witness of the works of his own Nature,—for he is al- ways, beyond both the silence and the ‘action, the supreme Purushottama. And the Gita is able to meetall these oppositions and to reconcile all these contraries because it starts from the Vedantic view of existence, of God and the universe.
For in the Vedantic view of things all these appa- rently formidable objections are null and void from the beginning. The idea of the Avatar is not indeed indispensable to its scheme, but it comes in naturally into it as a perfectly rational and logical conception. For all here is God, is the Spirit or Self-existence, is Brahman, ekamevidwitiyam,—there” is nothing else, nothing other and different from it and there can be nothing else, can be nothing other ande different from it ; Nature is and can be nothing else than a power of the divine consciousness ; all beings are and can be nothing else than inner and outer, subjective and objective soul-forms and bpdily forms of the divine being which exist in or result from the power of its consciousness. Far from the Infinite being unable to take on finiteness, the whole universe is nothing else but that; we can see, look as we may, nothing else at all in the whole wide world we inhabit. Far from the Spirit being incapable of form or disdaining to con- nect itself with form of matter or mind and to assume a limited nature or a body, all here is nothing but that, the world exists only by that connection, that assump- tion. Far from the world being a mechanism of law with no soul or spirit intervening in the movement of its forces or the action of its minds and bodies,—only some original indifferent Spirit passively existing some-
