f the world He limits Himself within His Maya, then He
must work within the conditions of those materials that limit His
activity, as we are told over and over again.

Now when in the ceaseless interplay of Sattva, Rajas, and Tamas, Tamas
has the ascendancy, aided and, as it were, worked by Rajas, so that they
predominate over Sattva in the foreseen evolution, when the two
combining overpower the third, when the force of Rajas and the inertia
and stubbornness of Tamas, binding themselves together, check the
action, the harmony, the pleasure-giving qualities of Sattva, then comes
one of the conditions in which the Lord comes forth to restore that
which had been disturbed of the balanced interworking of the three
gunas and to make again such balance between them as shall enable
evolution to go forward smoothly and not be checked in its progress. He
re-establishes the balance of power which gives orderly motion, the
order having been disturbed by the co-operation of the two in
contradistinction to the third. In these fundamental attributes of
matter, the three gunas, lies the first reason of the need for
Avataras.

The second need has to do with man himself, and now we come back in both
the second and the third to that question of good and evil, of which I
have already spoken. I'shvara, when He came to deal with the evolution
of man--with all reverence I say it--had a harder task to perform than
in the evolution of the lower forms of life. On them the law is imposed
and they must obey its impulse. On the mineral the law is compulsory;
every mineral moves according to the law, without interposing any
impulse from itself to work against the will of the One. In the
vegetable world the law is imposed, and every plant grows in orderly
method according to the law within it, developing steadily and in the
fashion of its order, interposing no impulse of its own. Nay, in the
animal world--save perhaps when we come to its highest members--the law
is still a force overpowering everything else, sweeping everything
before it, carrying along all living things. A wheel turning on the road
might carry with it on its axle the fly that happened to have settled
there; it does not interpose any obstacle to the turning of the wheel.
If the fly comes on to the circumference of the wheel and opposes itself
to its motion, it is crushed without the slightest jarring of the wheel
that rolls on, and the form goes out of existence, and the life take