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Presidential Address
833
possible languages to add together their various shades of meaning and, correcting each other by a kind of mutual retouching, to give a more and more faithful image of the poem they translate, they would yet never succeed in rendering the inner meaning of the original". It is thus that the Upanishads describe Brahman or Atman through its various expressions or aspects such as earth, water, fire etc, and having first affirmed their identity with them they proceed to deny it by the formula of afa afa.
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As to how this intuition can be communicated, Bergson uses language which is reminiscent of that of Samkara's philosophy in regard to the duty of a guru: Here the single aim of the philosopher says Bergson should be to promote a certain effort, which in most men is usually fettered by habits of mind more useful to life. Now the image has at least this advantage, that it keeps us in the concrete. No image can replace the intuition of duration, but many diverse images, borrowed from very different orders of things, may, by the conveyance of their action direct consciousness to the precise point where there is a certain intuition to be seized."
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Longm
Lastly, one more form of the alogistic attitude which is mysticism although it is as old as the human mind has of late been particularly fostered by the recent discoveries of Science. The new science has enlarged as well as deepened our conception of Reality. It has furnished scientific proofs of the limits of the human mind, and has purified religion by de-anthropomorphising its ideas of God. The closed circle in which Reality was confined by some philo૧૦૫
