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THE SYSTEMS OF INDIAN PHILOSOPHY
tist says : We may take it for silver but it always remains mother-of-pearl. So we may speak of the snake and the rope, or of the silver and mother-of
rl, as being one. And yet we do not mean that the rope has actually undergone a change or has turned into silver. After that the Vedantists argue that what the rope is to the snake the Supreme Being is to the world. They go on to explain that when they hold that the world is Brahma they do not mean that Brahma is actually transformed into the world, for Brahma cannot change and cannot be transformed. They mean that Brahma presents itself as the world or appears to be the world. The world's reality is not its own but Brahma's, yet Brahma is not the material cause of the world, as the spider is of the web, or the milk of the curds, or the sea of the foam, or the clay of the jar (which is made by the potter), but only the substratum, the illusory material cause. There would be no snake without the rope, there would be no world without the Brahma, and yet the rope does not become a snake nor does Brahma become the world. With the Vedantist the phenomenal and the noumenal are essentially the same. The silver as we perceive and call it is the same as the mother-of-pearl; without the mother-of-pearl there would be no silver for us. We impart to motherof-pearl the name and form of silver, and by the same process by which we create silver the whole world was created by words and forms.
(m) Besides, the Vedanta philosophy has its own theory as to the creation of the whole world out of Brahma and 341971. The purport of the philosophy however comes to this: All being is Brahma, nothing can be except Brahma, while all that exists is an illusory, not a real, modification of Brahma and is caused by name and form. When the true knowledge
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