THE MISSION OF THE VEDANTA : 9.

The second claim of the Vedanta upon the attention of the world is that, of all the scriptures in the world, it is the one scripture the teaching of which is in entire harmony with the results that have been attained by the modern scientific investigations of external nature. 

Two minds in the dim past of history, cognate to each other in form and kinship and sympathy, started, being placed in different routes. 

The one was the ancient Hindu mind, and the other the ancient Greek mind. 

The former started by analysing the internal world. 

The latter started in search of that goal beyond by analysing the external world. 

And even through the various vicissitudes of their history, it is easy to make out these two vibrations of thought as tending to produce similar echoes of the goal beyond. 

It seems clear that the conclusions of modern materialistic science can be acceptable, harmoniously with their religion, only to the Vedantins or Hindus as they are called. 

It seems clear that modern materialism can hold its own and at the same time approach spirituality by taking up the conclusions of the Vedanta. 

It seems to us, and to all who care to know, that the conclusions of modern science are the very conclusions the Vedanta reached ages ago; only, in modern science they are written in the language of matter. 

This then is another claim of the Vedanta upon modern Western minds, its rationality, the wonderful rationalism of the Vedanta. 

I have myself been told by some of the best Western scientific minds of the day, how wonderfully rational the conclusions of the Vedanta are. 

I know one of them personally who scarcely has time to eat his meal or go out of his laboratory, but who yet would stand by the hour to attend my lectures on the Vedanta; for, as he expresses it, they are so scientific, they so exactly harmonise with the aspirations of the age and with the conclusions to which modern science is coming at the present time.

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