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same, I shall state the general principles of the Adwaita and the Arhat doctrines on the subject under consideration, and leave it to my readers to decide whether they indicate a belief in a personal or an impersonal God, or whether they amount to Atheism.
I shall here request my readers (such of them at least as are not acquainted with the Cosmological theories of the Idealistic thinkers of Europe) to examine John Stuart Mill's Cosmological theory as explained in his examination of Sir William Hamilton's philosophy, before attempting to understand the Adwaita doctrine; and I beg to inform them beforehand that in explaining the main principles of the said doctrine I am going to use, as far as it is convenient to do so, the phraseology adopted by English psychologists of the Idealistic School of thought. In dealing with the phenomena of our present plane of existence John Stuart Mill ultimately came to the conclusion that matter or the so-called external phenomena are but the creation of our mind; they are the mere appearances of a particular phase of our subjective self, and of our thoughts, volitions, sensations and emotions which in their totality constitute the basis of that Ego. Matter, then, is the permanent possibility of sensations; and the so-called Laws of matter are, properly speaking, the Laws which govern the succession and co-existence of our states of consciousness. Mill further holds that properly speaking there is no noumenal Ego. The very idea of a mind existing separately as an entity distinct from the states of consciousness which are supposed to inhere in it is in his opinion illusory, as the idea of an external object which is supposed to be perceived by our senses.
Thus the ideas of mind and matter, of subject and object, of the Ego and external world are really evolved from the aggregation of our mental state which are the only realities so far as we are concerned.
The chain of our mental states of consiousness is "a double-headed monster" according to Professor Bain, which has two distinct aspects, one objetive and the other subjective.