Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/176

Rh every popular interpretation of nature, which may serve to make the sense of this unity living in the reader’s or hearer’s mind. For the writers of the greater Upanishads, this unity of Being is not so much a matter of argument as it is an object of intuition. You first look out upon the whole circle of the heavens, and upon the multitudes of living forms, and you say of the whole: It is One, because at first you merely feel this to be true. Especially is the life of the body, or the life of any animate creature, felt to be one. But the Hindoo is animistic. His world is all alive. Hence he easily feels all this life to be one.

But, as we saw at the last time, a metaphysical realist also can attempt, however inconsistently, to call all Being One. In this case there would result such a doctrine as that of the Eleatic school. But to what obvious objection any Eleatic doctrine is open, we also saw. For if the Real is the Independent Being, existent wholly apart from your ideas about it, there is no way of escape from the assertion that our false opinions are themselves real in the same sense in which the One is real. The realist is essentially a dualist. The Hindoo was early aware of this danger threatening every monistic interpretation of the Real. He undertook to escape the danger by a device which in the Upanishads appears so constantly, and with such directness of expression, as to constitute a sort of axiom, to which the thinker constantly appeals. The Hindoo seer of the period of the Upanishads is keenly and reflectively self-conscious. His own thinking process is constantly before him. He cannot view any reality as merely