spirit of the Upanishads in his theory of the ultimate fate of the soul,
we have already remarked above. And although the Mâyâ doctrine cannot,
in my opinion, be said to form part of the teaching of the Upanishads,
it cannot yet be asserted to contradict it openly, because the very
point which it is meant to elucidate, viz. the mode in which the
physical universe and the multiplicity of individual souls originate, is
left by the Upanishads very much in the dark. The later growth of the
Mâyâ doctrine on the basis of the Upanishads is therefore quite
intelligible, and I fully agree with Mr. Gough when he says regarding it
that there has been no addition to the system from without but only a
development from within, no graft but only growth. The lines of thought
which finally led to the elaboration of the full-blown Mâyâ theory may
be traced with considerable certainty. In the first place, deepening
speculation on Brahman tended to the notion of advaita being taken in a
more and more strict sense, as implying not only the exclusion of any
second principle external to Brahman, but also the absence of any
elements of duality or plurality in the nature of the one universal
being itself; a tendency agreeing with the spirit of a certain set of
texts from the Upanishads. And as the fact of the appearance of a
manifold world cannot be denied, the only way open to thoroughly
consistent speculation was to deny at any rate its reality, and to call
it a mere illusion due to an unreal principle, with which Brahman is
indeed associated, but which is unable to break the unity of Brahman's
nature just on account of its own unreality. And, in the second place, a
more thorough following out of the conception that the union with
Brahman is to be reached through true knowledge only, not unnaturally
led to the conclusion that what separates us in our unenlightened state
from Brahman is such as to allow itself to be completely sublated by an
act of knowledge; is, in other words, nothing else but an erroneous
notion, an illusion.--A further circumstance which may not impossibly