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But what is truly extraordinary, though characteristic of much Indian literature about ritual, is that a work dealing with the general theory of religious worship should treat the deity as an irrelevant topic. The Pûrva-mîmâṃsâ discusses ceremonies prescribed by an eternal self-existing Veda. The reward of sacrifice is not given by God.
O great Muni, I shall first properly recount the story of this family, as told in the Puranas. "The great and blessed saint Bhrigu, we are informed, was produced by the self-existing Brahma from the fire at the sacrifice of Varuna. And Bhrigu had a son, named Chyavana, whom he dearly loved. And to Chyavana was born a virtuous son called Pramati.
'I first consider the undoubted fact that the existence of a Supreme Mind in nature is, scientifically considered, unnecessary; and, therefore, that the only reason we require to entertain the supposition of any such existence at all is, that the complexity of nature being so great, we are unable adequately to conceive of its self-evolution notwithstanding our reason tells us plainly that, given a self-existing universe of force and matter, and such self-evolution becomes abstractedly possible. I then reflect that this is a negative and not a positive ground of belief. If the hypothesis of self-evolution is true, we should
Now what are these features? The postulate of an Eternal Self-existing Something is common to Theism and to Atheism. Here Atheism ends. Theism, however, is generally said to assume Personality, Intelligence, and Creative Power as attributes of the single self-existing substance. Lastly, Pantheism assumes the Something now existing to have been self-created.
After all, some will say, if we grant your great, wise, beneficent, designing Creator, the finite human mind has as little idea of a self-existing God, as it has of self-existing matter and self-existing law. You postulate one great mystery, we postulate two smaller ones; and the two together really present less "unthinkableness" to the mind than your one.
The fact cannot be taken to justify any such inference for the following reasons. In the first place, assuming the atomic theory to be true, and there is nothing in the argument to show that the now-existing atoms are not self-existing atoms, endowed with their peculiar and severally distinctive properties from all eternity.
Granting that there is no other alternative in the whole possibility of things, than that matter must be conscious, or that self-conscious Mind must somewhere be self-existing; and granting that it is quite "impossible for us to conceive" of consciousness as an attribute of matter; still surely it would be a prodigious leap to conclude that for this reason matter cannot possess this attribute.
So in this case British idealists, in the act of defining knowledge idealistically, as the presence to consciousness of its own phenomena, never really ceased to assume transcendent knowledge of a self-existing world, social and psychological, if not material: and they continued scrupulously to readjust their ideas to those dark facts, often more faithfully than the avowed positivists or scientific psychologists.
God's fiat on creation's day has figured in traditional philosophy as such an absolute cause and origin. Against this notion of the unity of origin of all there has always stood the pluralistic notion of an eternal self-existing many in the shape of atoms or even of spiritual units of some sort.
Many fine passages might be quoted from Philo, on the impossibility that the first self-existing Being should become cognisable to the sense of man; and even in Palestine, no doubt, John the Baptist and our Lord himself spoke no new doctrine, but rather the common sentiment of the more enlightened, when they declared that 'no man had seen God at any time. In conformity with this principle, the Jews, in the interpretation of the older Scriptures, instead of direct and sensible communication from the one great Deity, had interposed either one or more intermediate beings as the channels of communication.
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