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THE KEY OF KNOWLEDGE.
at the very moment of its conception. An actual French Republic requires a living force, or idea, actually influencing the minds of the people in France, and holding them together as a nation. Separate the two terms by impassable barriers, and you destroy the republican spirit in the hearts of men, and the power to exist in the idea of the Republic at a stroke.
The Absolute of philosophy, when conceived as a collective concept, is an idea of the same type as that of the French Republic, and is subject to all the limitations of the class to which it belongs. It is not a being, but a bond, and cannot exist apart from the terms which it unites and controls. It will now be seen that the idea of Brahmau in the early Upanishads is a pure mental abstraction. The early Hindu theorists of the Vedanta School, ignorant of the state of super-consciousness, which was later recognised as turya, the fourth, seem to have revelled in the idea of becoming “That,” conceived as a mental abstraction. As a matter of fact, their description of Brahman itself suffices to refute any argument to the contrary, since it (it' is the pronoun which is invariably employed for Brahman) is not the Being-Knower-Blissful, but only Sat, Chit and Ananda, that is, Existence-Knowledge-Bliss, in other words, pure abstractions. Accordingly, Hindu philosophers invariably described Brahman by maintaining unbroken silencex-a method which Buddha also employed on certain occasions. The reason for this lay in the fact that their conception of Brahman, not being that of a being, but of pure mental abstractions,
* Deussen's Philosophy of the Upanishads, p. 309.
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