Page:Essays On The Gita - Ghose - 1922.djvu/332

324 illusory, as some would have it, it the spirit had nothing to do with works or life, this would not be so; but the soul in us devélops itself by life and works-and, not indeed so much the action itself, but the way of our soul’s inner {orce of working determines its relations to the spirit. This is, indeed, the justification of Karmayoga as-a practical means of the higher self- realisation.

We start from this foundation that the present inner life of man, almost entirely dependent as it is upon his vital and physical nature, only lifted beyond it by a limited play of mental energy, is not the whole of his possible existence, not even the whole of his present real existence. There is within him a hidden Self, of which his present nature is either only an outer appear- ance or is a partial dynamic result. The Gita seems throughout to admit its dynamic reality and not to adopt . the severer view of the extreme Vedantists that it is only an appearance, a view which strikes at the very roots of all works and action. Its way of formulating this element of its philosopbhical thought,—it might be done in a difterent way,—is to admit the Sankhya distinction between the Soul and Nature, the power that knows, supports and informs and the power that works, acts, provides all the variations of instrument, medium and process. Only it takes the free and immutable soul of the Sankhyas, calls it in Vedantic language the one immutable omnipresent Self or Brahman, and distinguishes it from this other soul involved in Nature, which is our mutable and dynamic being, the multiple soul of things, the basis of variation and personality. But in what then consists this action - of Nature ?