mere phrase, 'providing a place' intimates with sufficient clearness the nature of the work in which systematisers of the Vedantic doctrine are engaged. /S/a@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 /S/a@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 those which ascribe to it personal attributes, /S/a@nkara is right in giving preference to texts of the former kind. The Brahman of the old Upanishads, from which the souls spring to enjoy individual consciousness in their waking state, and into which they sink back temporarily in the state of deep dreamless sleep and permanently in death, is certainly not represented adequately by the strictly personal I/s/vara of Ramanuja, who rules the world in wisdom and mercy. The older Upanishads, at any rate, lay very little stress upon personal attributes of their highest being, and hence /S/a@nkara is right in so far as he assigns to his hypostatised personal I/s/vara[29] a lower place than to his absolute Brahman. That he also faithfully represents the prevailing spirit of the Upanishads in his theory of the ultimate fate of the soul, we have already remarked above. And although the Maya doctrine cannot, in my opinion, be said to form part of the teaching of the Upanishads, it cannot yet be asserted to contradict it openly, because the very point which it is meant to elucidate, viz. the mode in which the physical universe and the multiplicity of individual souls originate, is left by the Upanishads very much in the dark. The later growth of the Maya doctrine on the basis of the Upanishads is therefore quite intelligible, and I fully agree with Mr. Gough when he says regarding it that there has been no addition to the system from without but only a development from within, no graft but only growth. The lines of thought which finally led to the elaboration of the full-blown Maya theory may be traced with considerable certainty. In the first place, deepening speculation on Brahman tended to the notion of advaita being taken in a more and more strict sense, as implying not only the exclusion of any second principle external to Brahman, but also the absence of any elements of duality or plurality in the nature of the one universal