________________
98
RELIGIOUS PRACTICES AND OPINIONS
therefore, though not substantially, yet essentially one and the same. As this solution was possibly found too subtle to satisfy the understanding, later teachers went a step farther, and boldly cut the knot, by maintaining there is no such thing as substance. In the spirit of the Berkeleyan theory, they affirmed that matter exists not independent of perception, and that substances are indebted for their seeming reality to the ideas of the mind. They went still farther, and maintained that until our intellects are purified by abstraction, until we have attained a just appreciation of our own nature, and of that of universal spirit, our ideas are all wrong. Until the day of true knowledge dawn upon us, we are asleep-in a dream; we misconceive of all we perceive; we take a rope for a snake; an oyster-shell for mother-of-pearl; mirage for real water. All that we see in our unilluminated condition is Máyá, deception, illusion. There are no two things in existence; there is but one in all. There is no second, no matter; there is spirit alone. The world is not God, but there is nothing but God in the world.
Should it be an object to acquire more precise views of this part of our subject, they are easily attainable. The doctrines of the Vedanta philosophy have been recently the topic of controversy, as similar doctrines of idealism or transcendentalism have ever been and will probably ever be. The different schools of Indian philosophy are described by Mr. Colebrooke in several essays, in the Transactions of the Royal
