to an unreal principle, with which Brahman is
indeed associated, but which is unable to break the unity of Brahman's
nature just on account of its own unreality. And, in the second place, a
more thorough following out of the conception that the union with
Brahman is to be reached through true knowledge only, not unnaturally
led to the conclusion that what separates us in our unenlightened state
from Brahman is such as to allow itself to be completely sublated by an
act of knowledge; is, in other words, nothing else but an erroneous
notion, an illusion.--A further circumstance which may not impossibly
have co-operated to further the development of the theory of the world's
unreality will be referred to later on.[30]

We have above been obliged to leave it an open question what kind of
Vedanta is represented by the Vedanta-sutras, although reason was shown
for the supposition that in some important points their teaching is more
closely related to the system of Ramanuja than to that of /S/a@nkara. If
so, the philosophy of /S/a@nkara would on the whole stand nearer to the
teaching of the Upanishads than the Sutras of Badaraya/n/a. This would
indeed be a somewhat unexpected conclusion--for, judging a priori, we
should be more inclined to assume a direct propagation of the true
doctrine of the Upanishads through Badaraya/n/a to /S/a@nkara--but a
priori considerations have of course no weight against positive evidence
to the contrary. There are, moreover, other facts in the history of
Indian philosophy and theology which help us better to appreciate the
possibility of Badaraya/n/a's Sutras already setting forth a doctrine
that lays greater stress on the personal character of the highest being
than is in agreement with the prevailing tendency of the Upanishads.
That the pure doctrine of those ancient Brahminical treatises underwent
at a rather early period amalgamations with beliefs which most probably
had sprung up in altogether different--priestly or
non-priestly--communities is a well-known circumstance; it suffices for
our purposes to refer to the most eminent of the early literary
monuments in which an amalgamation of the kind mentioned is observable,
viz. the Bhagavadgita. The doctrine of the Bhagavadgita represents a
fusion of the Brahman theory of the Upanishads with the belief in a
personal highest being--K/ri/sh/n/a or Vish/n/u--which in many respects
approximates very closely to the system of the Bhagavatas; the attem