very manifest as soon as we compare Sa@nkara’s system with that of Ramanuja.  The latter recognises only one Brahman which is, as we should say, a personal God, and he therefore lays stress on all those passages of the Upanishads which ascribe to Brahman the attributes of a personal God, such as omniscience and omnipotence.  Those passages, on the other hand, whose decided tendency it is to represent Brahman as transcending all qualities, as one undifferenced mass of impersonal intelligence, Ramanuja is unable to accept frankly and fairly, and has to misinterpret them more or less to make them fall in with his system.  The same remark holds good with regard to those texts which represent the individual soul as finally identifying itself with Brahman; Ramanuja cannot allow a complete identification but merely an assimilation carried as far as possible. Sa@nkara, on the other hand, by skilfully ringing the changes on a higher and a lower doctrine, somehow manages to find room for whatever the Upanishads have to say.  Where the text speaks of Brahman as transcending all attributes, the highest doctrine is set forth.  Where Brahman is called the All-knowing ruler of the world, the author means to propound the lower knowledge of the Lord only.  And where the legends about the primary being and its way of creating the world become somewhat crude and gross, Hira/n/yagarbha and Viraj are summoned forth and charged with the responsibility.  Of Viraj Mr. Gough remarks (p. 55) that in him a place is provided by the poets of the Upanishads for the purusha of the ancient rishis, the divine being out of whom the visible and tangible world proceeded.  This is quite true if only we substitute for the ‘poets of the Upanishads’ the framers of the orthodox Vedanta system—­for the Upanishads give no indication whatever that by their purusha they understand not the simple old purusha but the Viraj occupying a definite position in a highly elaborate system;—­but the mere phrase, ‘providing a place’ intimates with sufficient clearness the nature of the work in which systematisers of the Vedantic doctrine are engaged.

Sa@nkara’s method thus enables him in a certain way to do justice to different stages of historical development, to recognise clearly existing differences which other systematisers are intent on obliterating.  And there has yet to be made a further and even more important admission in favour of his system.  It is not only more pliable, more capable of amalgamating heterogeneous material than other systems, but its fundamental doctrines are manifestly in greater harmony with the essential teaching of the Upanishads than those of other Vedantic systems.  Above we were unable to allow that the distinction made by Sa@nkara between Brahman and I/s/vara is known to the Upanishads; but we must now admit that if, for the purpose of determining the nature of the highest being, a choice has to be made between those texts which represent Brahman as nirgu/n/a, and