ial mark of
the individual soul, viz. 'And as the master feeds with his people, nay,
as his people feed on the master, thus does this conscious Self feed
with the other Selfs, thus those Selfs feed on the conscious Self' (Kau.
Up. IV, 20). And as the individual soul is the support of the pra/n/a,
it may itself be called pra/n/a.--We thus conclude that the passage
under discussion refers either to the individual soul or to the chief
vital air; but not to the Lord, of whom it contains no inferential marks
whatever.

To this we make the following reply.--The Lord only can be the maker of
the persons enumerated, on account of the force of the introductory part
of the section. Balaki begins his colloquy with Ajata/s/atru with the
offer, 'Shall I tell you Brahman?' Thereupon he enumerates some
individual souls residing in the sun, the moon, and so on, which
participate in the sight of the secondary Brahman, and in the end
becomes silent. Ajata/s/atru then sets aside Balaki's doctrine as not
referring to the chief Brahman--with the words, 'Vainly did you
challenge me, saying, Shall I tell you Brahman,' &c.--and proposes the
maker of all those individual souls as a new object of knowledge. If now
that maker also were merely a soul participating in the sight of the
secondary Brahman, the introductory statement which speaks of Brahman
would be futile. Hence it follows that the highest Lord himself is
meant.--None, moreover, but the highest Lord is capable of being the
maker of all those persons as he only is absolutely
independent.--Further, the clause 'of whom this is the work' does not
refer either to the activity of motion nor to meritorious and
non-meritorious actions; for neither of those two is the topic of
discussion or has been mentioned previously. Nor can the term 'work'
denote the enumerated persons, since the latter are mentioned
separately--in the clause, 'He who is the maker of those persons'--and
as inferential marks (viz. the neuter gender and the singular number of
the word karman, work) contradict that assumption. Nor, again, can the
term 'work' denote either the activity whose object the persons are, or
the result of that activity, since those two are already implied in the
mention of the agent (in the clause, 'He who is the maker'). Thus there
remains no other alternative than to take the pronoun 'this' (in 'He of
whom this is the work') as denoting the perceptible world and to
understand the same world--as t