which are generally appealed to as intimating the unreal character of
the evolution about to be described, do not, if viewed impartially,
intimate any such thing[26]. For what is capable of being proved, and
manifestly meant to be proved, by the illustrative instances of the lump
of clay and the nugget of gold, through which there are known all things
made of clay and gold? Merely that this whole world has Brahman for its
causal substance, just as clay is the causal matter of every earthen
pot, and gold of every golden ornament, but not that the process through
which any causal substance becomes an effect is an unreal one.
We--including Uddâlaka--may surely say that all earthen pots are in
reality nothing but earth--the earthen pot being merely a special
modification (vikâra) of clay which has a name of its own--without
thereby committing ourselves to the doctrine that the change of form,
which a lump of clay undergoes when being fashioned into a pot, is not
real but a mere baseless illusion.

In the same light we have to view numerous other passages which set
forth the successive emanations proceeding from the first principle.
When, for instance, we meet in the Ka/th/a Up. I, 3, 10, in the serial
enumeration of the forms of existence intervening between the gross
material world and the highest Self (the Person), with the
'avyâk/ri/ta,' the Undeveloped, immediately below the purusha; and when
again the Mu/nd/aka Up. II, 1, 2, speaks of the 'high Imperishable'
higher than which is the heavenly Person; there is no reason whatever to
see in that 'Undeveloped' and that 'high Imperishable' anything but that
real element in Brahman from which, as in the Râmânuja system, the
material universe springs by a process of real development. We must of
course render it quite clear to ourselves in what sense the terms 'real'
and 'unreal' have to be understood. The Upanishads no doubt teach
emphatically that the material world does not owe its existence to any