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To be connected with what is hurtful to man, and to be absolutely perfect and antagonistic to all evil is self- contradictory. But, our adversary now rejoins, what after all are we to do? Up. Nothing therefore is left to us but the hypothesis that Brahman is the substrate of Nescience and all that springs from it!
The present war is being fought against a background of questions which cannot be suppressed by discipline or the mere fulfilment of patriotic duty. The old acceptance of the social order is passing away. The old acceptance of religious nescience is passing away; there is a new impatience to reach the foundation of things, a popular clamour for explanation of the riddles of life.
The true nature of these souls is, however, obscured by Nescience, i.e. the influence of the beginningless chain of works; and by Release then we have to understand that intuition of the highest Self, which is the natural state of the individual souls, and which follows on the destruction of Nescience.
Neither Perception alone, nor Perception aided by Reasoning, reveals to us a positive entity, Nescience, as implied in judgments such as 'I am non-knowing, 'I know neither myself nor others. The contradiction which was urged above against the view of non-knowledge being the antecedent non-existence of knowledge, presents itself equally in connexion with non-knowledge viewed as a positive entity.
Oliver Vyell loved his bride as passionately as his nature, hardened by his past, allowed him. To the women who envied her, to the gossips and backbiters, he opposed a nescience inexpugnable, unscalable as a wall of polished stone: but the mischief was, he equally ignored her sensitiveness. Being sensitive, she understood the hostile shadows better than the hard protecting fence.
We admit that release consists only in the cessation of Nescience, and that this cessation results entirely from the knowledge of Brahman. But a distinction has here to be made regarding the nature of this knowledge which the Vedanta-texts aim at enjoining for the purpose of putting an end to Nescience.
If, again, it be said that the difference of the soul and Brahman is due to Nescience on the part of both, and that the texts declaring difference refer to difference of this kind, the assumption of Nescience belonging to the soul leads us to the very alternatives just stated and to their respective results.
Badarayana, therefore, holds that knowledge has an independent fruit of its own. In all those texts there is not the slightest trace of any reference to the wretched individual soul, as insignificant and weak as a tiny glow-worm, implicated in Nescience and all the other evils of finite existence.
And that, in the case of a being consisting of non-differenced light, obscuration by Nescience would be tantamount to complete destruction, we have already explained above.
'What puts an end to Nescience is the knowledge that Brahman is pure knowledge! 'Not so, for that knowledge also is, like Brahman, of the nature of light, and hence has no power to put an end to Nescience.
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