objections opposed by our reason to the possibility of Avatarhood can stand in their principle; for the principle is a vain division made by the intellectual reason which the whole phenomenon and the whole reality of the world are busy every moment contradicting and dis- proving.
But still, apart from the possibility, there is the question of the actual divine working,—whether actual- ly the divine consciousness does appear coming forward from beyond the veil to act at all directly in the’ phenomenal, the finite, the mentai and material, the limited, the imperfect. The finite is indeed nothing but a definition, a face-value of the Infinite’s self- representations to its own variations of consciousness ; the real value of each finite phenomenon is an infinite in its self-existence, whatever it may be in the action of its phenomenal nature, its temporal self-representa- tion. The man is not, when we look closely, himself alone, a rigidly separate self-existent individual, but humanity in a mind and body of itself ; and humanity too is no rigidiy separate self-existent species or genus, it is the All-existence, the universal Godhead figuring itself in the type of humanity ; there it works out certain possibilities, develops, evolves, as we now say, certain powers of its manifestation: What it evolves, is itself, is the Spirit.
For what we mean by Spirit is self-existent being with an infinite power of -consciousness and uncondi- tioned delight in its being ; it is either that or nothing, or at least nothing which bhas anything to do with man . and the world or with which, therefore, man or the
