But, an objection may be raised, the passage, ’Rising from out of these elements he vanishes again after them.  When he has departed there is no more knowledge,’ intimates the final destruction of the soul, not its identity with the highest Self!—­By no means, we reply.  The passage means to say only that on the soul departing from the body all specific cognition vanishes, not that the Self is destroyed.  For an objection being raised—­in the passage, ’Here thou hast bewildered me, Sir, when thou sayest that having departed there is no more knowledge’.  Scripture itself explains that what is meant is not the annihilation of the Self, ’I say nothing that is bewildering.  Verily, beloved, that Self is imperishable, and of an indestructible nature.  But there takes place non-connexion with the matras.’  That means:  The eternally unchanging Self, which is one mass of knowledge, cannot possibly perish; but by means of true knowledge there is effected its dissociation from the matras, i.e. the elements and the sense organs, which are the product of Nescience.  When the connexion has been solved, specific cognition, which depended on it, no longer takes place, and thus it can be said, that ‘When he has departed there is no more knowledge.’

The third argument also of the purvapakshin, viz. that the word ’knower’—­which occurs in the concluding passage, ’How should he know the knower?’—­denotes an agent, and therefore refers to the individual soul as the object of sight, is to be refuted according to the view of Ka/s/ak/ri/tsna.—­Moreover, the text after having enumerated—­in the passage, ’For where there is duality as it were, there one sees the other,’ &c.—­all the kinds of specific cognition which belong to the sphere of Nescience declares—­in the subsequent passage, ’But when the Self only is all this, how should he see another?’—­that in the sphere of true knowledge all specific cognition such as seeing, and so on, is absent.  And, again, in order to obviate the doubt whether in the absence of objects the knower might not know himself, Yaj/n/avalkya goes on, ‘How, O beloved, should he know himself, the knower?’ As thus the latter passage evidently aims at proving the absence of specific cognition, we have to conclude that the word ‘knower’ is here used to denote that being which is knowledge, i.e. the Self.—­That the view of Ka/s/ak/ri/tsna is scriptural, we have already shown above.  And as it is so, all the adherents of the Vedanta must admit that the difference of the soul and the highest Self is not real, but due to the limiting adjuncts, viz. the body, and so on, which are the product of name and form as presented by Nescience.  That view receives ample confirmation from Scripture; compare, for instance, ’Being only, my dear, this was in the beginning, one, without a second’ (Ch.  Up.  VI, 2, 1); ’The Self is all this’ (Ch.  Up.  VII, 25, 2); ‘Brahman alone is all this’ (Mu.  Up.  II, 2, 11); ‘This everything is that Self’ (B/ri/.