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OUTLINES OF INDIAN PHILOSOPHY
of knowing; how could a man know that by which he knows everything, how could he know the knower."
Pantheism
14. The idealism of Yâjňavalkya denies, as we have seen, the existence of the world; but this denial could not be maintained in the long run. The reality of the world forced itself on the beholder, and the problem was to recognize it without abandoning the truth laid down by the sage Yâjñavalkya. This led to a second stage of development which for want of a better name we may denominate Pantheism. Its chief doctrine is that the world is real, and yet the atman is the only reality, for the world is the atman. This is the most current thesis in the Upanishads and leads to very beautiful conceptions like that in Chând. 3, '14 : "The âtman is my soul in the inner heart, smaller than a barley corn, smaller than a mustard-seed, smaller than a grain of millet; and he again is my soul in the inner heart, larger than the earth, larger than the atmosphere, larger than the heavens and all these worlds." Cosmogonism
15. The equation world = âtman, notwithstanding its constant repetition in the Upanishads, is not a transparent one; for the âtman is an absolute unity, and the world a plurality. How can they be regarded as identical? This difficulty may have led later on to the attempt to substitute
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