rs of
two first-class states in Saurash_t_ra, Junagadh, and Bhavnagar,
Gokulaji and Gauri_s_ankara,[343] and you will see whether the Vedanta
is still a moral and a political power in India or not.

But I claim even more for the Vedanta, and I recommend its study, not
only to the candidates for the Indian Civil Service, but to all true
students of philosophy. It will bring before them a view of life,
different from all other views of life which are placed before us in
the History of Philosophy. You saw how behind all the Devas or gods,
the authors of the Upanishads discovered the Atman or Self. Of that
Self they predicated three things only, that it is, that it perceives,
and that it enjoys eternal bliss. All other predicates were negative:
it is not this, it is not that--it is beyond anything that we can
conceive or name.

But that Self, that Highest Self, the Paramatman, could be discovered
after a severe moral and intellectual discipline only, and those who
had not yet discovered it were allowed to worship lower gods, and to
employ more poetical names to satisfy their human wants. Those who
knew the other gods to be but names or persons--_personae_ or masks,
in the true sense of the word--pratikas, as they call them in
Sanskrit--knew also that those who worshipped these names or persons,
worshipped in truth the Highest Self, though ignorantly. This is a
most characteristic feature in the religious history of India. Even in
the Bhagavadgita, a rather popular and exoteric exposition of Vedantic
doctrines, the Supreme Lord or Bhagavat himself is introduced as
saying: "Even those who worship idols, worship me."[344]

But that was not all. As behind the names of Agni, Indra, and
Pra_g_apati, and behind all the mythology of nature, the ancient sages
of India had discovered the Atman--let us call it the objective
Self--they perceived also behind the veil of the body, behind the
senses, behind the mind, and behind our reason (in fact behind the
mythology of the soul, which we often call psychology), another
Atman, or the subjective Self. That Self too was to be discovered by a
severe moral and intellectual discipline only, and those who wished to
find it, who wished to know, not themselves, but their Self, had to
cut far deeper than the senses, or the mind, or the reason, or the
ordinary Ego. All these too were Devas, bright apparitions--mere
names--yet names meant for something. Much that was most dear, that
had seemed