dualist who sees an unbridgeable gulf between the human and the divine nature, it sounds like a blas- phemy. The rationalist objects that if God exists, he is extracosmic or supracosmic and does not intervene in the affairs of the world, but allows them to be governed by a fixed machinery of law,—he is, in fact, a sort of far-off constitutional monarch or spiritual King Log, at the best an indifferent inactive Spirit be- hind the activity of Nature, like some generalised or abstract witness Purusha of the Sankhyas ; he is pure Spirit and cannot put on a body, infinite and cannot be finite as the human being is finite, the ever unborn creator and cannot be the creature born into the world,— these things are impossible even to his absolute omnipotence. To these objections the thoroughgoing dualjst would add that God is in his person, his role and his nature different and separate from man; the perfect cannot put on human imperfection ; the unborn personal God cannot be born as a human personality ; the Ruler of the worlds cannot be limited in a nature- bound human action and in a perishable human body. These objections, so formidable at first sight to the reason, seem to have been present to the mind of the Teacher in the Gita when he says that although the Divine is unborn, imperishable in his self-existence, the Lord of all beings, yet he assumes birth by a supreme resort to the action of his Nature and by force of his self-Maya ; that he whom the deluded despise because lodged in a human body, is verily in his supreme being the Lord of all; that he is in the action of the divine consciousness the creator of the fourfold Law and the doer of the works of the world and at the same time in the silence of the divine consciousness the impartial
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