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Srikara Bhashya (commentary)

by C. Hayavadana Rao | 1936 | 306,897 words

The Srikara Bhashya, authored by Sripati Panditacharya in the 15th century, presents a comprehensive commentary on the Vedanta-Sutras of Badarayana (also known as the Brahmasutra). These pages represent the introduction portion of the publication by C. Hayavadana Rao. The text examines various philosophical perspectives within Indian philosophy, hi...

Part 39 - Influence of Spinoza: Bhedabheda in the West

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The views of later writers on philosophy are mainly based on the systems of Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke or Leibniz. These provided, as Professor Wolf says, "the broad foundations for all, nearly all the philosophies which have been propounded since then during the past two centuries. There is hardly any doubt that Leibniz helped Kant to effect the Copernican revolution he did in logic. Through Wolff, the chief follower of Leibniz, Kant sought to revivify philosophy. But the influence of Spinoza on German thought generally was far greater than that of Leibniz. F. H. Jacobi (1743-1819) spoke of Spinoza's philosophy as logically unanswerable though 1129 1130 Monadology, Para 74. See Theodicy. Morris, Philosophical Writings of Leibniz, page 196; page 242, Para 173. 1181 Pollock, loc. cit., 355.

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morally unacceptable. 1132 Lessing (1729-1781) said that there was no other philosophy but Spinoza's. Kant was not wholly unaffected by its rising influence but Goethe (1749-1832) assimilated and used it. J. G. Fichte (1762- 1814), though he started as a disciple of Kant, broke away from him subsequently and developed a philosophy in which we see how he had studied Spinoza and how he had felt the power and the influence of Spinoza's world-idea. He took Spinoza's metaphysical interpretations of theology with but little alteration, though he diverged from Spinoza's theory of substance. He argued that even the Absolute is the product of the mind. The whole of experience-not its form only-is generated by the absolute self" in which individual minds participate. The "absolute self" divides itself into a knowing self and a known object, because the moral growth of the self needs objects as obstacles to be surmounted by moral endeavour. For similar reasons, he holds that the absolute self must divide into many selves, otherwise there would be no opportunity for the exercise of moral duties. But the many selves are all expressions of one moral order, which is the absolute self or God. He thus tries to harmonize realism with idealism and in doing so reaches the Bhedabheda position. No wonder that his philosophy impressed Carlyle. "So robust an intellect, a soul so calm," said Carlyle of Fichte, "so lofty, massive, and immoveable, has not mingled in philosophic discussion since the time of Luther....the cold, colossal, adamantine spirit standing erect and clear, like Cato Major among degenerate men; fit to have been the teacher of the Stoa and to have discoursed of Beauty and Virtue in the groves. of Academe.' " 1132 Jacobi contended for the dogma of immediate cognition as the special organ of the supersensuous. As Schwegler suggests, he failed to note that cognition has, as already described, a series of subjective intermediating movements and can pretend to immediacy only in entire oblivion of its own nature and origin.

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Hegel (1770-1831), though he criticized Spinoza, was greatly influenced by him. He repeatedly said that to be a philosopher, you must first be a Spinozist and that if you have not Spinozism, you have no philosophy. It is to be feared that Hegel criticized Spinoza not for what he actually said or thought but for what was understood as Spinoza's view in his time. 1133 However this may be, the fact remains that his theory endeavours to harmonize the absolute with the many. The philosophy of Hegel resolves being into thought, and thought into the unity of the logical moments of simple apprehension, judgment and reason, all purely spiritual acts, whereby being in itself, or seyn, becomes other than itself, or fur sich seyn, the universal being first by separating from itself particularised, and then by return into itself individualised, the whole being what Hegel characterizes as Des Process des Geistes or "the Process of the Spirit". This is what has been called "the secret of Hegel". It is an open secret, as has been well said, and one too that pervades the whole of his system. Open where you will," writes Dr. Sterling, the first of his chief exponents in England, "you find him always engaged in saying pretty well the same thing "-always identity by otherness passing into selfness or making that for itself which is at first in itself. The unity that Hegel aims at is, again, Bhedabheda, wherein difference is particularised while unity is stressed. The two seem to be opposed to each other but are really allied to each other. Hegel's identity of the opposites is what we see in Bhedabheda. The similarity does not end there, for we see Bhedabheda more than lurking in Hegel's description of the nature of the absolute and its separation from itself. F. W. S. Schelling (1775-1854), though originally a student of Hegel, later attached himself to Fichte, and then departed from him in restoring the Absolute to the position of an unknown thing-in-itself. He re-established once 1133 See Pollock, loc. cit., 372, f.n. 2.

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again the reality of the physical world. To him the beauty of the material world is sufficient ground for its reality. It is an expression of the Absolute as the mind is. The Absolute thus is neither mind nor matter, though it expresses itself in both. Thus Schelling's theory of unity is essentially based on the idea of the Absolute being allowed its place of pre-eminence. Though he has been criticized as having gone back to Spinozism, it is clear that he urges as much the reality of the Absolute as the reality of the material world. That is just where he agrees with the Bhedabheda theory, which refuses to yield either the Absolute or the material world. J. T. Fechner (1801-1887), the great psychophysicist, who laid the foundations of the science of psychophysics in his Elements of Psychophysics, has elaborated a theory which has to be described as a phase of Bhedabheda. He regards the universe as a society of souls, and God as the supreme all-embracing Soul. To him, inwardly all souls are mental, though they appear outwardly to each other as material bodies. Just as smaller bodies are included in larger bodies, and all bodies are included in physical nature, so some souls are included in others, and the soul of God embraces all other souls. Rudolph Hermann Lotze (1817-1881), the German philosopher, author of Microcosmus, developed a system of teleological idealism-sometimes also called as idealistic pantheism-which is largely based on ethical considerations. According to it, ultimate reality is mental substance. Material phenomena are, in his view, appearances produced by souls or spiritual monads, but he held that these monads. are not independent substances, but modes or states of God, who is the sole and infinite Substance. He repudiated both agnosticism and a mere mechanical view of the universe. In his view, mechanistic phenomena are appearances resulting from the uniform laws with which God comes out of these immanent activities which, he suggests, are, at the same time, directed to divine ends. He thus endeavoured to reconcile idealism with what might be called qualified

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monadism of a kind which, while it is a departure from that of Leibniz, contains the elements of the Bhedabheda doctrine. T. H. Green (1838-1882) and F. H. Bradley (1846- 1924) continued in the spiritual tradition set up by Hegel. Green led the protest against empiricism and evolutionism, which denied to man a sense of moral obligation. Man is not a being who is simply "the result of natural forces". To understand his real nature, it is necessary to understand, first, the nature of our consciousness, the reality of which is all that we are sure of in the first instance. Human consciousness is essentially self-consciousness. In man, even the simplest process of sense-perception is not a mere change, but the consciousness of a change. Human experience, thus, consists not only of mere events, physical or mental, but of recognitions of such events. What is apprehended, accordingly, is never a bare fact, but a recognized fact, a synthesis of relations in a consciousness which involves a self as well as the elements of the objects apprehended, which it holds together in the unity of the act of perception. Knowledge therefore always implies the work of the mind or self. The work of the mind, however, is not capricious or arbitrary. This is attested by the common distinction between truth and error, between reality and illusion and by the very existence of the sciences. But all this, in the view of Green, implies that the reality which we know is an intelligible reality, an ideal system, in short, a spiritual world. And such a world, in his opinion, can only be explained by reference to a spiritual "principle which renders all relations possible and is itself determined by none of them", an absolute and eternal self-consciousness which apprehends as a whole what man knows only in part. This "principle", this absolute, and eternal self-consciousness, is, to him, God. In some measure, man partakes of the self-consciousness of God. This participation is the source of morality and religion. For a self-conscious personality, according to him, cannot be supposed to pass away but

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must partake of the nature of the eternal. A bridge between the Absolute and the finite is thus created-by the "principle which renders all relations possible and is itself determined by none of them". The Absolute is the ideal and the finite partakes of its nature-the self-consciousness of the one being the self-consciousness of the other. Thus, the finite partakes of the "nature of the eternal". Green thus affirms both unity and difference between the Absolute and the finite and harmonizes both by postulating a spiritual world, an "ideal system ", drawn from his Hegelian repertoire. F. H. Bradley, if anything, is even more specific. He feels that the Hegelian view that the "real" is the natural, adopted by Green, is far from satisfying. He finds this kind of idealism not only "as cold and ghost-like as the dreariest materialism" but also the apparent glory of the perceived world as much "a deception and a cheat", if it covers some spectral woof of impalpable abstractions, or unearthly ballet of bloodless categories," which Hegel's idealism regards as ultimate reality. He makes "immediate experience' rather than " cognitive consciousness" his starting-point. He finds in immediate experience immediate feeling, a knowing and being in one". doubtless at first an undifferentiated unity, and relational but it contains implicitly numerous distinctions. which discursive thought or judgment makes explicit. For immediate experience is felt to be inadequate, and thought is our endeavour to supplement it by introducing distinctions, abstractions, qualifications, relations, etc. But the categories and concepts with which thought operates, though useful as working ideas for the special tasks of science, are unsatisfactory for a philosophic understanding of ultimate reality. "The nature studied by the observer and by the poet and painter, is in all its sensible and emotional fulness a very real Nature. It is in most respects more real " " an It is nonFor the than the strict object of physical science." concepts of science are abstract and are abstract and not ultimately true. Space and time, relation and quality, primary and secondary qualities, motion and change, causation and

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" 769 " activity, self and things-in-themselves-all these notions, when closely examined, end in self-contradiction, and are therefore applicable only to mere appearances ", not to ultimate reality. For ultimate reality must be selfconsistent and harmonious. Yet even " appearances cannot be mere illusions, though Bradley sometimes describes them as such. They must have a place in ultimate reality. How is ultimate Reality, the Absolute, to be conceived? The clue to such a conception, though a very inadequate conception, is sought by Bradley in immediate experience, at least in immediate experience at as it has been put--a higher remove. The Absolute is a Spirit embracing and completing all finite experiences and "appearances". And the experience of the Absolute or the Absolute experience, repeats at a higher remove, with infinitely greater wealth and perfection, the "immediate feeling", the "knowing and being in one", which characterizes the "immediate experience" of human beings. "Reality is one experience" and "experience" exhausts all reality. "There is no being or fact outside of that which is commonly called psychical existence. Feeling, thought and volition-any groups under which we class psychical phenomena are all the material of existence. And there is no other material actual or even possible. Spirit is to Bradley "the unity of the manifold in which externality of the manifold has utterly ceased. "Outside of spirit," according to him, "there is not, and there cannot be, any reality, and the more that anything is spiritual, so much the more is it veritably real." To Bradley, the Absolute was supra-personal, and it "has no history of its own, though it contains histories without number." The Absolute is a Spirit which embraces and completes all finite experiences and appearances ". And that Spirit is the unity of the manifold in which the externality of the manifold has ceased. Finite experiences are there, but they are embraced in the Spirit-the Absolute; the unity of the manifold makes the Spirit, the externality of the manifold having ceased. This conception of 49 " " F

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the Absolute is much like Bhedabheda, which postulates the unity of the manifold, the manifold having lost its externality. " Thought and B. Bosanquet (1848-1923), who makes thought the pathway to absolute reality, reaches the Bhedabheda position in a different manner. He refutes the idea that thought could lead, by its abstraction, to any inconsistencies. It is wrong, in his view, to identify thought with the formation of abstract universals, which naturally lead to an inadequate interpretation of reality. Thought is not merely abstract; it is, at its best, systematic. It helps to construe the systemic character of reality. Its characteristic "universal" for the understanding of reality is the concrete universal", i.e., the conception of a " whole " or "system", not the merely "abstract" universal which is only concerned with what is common or general in things instead of with their systematic inter-relations in a whole or system. Thus conceived, thought leads, not to contradiction or illusory appearance, but to the very heart of reality. It is, in fact, to Bosanquet, "the self-revelation of reality". reality are, to him, correlative. always an affirmation about reality. And reality "is the whole that thought is always endeavouring to affirm." In all experience, the influence of "the whole " or the concrete universal, is implicit. In logical thought, which follows the natural impulse to seek the truth and reality, we have "the whole " operating explicitly as the criterion. In it "the idea of system, the spirit of the concrete universal, in other words, of individuality, is the central essence. All higher experiences are characterised by the fact that in them comes to light the coherence of things, the "wholeness", or system, i.e., integrity, of the universe, that is, the Absolute. In such experiences, accordingly, we feel "the heart-beat of the Absolute". And the Absolute is the final synthesis of mind and nature. Nature and mind are correlative. Nature is what is revealed to mind, and mind is what apprehends or interprets nature. " Thought," he says, " "is "

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In the Absolute all finite experiences are transmuted and perfected into a complete whole. As such a whole in which everything is adjusted in relation to the rest, the Absolute may be described as self-directing. The Absolute is thus the one, according to Bosanquet, in which all finite experiences are changed and perfected into a whole. It is thus self-conditioned and self-regulating. The finite has no significance without it; in it, it finds its coherence or systemic integrity. But its individuality is not denied; but is affirmed and, indeed, without such individuality, the very conception of the idea of system, would be in danger. Only it would be without purpose, if it were not correlated to the whole, the Absolute. In his view, the finite can have no separate existence but must find its place in the Absolute, if human experience is any guide. Professor Benedetto Croce (born 1866), the leading Italian Idealist philosopher, has propounded a philosophy of the spirit which is likewise a form of the Bhedabheda theory. He starts with the view that conscious experience is the only sort of reality that need be assumed. But he concedes that spiritual reality contains more than the experience of merely finite minds. He also posits a universal consciousness or spirit which is immanent in all finite minds and is more than the mere totality of finite minds. While Hegel and his school of thought conceived of the dialect of thought as essentially logical rather than temporal in character--though Hegel had to agree that it was also a process in time-Croce definitely regards the cosmic spirit as a process in time and identifies reality with history. In other words, he represents reality as incessantly changing, always active, ever creative. Much like Bergson and James, he rejects the idea of a static, immutable Absolute, or "block universe," complete once for all. Cosmic activity proceeds in cycles, but is without a beginning and without an end. Within this total spiritual activity, certain phases, aspects or factors may, he holds, be distinguished, though not separated. He distinguishes theoretical from practical activity. Within each of these, he makes further distinctions.

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Under theoretical, he differentiates intuitions from concepts, which are thoughts or ideas. Intuition, he holds, is the act of creating the materials of cognition and exemplifies it by the creation of the artist. In this case, the mind has no material from outside supplied to it; it simply creates or produces its intuitions. On the other hand, conceptual thinking operates on intuitions and traces relations between them, or traces what is universal in them. Concepts, indeed, are immanent in the intuitions, it being impossible to separate them. Concepts, however, have a certain special significance. They are common to all minds and are the means of communion between them. They are universal, and are expressive of the Universal Spirit that is immanent in all finite minds. As to the objects to which theoretical activity must always be directed, they also are the creations of that activity. In fact the process of thinking, the object of thought, and the discrimination between the activity and the object are all of them aspects of the same total experience. They seem separate, but are not. It is only by a process of abstraction that a world of seemingly independent objects is set up over against the world of thought. Next, as to practical activity, Croce holds that this is always volition, since there are no physical actions in a spiritual world. As volition depends on cognition, practical activity is dependent on theoretical activity. To Croce, this world is in the region of pure intuition, of experience accepted for its own sake. The question of the reality of experience does not arise in this region. We are satisfied with experience itself, simply But anything can be intuited and taken as pure experience. The world then can be imagined as simply existing and as satisfying our desires simply by being so imagined. This does not preclude the conception of a world that exists and of the idea that its existence is an affair of perfect interconnection and coherence. Croce is largely governed by the Hegelian idea of the supremacy of the Spirit, though he differs from his master in suggesting that religion is only imperfect philosophy and not the as such.

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supreme form of the Spirit. However this may be, Croce agrees with Bhedabheda when he refuses to accept the "block universe" idea; when he speaks of a universal consciousness or spirit as immanent in all finite minds and is something more than a mere totality of finite minds; when he suggests the Cosmic Spirit as a process in time; and when he speaks of concepts as being universal and as expressive of the universal Spirit that is immanent. in all finite minds. J. Royce (1855-1916), the well-known American philosopher, approaches to some extent the views of Bradley. To him finite ideas are not mere images, but imply some mode of action, and therefore some purpose. Such purpose constitutes its internal meaning. They also possess an internal meaning; the external meaning having reference to objects to objects beyond themselves. beyond themselves. But objects cannot be really independent of the knowledge relating to them. To be related, the object and the idea should have something in common. The reality of these objects of reference thus consists in their fulfilment of the inner meanings of the corresponding ideas. The reality of an object is accordingly conceived as the realization in experience of the purpose involved in the internal meaning of an idea. Whether this purpose is or is not fulfilled can only be judged by the idea itself. Thus the idea itself is constructed as having a purpose and will of its own. Thought thus came to be conceived by Royce as a conscious life in which ideas embody their purposes in objects. From this point of view, "to be" means to express to be" means to express "the complete internal meaning of an absolute system of ideas". This is so, because reality in its fulness must fulfil all ideas. It follows from this that finite ideas must be assumed to be absorbed in one complete system of ideas and one all-comprehensive purpose which finds its satisfaction in the total realm of existence. Absolute experience, however, embraces much that is beyond finite experience. According to Royce's conception, human individuals are not merely engulfed in the Absolute, but are, in some way, conserved. Each individual

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expresses in his own way something of the Absolute will, and so constitutes a unique part of the unique whole. Even time, in his view, is not entirely superseded, in the Absolute, by an eternity that is utterly different from it. He rather would suggest that "Eternity is the Absolute's simultaneous apprehension of all time, somewhat in the same way as a melody is the simultaneous apprehension of a certain sequence of notes." The significance of Royce's theory in the light of Bhedabheda will be evident when it is said that he tries to reconcile by it the theories of monism and pluralism in a manner which is strikingly illustrative of the hold of this doctrine in modern Western philosophy. This is even more evident when we review the views of a few other Western philosophers of modern times, who have propounded what may be styled composite types of Realism in their endeavour to effect compromises between different kinds of philosophical opposites-monism and pluralism, idealism and materialism, empiricism and rationalism. Renouvier, who essayed a fusion of positivism and idealism on a basis of phenomenalism, is a good example of this tendency. In his later writings, he admitted the existence of more organic individualities than orderly aggregates of phenomena, namely, monads, spiritual individualities and personalities. "When freedom makes its appearance," he says, "in a given being, that being, bound by a thousand relations to other beings, acquires an incomparably more individual existence; what was only distinguished is now separated; what was a self becomes. self-subsistent, an essence, or....a substance. . . .; an individual, and the most individual that is known-the human individual, the human person." Further, to form a comprehensive view of reality as a whole, more is needed than a knowledge of the categories and particular laws. We have to assume the law of contradiction, and have recourse to the principle of free Belief under the inspiration of our whole personality. Renouvier believed in a kind of harmony between man and the universe, in virtue of which the universe responds to the moral demands of man. In

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view of his rather wide departure from absolute idealism, Professor Wolf is inclined to class him with critical idealism or even monadism, but he is not only idealistic but his very monadism and indeed his pluralism enables us to put him down under the Bhedabhedavadins. Next, G. Gentile (born 1875) for whom self-consciousness is ultimate reality, suggests that just as the self-consciousness of a finite mind or spirit is immanent in each of its experiences, so the universal consciousness or spirit is immanent in each finite self-consciousness. Finite minds are therefore only moments or aspects of the universal mind which at once is and creates the universe. Although the subjective and objective phases or moments of self-experience (finite or cosmic) are not really separate, yet they are distinguishable. W. E. Hocking (born 1873) who elaborates a philosophy which admittedly contains elements drawn from idealism, naturalism and pragmatism, suggests that sense experience is a common link between many selves and that thereby we get to know directly not only other human selves but even God himself. Hocking regards the whole world as a self. "This word Self," he writes, "indicates chiefly that the mental life within the world has its unity, and that all the meanings of things cohere in a single will." The ultimate evidence for the self-hood of the whole world is to be found in immediate experience. "We, as a group of human selves," he adds, "know that we are not alone in the universe that is our first and persistent intuition." But the self of the universe is infinite in its depth and mystery. And human life is a reaching out to the reality of things as a region in which the discovery of value need never end. The human self spans past and future, lives on values, and is free, determining out of a matrix of many possibilities which shall become fact. But the human self is not all these things from the beginning-its freedom and its immortality must be won. In these respects man is the creator of his own destiny. That is not a mere echo of Bhedabheaa, but Bhedabheda itself in its fullest sense as

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propounded in the last Sutras of the Vedanta-Sutras by Sripati and his school of thought. James Ward (1843-1925) propounded a theory which partakes of the character of Bhedabheda. Though agreeing with contemporary idealists to some extent, he fell back on theism to avoid, it would seem, speculation. He maintained that actual experience does not involve a dualism of matter and mind, but a duality of subject and object and that this duality-in-unity (Bhedabheda) is consistent with a spiritual monism in which the unity of nature is conceived to be the counterpart of the unity of experience. Beginning with the plurality of reals, he proceeded to find out where such an empirical method would lead him, assuming the existence of an indefinite variety of psychical beings of all grades, some higher than human minds, others much lower, but all tending to self-conservation and self-realization. This conception of all entities as psychical individuals, based on the principle of continuity, led him to endow them with spontaneity. Spontaneous activity leads into regular habits while their co-operation and organization leads to progress by a kind of creative synthesis, just as a melody comes into being when single notes follow in a certain sequence, or a certain level of culture is attained when society is organized on certain harmonious lines. As the final of progress, he suggests the "eventual consummation of a perfect commonwealth, wherein all co-operate and none conflicts, wherein the many have become one, one realm of ends." Ward thus construes the world as a plurality of psychical beings, primarily independent as regards their existence, and yet always mutually acting and reacting upon each other, "an ontological plurality that is yet somehow a cosmological unity". Fearing that all this might mean some ground beyond itself", he called in the aid of theism to supplement his spiritual pluralism. Without subscribing to the common ideas of creation, he held that God in some sense sustains the world by a continuous act of self-limitation. The pluralistic aspect of Bhedabheda implicitly postulates such a view and though Ward feared that he had been "

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more speculative in this part of his philosophy, and treated it as a matter of faith and his belief in God and in immortality on moralgrounds, there is reason to believe that the conclusion he arrived at was the more sound because any other would not be in keeping with the premises with which he started his simple, yet daring, theory. The ethical philosopher W. R. Sorley (born 1855) tries to harmonise natural laws which constitute the causal order of the existing world with values which constitute its moral order. Values apply to personal life, and their validity consists in expressing an ideal which people feel they ought to realize. Natural laws apply to phenomena in space and time, and their validity consists in their reality. A satisfactory theory of reality must harmonise these two orders. Sorley's solution postulates a universe consisting of a Supreme Mind, or God, to whom finite minds and their environment owe their reality. God is the creator, the essence and source of all values, but is willing that these values should be shared by the free minds who owe their being to Him. If Sorley had persuaded himself to follow out his theory, he would have naturally ended in Bhedabheda, for that seems implicit in it. He thus lacks not so much definiteness as a purposeful pursuing of his theory. The moral philosopher A. E. Taylor (born 1869), who seeks to harmonise the exigencies of scientific thought with the moral and religious demands of life, suggests that the reality of religious experience is evidence of the reality of its object. Postulating a theistic position, he holds that the ultimate ground of things is a single supreme reality which is the source of everything other than itself, and has the characteristic of being intrinsically complete or perfect, and an adequate object of adoration or worship. This supreme reality is best conceived after the analogy of the human spirit at its very best. The reality of moral progress, in his view, presupposes the reality of time, of causal agency, of free-will, and of permanent personality. The moral life is a life of tension between the temporal and the eternal and is only possible to a being which is neither abiding nor

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simply mutable, but both at once. It is a life of real adventure which begins with "nature" and ends in "supernature". The attainment of a fully unified personality depends on our finding our principal good in God, the concrete unity of all good in its source. The implication of morality is thus a double one. It points to the existence of God as the absolute and final plenitude of good, and to an eternal destiny for the moral person whose aim is the fruition of the good. Taylor's conception of supreme reality after the human spirit at its best has its counterpart in Bhedabheda which asks the devotee to concentrate on the Self as the Brahman (Brahma-Sutras, IV. 1. 1-3). His description of moral life as a life of tension between the temporal and the eternal; his idea of God as the unity of all good in its source; and his suggestion that the attainment of a fully unified personality depends on our finding our principal good in God-find a place in the theistic turn that Bhedabheda receives at the hands of Sripati. Taylor's forecast of the nature of man's life "in Heaven", after his present life of " probation" is also worthy of remark. While the process of character-forming will be over, the activity issuing from character will, Taylor says, remain. In Bhedabheda of the type enunciated by Sripati, this "activity" is countenanced. The Russian philosopher Lossky (born 1870) adumbrates a philosophical standpoint which, as Professor Wolf puts it, oscillates "between spiritual pluralism and absolute idealism", a something which seems allied to Bhedabheda. Lossky conceives the principle of life not as a force but as a substance exercising the creative activity that is the source of its laws and not their slave. He conceives the universe on this analogy. The world, to him, is an organic whole -an organic whole which is prior to its parts, so that the parts can only come into being and continue to exist within the whole. The unity of the intelligible world is," further to him, not a functional unity of abstract ideas but a community of beings that live an infinite life." Such an organic life cannot, however, be self-existent. It "

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has to be grounded, in his view, on some higher principle. He traces the unity of the cosmos, accordingly, to a super-cosmic principle, the Absolute, as the source of a plurality of substances which form a unity more intimate than the abstract unity of the world, and nevertheless remain free in their activity." It is thus that Lossky finds a philosophical basis for theism in his "Organic Concrete Ideal-Realism" which, rather not very picturesque name, seems to signify nothing more than a phase of Bhedabheda, much akin to what Sripati has propounded. The German E. Husserl (born 1859), one of the great

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Absolute of Hegel. Husserl, it will be seen, starting with Kant ends in Hegel, which is enough to indicate his kinship with Bhedabheda. The philosophy of H. Bergson (born 1859) bears more than a mere trace of the theory of Bhedabheda. Protesting against scientific mechanism, he tries to vindicate the spiritual character of the universe as a whole. He does not, however, deny altogether the reality of matter and of natural law. What Professor Wolf calls the "key concepts of his system are those of change, activity, freedom, creative

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Jan 781 Bergson, James develops a psychology which lays stress on the activity of consciousness or experience, which, under the influence of emotional and practical interests, selects for attention only certain things from a "theatre of simultaneous possibilities". His philosophy is a protest against excessive intellectualism and the monism or singularism or of absolute idealism and its conception of an eternally finished static world or "block universe". He has a keen feeling for

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have meant more by this suggestion than that the world is undetermined so that it is quite possible, as Professor Wolf puts it, to realize in it whatever we reasonably think ought to be realized. James' world-view thus rejects a static conception of the world; accepts pluralism; grants individuality and freedom; and concedes a superhuman consciousness composed of all finite ends. All these are

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occasions, inter-related in some determinate fashion in one extensive quantum. A thing or a person is a society of events, or a systematic stream of such events, having a certain causal continuity. As each actual occasion is connected with every other such occasion, the universe is one compact, organic system of actual occasions, an "interlocked community of events. The interlockings of actual occasions are called "pretensions pretensions ", and conceived causally. Each actual occasion is generated from its pretensions of preceding occasions, and is pretended by succeeding occasions. In this way, each actual occasion attains objective immortality" in spite of the flux. The "together- " of the universe, and the principle of "concretion " is identified with God. Whitehead, however, adds that "God is not concrete, but he is the ground of concrete actuality." Not only that; "the world is the multiplicity of finites seeking a perfected unity." And finally, God is "the unity of vision seeking physical multiplicity". God is also "the 'ure for feeling, the second stage of desire", and each feature has its "pretension into God". "The theme of smology, which is the basis of all religions," says White ead, "is the story of the dynamic effort of the World passing into everlasting unity, and of the static majority of God's vision, accompanying its purpose of completion by absorption of the World's multiplicity of effort." "lat he adds, "neither God nor the World reaches static com tion. Both are in the grip of the ultimate metaphysical glund, the creative advance into novelty." Thus Whitehead A world-idea not only postulates an organic world, bu, also a realistic world; but the realistic world is in a sle of flux-nothing is but everything becomes, that the tsth of being is becoming. It is not surprising that Proffer Wolf should recall the fact that there is in Whiteheah theory not only the Heraclitian idea of everything thre hout the universe being in constant flux but also somoing of Plato's ideas of "eternal objects" in it. His doct of "pretensions conceived causally, which Professor Volf compares to Bergson's conception of the 50 " F

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telescoping of the past in the present, resembles the cosmic process which is postulated by the Bhedabhedins in so far as they admit a realistic view of this world. But the elements in Whitehead's theory which are pre-eminently of the Bhedabheda order are where he speaks of the "togetherness of the universe and of "the principle of concretion where he suggests that God is the "ground of concrete reality"; where he says that "the world is the multiplicity of finites seeking a perfected unity" and where he suggests that God is "the unity of vision seeking physical multiplicity". The other idea that neither God nor the World reaches static completion also finds its counterpart in Bhedabheda which differs in this respect fundamentally from Abheda.

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