the supreme authority of the Veda to be established against those who doubt it? It may be enough for the orthodox to say that the Veda is its own proof, that it is self-luminous like the sun: but

how are objections to be silenced? The Vedanta philosophers have no superstitions on any other points, and are perfectly fearless in the treatment of all other problems; they can enter into the most subtle controversies, and yet they are satisfied with the mere assertion that the Veda wants no proof, that its authority requires no support from elsewhere (prâmânyam nirapeksham), that it is direct evidence of truth, just as the light of the sun is its own evidence of light, and at the same time the direct means of our knowledge of form and colour (II, 1, 1).

Authority of the Vedas.

But who says so? Who but a fallible mortal? It is hardly enough if we were to say that the Veda was the oldest document which the Brahmans possessed, that it may even have been brought into India from another country, that its very language required to be interpreted by competent persons. All this might have helped to invest the Veda with some kind of mysterious character; but my impression has always been that this would be taking too low a view of the Indian intellect. Veda, I hold, was not merely the name of a text or of texts, but was originally conceived in a far deeper sense.

The Meaning of Veda.

We often read that Veda is Brahman, and Brahman is Veda, and in such passages Brahman is now generally taken in the sense of the Samhitâs and Brahmanas such as we possess them. But might it not, like Âptavakana, to which we referred before, have meant originally knowledge or wisdom

or Sophia; and as such a Sophia was impossible without words, might we not here also have a faint recollection of Brahman as the Word, the first creation of divine thought. After all, Veda means originally knowledge, and not hymns and Brahmanas, and as such would come very near to Wisdom or Sophia. I do not venture to speak positively on such a subject, because there is so little of real evidence left to which we could appeal. I give it simply as an idea that has presented itself to my mind as a way out of many difficulties. To prevent all misunderstandings I say at once that I do not entertain the idea that such thoughts were borrowed from Greece and Alexandria, or had been matured during the as yet undivided Aryan period. All I should venture to suggest is that the idea of the Word or the Logos being the first revelation, manifestation or creation of a Divine Power is by no means so strange, even in a very early period of thought, as it seems to us. People who have thought at all about what a word is, not a mere sign or a means of communication, but an act embodying for the first time a definite idea which came into existence by being uttered, and afterwards thrown forth and realised in our objective world, would naturally, whether in Greece or in India, recognise in every word an act of a Divine Thinker, just as in every species they have to recognise the will of a Divine Creator. Samkara goes so far as to declare that the Veda is the cause of the distinction of all the different classes and conditions (species) of gods, animals, and men (I, 1, 3, and Brih. Âr. Upan. II, 4, 10). Nay he speaks still more distinctly in I, 3, 28: 'We all know from

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observation,' he says, 'that any one, when setting about something which he wishes to accomplish, first remembers the word denoting the thing, and after that sets to work.' What should he do when there is as yet no word to remember, but the word, that is, the idea, has first to be created? We therefore conclude that, before the creation, the Vedic words became manifest in the mind of Pragâpati the creator, and that after that he created the things corresponding to these words. The Sruti also, when it says uttering Bhûr He created the earth, &c.,' shows that the worlds, such as the earth, &c., became manifest, i. e. were created, from the word Bhûr, which had become manifest in the mind (of Pragâpati). In that case the recognition by Indian thinkers of Brahman as the Word or the Divine Thought, or as Veda, would by no means be so surprising as it sounds to us at first. It might then be said quite truly that the Sabda, sound, or Brahman or Vâk or *Brih = word, was eternal, absolute, self-luminous, self-evident, in fact all that the Veda is said to be. Two such words as Brahman and Âtman would by themselves convey that eternal truth for which the Vedânta-philosophy is fighting, and in support of which there is but one appeal, not to sensuous experience nor to inference, but to the Word itself, i. e. to Brahman, or the Veda. I know full well how entirely hypothetical, if not mystical, this may sound to many Sanskrit scholars, but I could not entirely suppress these thoughts, as they seem to me the only way in which we can free our Vedanta philosophers from the charge of childishness, for imagining that they could establish the highest truths which are within the reach of the

human mind, on such authorities as the hymns, the Brahmanas and even some of the Upanishads, as we possess them now.`

Returning to the Vedânta, however, such as we know it from the Sûtras, we must be satisfied with. the expressed view of Bâdarayana that the evidence for what the Vedanta teaches is neither perception nor inference, but the Word (Sabda) alone, such as we find it in our manuscripts, or rather in the oral tradition of the Veda.

Work-part and Knowledge-part of the Veda.

Of course a distinction has to be made, and has been made by Bâdarayana between the Knowledgepart, the Gñâna-kânda, chiefly the Upanishads, and the Karma-kânda, the Work-part, the hymns and Brahmanas. Both are called Veda or Sruti, revelation, and yet the work-part does not exist for the true philosopher, except in order to be discarded as soon as he has understood the knowledge-part. Samkara is bold enough to declare that the whole Veda is useless to a man who has obtained knowledge, or Mukti, or freedom. Not all the Vedas together,' he says, are more useful to one who has obtained true knowledge than is a small tank of water in a country flooded with water.' A man who has neglected the Vedas and disregarded the rules of the four Âsramas, in fact, a man who has lost caste, may still be allowed to study the Vedânta as the fountain of all true knowledge, and thus become liberated (III, 4, 36). The hymns and Brâhmanas refer in fact to the phenomenal world, they presuppose the existence of a manifold creation, of an enjoyer of what is to be enjoyed, of good works and

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