If, then, we start with the idea of the Godhead, which is never quite absent in any system of philosophy or religion, we may, excluding all polytheistic forms of faith, allow our friends, the Vedântists, to lay it down that before all things the Godhead must be one, so that it may not be limited or conditioned by anything else. This is the Vedânta tenet which they express by the ever-recurring formula that the Sat, the true Being or Brahman, must be Ekam, one, and Advitîyam, without any second whatsoever. If, then, it is once admitted that in the beginning, in the present, and in the future, the Godhead must be one, all, and everything, it follows that nothing but that Godhead can be conceived as the true, though distant cause of everything material as well as spiritual, of our body as well as of our soul. Another maxim of the Vedântist, which likewise could hardly be gainsaid by any thinker, is that the Godhead, if it exists at all in its postulated character, must be unchangeable, because it is perfect and cannot possibly be interfered with by anything else, there being nothing beside itself. On this point also all the advanced religions seem agreed. But then arises at once the next question, If the Godhead is one without a second, and if it is unchangeable, whence comes change or development into the world; nay, whence comes the world itself, or what we call creation—whence comes nature with its ever-changing life and growth and decay? Here the Vedântist answer sounds at first very strange to us, and yet it is not so very different from other philosophies. The Vedântist evidently holds, though this view is implied rather than enunciated, that, as far as we are concerned, the objective world is, and can only be, _our knowledge_ of the objective world, and that everything that is objective is _ipso facto_ phenomenal. Objective, if properly analysed, is to the Vedântist the same as phenomenal, the result of what _we_ see, hear, and touch. Nothing objective could exist objectively, except as perceived, by us, nor can we ever go beyond this, and come nearer in any other way to the hidden, subjective part of the objective world, to the _Ding an sich_ supposed to be without us. If, then, we perceive that the objective world—that is, whatever we know by our senses, call it nature or anything else—is always changing, whilst on the other hand, the one Being that exists, the Sat, can be one only, without a second, and without change, the only way to escape from this dilemma is to take the world when known to us as purely phenomenal, i.e. as created by our knowledge of it, only that what we call knowledge is called from a higher point of view not knowledge, but Avidyâ, i.e. Nescience. Thus the Godhead, though being that which alone supplies the reality underlying the objective world, is never itself objective, still less can it be changing. This is illustrated by a simile, such as are frequently used