from the pra/n/a.  A subsequent passage also contains an inferential 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 that which is made—­by the term ’work.’—­We may indeed admit that the world also is not the previous topic of discussion and has not been mentioned before; still, as no specification is mentioned, we conclude that the term ‘work’ has to be understood in a general sense, and thus denotes what first presents itself to the mind, viz. everything which exists in general.  It is, moreover, not true that the world is not the previous topic of discussion; we