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CREATION.
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The Monist, however, affirms that a philosopher who does not try to attain to Monism must be held to have thrown up his brief. Sir Oliver Lodge thinks :
“The truth is that all philosophy aims at being monistic; it is bound to aim at unification, however difficult of attainment; and a philosopher who abandoned the quest, and contented himself with a permanent antinomy-a universe compounded of two or more irreconcilable and entirely disparate and disconnected agencies-would be held to be throwing up his brief as a philosopher and taking refuge in a kind of permanent Manichaeism, which experience has shown to be an untenable and ultimately unthinkable position" (Life and Matter).
Agreeably to the trend of the above argument, the Monist maintains that unity is capable of being attained by making the intellect turn on itself with a view to self-elucidation. The school of thought known as Vedanta follows the Intellect in its introspective excursion into its own self. We shall, accordingly, now investigate the nature of the world from the standpoint of Vedanta.
Vedanta opens its campaign by challenging the reliability of senses, a slight alteration of the conditions of whose functioning suffices to produce false impressionsa rope is often mistaken for a serpent, the stump of a tree for a human being and a shadow for a ghost. The Vedantist, therefore, refuses to place any reliance upon these deceitful agents of the phenomenal “ without."
The next question which Vedanta raises relates to the nature of the world, which, it is pointed out, is so hopelessly dependent on the senses that it can hardly be said to exist independently of them. Things are as they are perceived, or inferred from those perceived. But what are perceived except extension, colour and the like, which are only sense-affections? Perception and infer
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