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812
Presidential Address
The God of science in the latter half of the nineteenth century was the 'Unknown' and 'Unknowable' of Herbert Spencer, and its religion consisted of what is called 'cosmic emotion'. But Spencer's Unknown and Unknowable though vast in its sublimity was less than man, not more, impersonal without being superpersonal : hence, it could not evoke love or reverence, but could only strike the imagination with awewhich is very simply described as 'cosmic emotion'. But Alexander's Space-Time, unlike Šamkara's Brahman, which is at once personal and superpersonal, is not a principle before which the human soul could · be expected to bend and exclaim:
" सत्यपि भेदापगमे नाथ तवाहं न मामकीनस्त्वम् । सामुद्रो हि तरङ्गः क्वचन समुद्रो न तारङ्गः ॥" *
Alexander admits this. He asks: “Since SpaceTime is already a whole and one, why, it may be urged, should we seek to go beyond it ? Why not identify God with Space-Time ?", and answers "Now no one could worship Space-Time. It may excite speculative or mathematical enthusiasm and fill our minds with intellectual admiration, but it lights no spark of religious emotion. Worship is not the response which Space-Time evokes in us, but intuition." One may be tempted to accept this position on behalf of śāınkara Vedānta on the ground that Sażnkara too makes a distinction between the Brahman of Upasana (worship) and the Brahman of Jnāna (self-realisation), of which the latter may well be identified with Space* "I have transcended all sense of distinctions. Still, O Lord, I am Thy expiession, Thou not mine: a wave belongs to the ocean, the ocean does not belong to the wave.”
