पृष्ठम्:तैत्तिरीयोपनिषद्भाष्यम्.djvu/१७

X11 Charles Johnston writes:</Now here counles in the moral of the tale. It is axiomatic-at least with the modern Europeans; —-that modern Europeans are the most important and admirable persons in the world; that their achievnuments are to the achievements of of other folk as wine is to water, as sunlight to moonlight. It is instructive, therefore, for us to learn that the last and highest achievement of the best intellect of modern Europe, and the only achievement which is the outconne of pure reason and serious thought, brings us exactly to where we were in the old Indian days, when silver-tongued Shankara taught the final lessons of the Vedanta.philosophy. Every conclusion, even the very phrases of our best modern thought, have their counterparts in that great teacher's work, and we are constrained to say, the Indian expres sion of the ultimate truth has a far finer quality of style than the modern, for Shankara says, the last reality is, not the reverted Will-toward-life or some hypothetical Force, but our own inmost and eternal selves; and we can easily see how much higher an expression, from the point of view of power and beauty, Shankar's is than .Kant's or Schopenhauers.' If the phenomenal knowledge that connes to us through the senses tends to withdraw us from the search for the underlying principles of existence, we may well term this phenomenal know ledge AziyaIgnorance, not because it is valueless in itself, but because of its self-centering hostility to the higher kind of know ledge. 'The Vedantin confines his attention to the highest pro blems of life; and views with disfavour whatever tends to obscure the philosophic vision. And the phenomenon has this tendency, and receives hence such names as Auidly, ilusion, &c. The absolute superiority of philosophy, if once admitted, justifies fully the language adopted by the Vedantin in respect of the material concerns of life. These concerns are paramount, it is true, to physical science and to us as Dorlay men. But this is no reason why we should forget that the concerns of science are after