270 The Religion of the Veda
.u—v
of the divine in one’s self, and the consequent submergence of all that is temporal and illusory.
It is time now that we return to the last question which I propounded for to—day’s lecture. How did the émkma, the One, the Universal Spirit, finally shape himself from out of the mass of ideas whose constant drift was in the direction of oneness, or, as we may finally call it, monistic pantheism? One of the main circumstances of the higher religious thought of the time just preceding the Upanishads was a strong monotheistic tendency which seemed to develop simultaneously and peacefully along with the monistic ideas, such as the “That,” the “ Only,” the “ Being.”
In the Upanishads monotheism is practically at an end, whereas the attempts to designate the ab stract conceptions just mentioned emerge from the stage of tremulous venture to confident and familiar statement. Yet they are not any one of them the final name of the Universal Being. Even the Upanishad mind seems to prefer something more tangible and suggestive, something that after all has attributes.
In the seething caldron of the earlier speculation there occur yet twoother conceptions which have become pretty well crystallised even before the time of the Upanishads. The first of these is the con—
mww" "
