1884,] R. Mitra— Psychological Tenets of the Vaishnavas'. 107 
human or celestial, and took to a single soul which gave vitality and 
consciousness to all. This is the theory of Absolute Unity, and is known 
under the name of Advaitavdcla or the theory of ‘ Uonduality,’ or 
‘Aduality.’ From its very name it is obvious that it is subsequent to 
belief in Duality, or of one Supreme Soul on the one side and of many 
individual souls on the other. Had unity been the only idea to express, 
the term would have for certain been formed of a Sanskrit word imply¬ 
ing 07ie, and not a derivative of two with a negative particle before it. 
It was to exclude the idea of two which was current, that recourse was 
had to the circumlocutory forms of “ not two ” advaita, “ one without a 
second ” ehamevddvitiyain, and so forth. These forms gave greater 
emphasis to the idea than what a simple statement of one would have 
done. Indeed, a term implying one would leave room for doubt as to 
whether the unity applied to the especial character of the soul or to its 
numerical individuality, and this is precluded by these negative forms. 
The Upanishads dwell very largely on this idea. When FTacliiketa, 
in the Katha Upanishad, repeatedly urges in varied phraseology ‘ I am 
that,’ and SVetaketu, in the Chhandogya Upanishad, is told thou art 
that,” the idea conveyed is that the ego is no other than the Divinity 
himself. But the brief enigmatic way in which the theory was disclosed 
led to much misapprehension. And it was left to the renowned SAn¬ 
kara Acharya, the apostle of this school, to elaborate this Uondual or 
Adual theory at considerable length in his great commentary on the 
Vedanta Aphorisms of Vyasa. He would tolerate nothing that did not 
coincide in every detail with this cardinal theory, and he argued it out 
in very much the same form in which Berkeley worked out his celebrated 
theory regarding the essential non-reality of matter. 
Sankara, however, left it in a position which could not be final, and 
his followers could not rest satisfied at the point where he left it. The 
question soon arose as to, how does this Supreme Soul, one without a 
second, provide souls for the countless individual units of creation ? 
To admit the theory of universal pervasion—of an infinite mass made 
finite by enclosing bodies, like the atmosphere enclosed in jars, which 
the followers of Sankara developed at great length—was to admit a 
system of Pantheism, or animism, the aninia mundi of Stahl, which 
was open to serious logical defects, and likewise inconsistent with the 
doctrine of faith which the Bhagavadgita had promulgated, and which 
got extensive currency a while before the time of SAnkara, Indeed SAn¬ 
kara himself had felt this, and provided for it by a faint outline of a theory 
of shadow or reflection,—a shadow from the Great Soul forming individual 
souls. This is the doctrine of the Bhagavata Purana. Vishnu Svami, the 
founder of the Rudra-sampradaya, changed the shadow into a scintilla or 
