Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/30

 resplendent egg, and therein the Eternal itself was born again as Brahma. Brahma is the progenitor of all spirits, of the existent and non-existent. In this egg, it is said, the great Power remained inactive for a year; at the end of that time it divided the egg by means of thought, and created one part masculine and the other feminine. The masculine energy is itself begotten, and becomes again begetting and active, only when it has practised severe meditation, that is to say, when it has attained to the concentration of abstraction. Thought is therefore what brings forth and what is brought forth; it is the bringer forth itself, namely, the unity of thinking with itself. The return of thinking to itself is found in other descriptions besides. In one of the Vedas, some passages out of which Colebrooke was the first to translate, a similar description of the first act of creation is to be found: “There was neither Being nor nothing, neither above nor below, neither death nor immortality, but only the One enshrouded and dark. Outside of this One existed nothing, and this brooded in solitude with itself; through the energy of contemplation it brought forth a world out of itself; in thinking, desire, impulse first formed itself, and this was the original seed of all things.”

Here likewise Thought in its self-enclosed activity is presented to us. But Thought becomes further known as Thought in the self-conscious Essence—in man, who represents its actual existence. The Hindus might be charged with having attributed to the One a contingent existence, since it is left to chance whether or not the individual raises itself to the abstract Universal—to abstract self-consciousness. But, on the other hand, the caste of the Brahmans is an immediate representation of the presence of Brahma; it is the duty of that caste to read the Vedas, to withdraw itself into itself. The reading of Vedas is the Divine, indeed God Himself, and so too is prayer. The Vedas may even be read unintelligently and in complete stupefaction; this stupefaction itself is