Page:One Hundred Poems Kabir (1915).djvu/28

xxviii Next, he is protected from the soul-destroying conclusions of pure monism, inevitable if its logical implications are pressed home : that is, the identity of substance between God and the soul, with its corollary of the total absorption of that soul in the Being of God as the goal of the spiritual life. For the thorough-going monist the soul, in so far as it is real, is substantially identical with God; and the true object of existence is the making patent of this latent identity, the realization which finds expression in the Vedāntist formula “That art thou.” But Kabīr says that Brahma and the creature are “ever distinct, yet ever united” ; that the wise man knows the spiritual as well as the material world to “be no more than His footstool.” The soul’s union with Him is a love union, a mutual