de.

There is one other general point to consider. Accounts of these Avataras
are found in the Puranas; allusions to them, to one or other of them,
are found in other of the ancient writings, but the moment you come to
very much detail you must turn to the Pauranic accounts; as you are
aware, sages, in giving those Puranas, very often described things as
they are seen on the higher planes, giving the description of the
underlying truth of facts and events; you have appearances described
which sound very strange in the lower world; you have facts asserted
which raise very much of challenge in modern days. When you read in the
Puranas of strange forms and marvellous appearances, when you read
accounts of creatures that seem unlike anything that you have ever heard
of or dreamed of elsewhere, the modern mind, with its somewhat narrow
limitations, is apt to revolt against the accounts that are given; the
modern mind, trained within the limits of the science of observation, is
necessarily circumscribed within those limits and those limits are of an
exceedingly narrow description; they are limits which belong only to
modern time, modern to men, in the true sense of the word, though
geological researches stretch of course far back into what we call in
this nineteenth century the night of time. But you must remember that
the moment geology goes beyond the historic period, which is a mere
moment in the history of the world, it has more of guesses than of
facts, more of theories than of proofs. If you take half a dozen modern
geologists and ask each of them in turn for the date of the period of
which records remain in the small number of fossils collected, you will
find that almost every man gives a different date, and that they deal
with differences of millions of years as though they were only seconds
or minutes of ours. So that you will have to remember in what science
can tell you of the world, however accurate it may be within its limits,
that these limits are exceedingly narrow, narrow I mean when measured by
the sight that goes back kalpa after kalpa, and that knows that the
mind of the Supreme is not limited to the manifestations of a few
hundred thousands of years, but goes back million after million,
hundreds of millions after hundreds of millions, and that the varieties
of form, the enormous differences of types, the marvellous kinds of
creatures which have come out of that creative imagination, transcend in
actuality