According to the Vedanta there is but one substance or reality immutable and eternal, the supreme spirit, the impersonal Self, the spiritual absolute atman—and that of course is summed up in the idea of Deity.
Science, which professes to reject all theories that cannot be proven, suggests tentatively that all of nature's innumerable products have evolved from the result of a fortuitous combination of unconscious causes that produced a beginning.
But there should be something beyond mere accident in the movements of non-intelligent forces. There must always be a first cause even for a beginning and that first cause cannot be an accident.
That should be an uncomfortable theory for those who are scientific enough to believe it, for they have no guarantee against other accidents of Nature. They can never feel secure against some awkward occurrence that might counteract that initial commingling of forces and restore this world to its original condition of nothingness.
We read of various vibrations that shiver into the production of light, color, heat, sound, power, electricity and even the life principle, but these vibrations are not even said to be self-produced. There has never been a theory satisfactory to the intuitions—which are the most accurate of all our truth finders, except that of an universal, Conscious Self, impersonal but all pervasive, that is the Cause, the Beginning and the ultimate Attainment of everything.
The only theory that agrees with the intuitions without offending the reasoning perceptions should offer the safest foundation upon which to build a philosophy. It is therefore not remarkable that ages ago the sages of the Orient, men who were fitted by training and inherited faculties for metaphysical contemplation, elaborated a philosophy based upon the belief in an impersonal First Cause that seeks personality only through involving Spirit in matter and evolving back to Spirit. Tinted with the results of that experience, Spirit, they believe, becomes self-conscious and individualized by its contact with a life or lives of manifestation. Evidently it can never be absolutely stainless again. It has exchanged entire purity for knowledge and self-consciousness. Therefore, man, who is the highest attainment of this evolution, can never be infinitely perfect, but can ever more and more approximate to perfection. He can never again be absorbed and swallowed up and engulfed in absolute divinity. He will never become entirely Divine in the sense of being re-absorbed into the unrecognizable All-consciousness, for that would extinguish all the effects of his earth experiences and his long pilgrimage would be a profitless waste of time and toil. He has become an individualized conscious being, less than Deity, but by reason of his completed evolution he is relatively a God to us.
He may therefore reach up to the Infinite even now, and can also extend a hand down to Earth to help us on our upward climb. Innumerable divine men have been reborn and have dwelt among us to teach us how to live. Even in comparatively modern times we have a line of such whose example and teachings have helped forward our evolution and made it easier for us.
From Zoroaster and Buddha and Jesus and others have come revelations that justify the theory of man's perfectibility through evolution and as we can trace the growth of all matter up to its culmination in humanity, the divine plan seems to stand revealed, and our ultimate destiny is plainly outlined. The method of evolution, like everything else in Nature, seems entirely a process of compensations. We gain and renounce; we take on higher qualities and drop the meaner characteristics. We advance by such methods as we can command as we go along. Higher ideals being reached, we look upward for still loftier points of attainment.
In the prehistoric stages of our development, while pure physicality dominated us, we asserted our supremacy by superior strength or speed. Further along a cunning mentality gave us a wider range of power. Still later we have grown into wisdom, and as we near the end we shall discard all the physical desires, the tastes and appetites, the hopes and ambitions, the affections and passions that tie us to the earth life, and take on instead the finer spiritual attributes that are inseparable from the higher planes of existence.
The severing of the earth desires marks the end of the process of evolution of spirit from matter. What follows that we may infer from analogy. The process of unfolding doubtless continues on planes of which we have no conception, but obviously need not dread to encounter.