It rises above all phenomenal states--joy, sorrow, grief,
fear, hope, and in fact all states resulting in pain or pleasure, and
becomes blissful, realizing immortality, infinitude and felicity of
wisdom within itself. The sentient soul is nervous, sensational,
emotional, phenomenal, and impressional. It constitutes the natural
life and is finite. The soul and the non-soul are thus the two
landmarks. What is non-soul is prakriti, or created. It is not the lot
of every one to know what soul is, and therefore millions live and die
possessing minds cultivated in intellect and feeling, but not raised to
the soul state. In proportion as one's soul is emancipated from
prakriti or sensuous bondage, in that proportion his approximation to
the soul state is attained; and it is this that constitutes disparities
in the intellectual, moral, and religious culture of human beings and
their consequent approximation to God.--Spiritual Stray Leaves,
Calcutta, 1879.
He also cites some words of Fichte, which prove that the like conclusion
is reached in the philosophy of Western idealism: "The real spirit which
comes to itself in human consciousness is to be regarded as an
impersonal pneuma--universal reason, nay, as the spirit of God Himself;
and the good of man's whole development, therefore, can be no other than
to substitute the universal for the individual consciousness.
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