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 The Final Philosophy of the Veda 27 5

ﬁnal development ; the power that manifests itself in every living thing ;-this eternal power is identical with our own innermost and truest self, equally imperishablc when stripped of all its external and accidental circumstances. This conviction is emu balmed in the famous words, 25m! roam e527, “Thou art That,” or eke”: Mar/amt: esmi, “ I am the Brahma.” These are the slogans of higher religious thought; and they contain the corollary that the world of things which we. see in space, as we ideally assume it to be with our eyes and bodies, themselves phenomena, are mere shadows cast by the one truth “the innermost Personal Self identical with the outer Universal Self, the drakmadtmmz.‘

Now we have seen that our empirical knowledge which shows us a manifold variegated world where in truth there is only are/mm, and a body where there is in truth only airmen, or the 5mm;er in ourselves, that all that is mere ignorance, distraction, or illusion. The things that are unfolded before our eyes in space, those things to which we ourselves belong with our

ponderable bodies, are not true entities, they are not

‘The Catholic mystic, Johannes Scheﬂler, called Angelus Silesius (horn 32624), arrives at the same end in a stanza of his collection of

poems called Ckarzaéim’rcﬁer Wondermmmz .-

“ Ich bin so gross wie Gott, Er ist wie ich so klein ; Ich kann nicht an ter ihm, Er ﬁber mich nicht sein.”