Page:The Religion of the Veda.djvu/255

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The Beginnings of Hindu Theosophy .2239

The avowed purpose of all philosophy is to so. count for the presence of the world and its contents, as something which is not self-evident, and needs to be explained beyond the point of more individual experience, or analysis through empirical knowledge. The creation hymn performs this act not without some unsteadiness and with petulance due to seep» ticism. In putting forth a fundamental principle without personality it does not fall far behind the best thought of later times inside or outside of 111- dia. It fails where all philosophy fails, in bridging over to this particular idealistic or phenomenal world, even after the fundamental principle has been ab~ stracted, no matter in how rareﬁed and non—committal a form. We may expect, therefore, other starts to- wards the same end. The Veda, as I have hinted before, contains an astonishing number of attempts to establish a supreme monotheistic being who is far easier to handle than the monistic “That Only ”; a monotheistic god who, when once conceived, con~ veniently assumes all responsibility. We have seen more than once how supreme divine action makes a show of gradually detaching itself from the persons of the various gods who ﬁgure in the earlier myth and cult, and how this action impresses itself upon the mind as really more important than the particu~ lar divine agent who was at any given time supposed