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MIRA AND MAHAVIR
God. But if you maintain that it is something purely physical, you deny God; and you have seen that if you adhere to this view, life itself becomes impossible. If you wish to live, you must, for your own sake, regard Nature as possessing the same moral and spiritual qualities that you have; nay more - the moral and spiritual qualities that you can in any circumstances imagine or conceive. And thus you rise from Nature to God. In your quest of God-knowledge you may begin by denying his existence completely; and that is pure atheisrn. But when you realize that by doing so you have destroyed the basis of your own existence, you conceive of him as beyond the range of Nature, as something unknowable and unknown; and this may be called agnosticism. You may also think of him as a mere spectator of life or in terms of a universal Law, but still as something apart from Nature or life. The next stage is when you think of him as a conscious, deliberate and intelligent Being, creating Man and other forms of life, but associated with Nature, which is still something apart, something independent, something physical; and then you conceive of him as a Dualist. From this you may rise slowly to a more universal conception of God, as creating all forms of life without end, including Nature itself, and this is a pure monistic conception of the Deity.
I have shown you that the idea of God is closely associated with Nature, and he cannot be
