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Presidential Address
evolutionary process. Let us follow this thought-movement through its different stages.
The period of the Great Vision--that is my word for " Veda”, which means knowledge or thought, but which being philologically connected with Latin videre, to see, I prefer to render by the word 'vision-closed with the teaching “All this is Brahma ", (Fefead a ) "Thou art That". ( azafe' ) The earlier Rshis, so at least it was thought, had both heard and seen the Truth. The generation that followed had heard but not seen it : it had the tradition, but not the sight. The later sages, therefore, asked the question : 'How is it I do not see that all is Brahma and that I am Brahma ?', and they tried to devise means for converting faith into experience (fa into cala). And their first answer to the question was: 'Because I am confounding matter and mind, or to go deeper, Nature and Spirit, which it is necessary for me to distinguish (fea Fettfa )', and this is Wisdom (aitu). But note that this answer just carries us one step forward and no more. For the question still remains:
How am I to turn this intellectual distinction into a reality of experience ?' So the next step was to point out the way (TI) to the separation of Nature and Spirit. This (TTT) is the practical complement of the theoretical Fict. The essential difference between pisu and it is more correctly formulated as the difference between the theoretical and the practical side of a single system of philosophy, than as the difference between two Sāmkhyas, one of which is nirisvara and the other seśvara ( atheistic
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