Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/179

160 view of Being, uses arguments at first partly identical with those of the Eleatic school, illustrates unity by various observations of nature; but then, in the very midst of what at first seems a merely realistic doctrine, suddenly, and with a dramatic swiftness of transformation, identifies the world principle with the inmost soul of the disciple himself, and with him, in so far as he is the knower of the Unity.

The beginning of the argument, I repeat, appears, from one side, realistic. The world, says Uddalaka, is, and is one. The disciple is to note this fact and to bring it home to himself by frequent empirical illustrations taken from outer nature. Then he is to observe that he, too, in so far as he is at all real, is for this very reason one with the world principle. The teaching seems at this state still a realism, only now a realism that has become reflective, recognizing the observer of the reality as also a real being, and therefore asserting of him, as knower, whatever one also asserts of the Being that he knows. But suddenly, even as one speaks, one becomes aware that, through this very identification of the essence of the knower and of the object known, the inmost reality of the world has itself become transformed. It is no longer a world independent of knowledge. One never really has observed it as an external world at all. It has no independent Being. It is a world identical with the knower. It is a vision of his soul. Its life is his life. It is in so far as he creates it. Whatever he is as knower, that is his world.