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LDM MLD ME லயம் - 31
as to be completely incomprehensible even to the unclouded superior faculties of the human mind. Such a false conception of God, as pointed out by Professor William James4. has no bearing whatever on the life and destiny of finite souls and must, therefore, be abandoned as an empty, worthless and unprofitable speculation of some idle minds. If God be a substance-a substance indeed it is but purely spiritual, it must be known, like other substances, not necessarily to ordinary senses bereft of superior mental vision as in the case of low animal life, but it must be known to the pre- eminent intuitive perception of highly developed human beings. Further, it is quite unreasonable to hold with the transcendantalists that all forms are perishable, that they are tainted with ills and impurities. On the contrary, the fact must be brought home to our mind that all thought-forms as well as the forms of light and fire, are imperishable, that they always exist absolutely pure untouched by the ills and impurities the heritage of man's mortal clay. Throw out any amount of dirt and filth, dregs, and sediments and refuse, etc., into the fire and try to defile it but you cannot succeed. On the other hand, the fire will burn them up all to ashes, itself ever remaining pure and undefiled. So also God's thought-forms exist everlastingly the purest and uncontaminated by any impurities.
Then, the sections from twentytwo to twentyseven dwell upon the forms of worship the Tamils have been paying to God from ancient times. The conceived God in a concrete form, in the form of the human father and mother. The whole universe was taken by them to represent the person of God in which the portion suffused with golden light consitituted the father as much as the portion of blue sky light constituted the mother; the three illuminating principles the sun, the moon and the fire were viewed as forming his three eyes; the evening clouds which look ruddy were imagined as his braided red locks; and other microcosmic members of his person represented other mocrocosmic aspects perceived by the senses and miniatured in the imagination so as to be easily pictured in the mind for their loving adoration. The Southern Tamils who loved the three lights chose to call their God "Mukkannan” (K¡f©zh<) or the
