which constitute the empiric world and possess determinate principles of being, formal and material potentialities (s'akti) that never vary throughout all the world's successive cycles (see section 23). These potential forces, which relatively to one another are of infinite variety but intrinsically are strictly determinate, include not only the germinal principles of all phenomena but also the empiric souls (jiva) as such; and collectively they constitute the "powers" or s'aktis, i.e. the eternal demiurgic potencies of Brahma, which in the intervals between the creations of the worlds lie dormant in a deep sleep of illusion as a sum of merely potential energies, waiting for the next creation to arise in cosmopoeic activity (on I. iii. 30, IV. 9, II, i. 30 f., etc.). Thus the Upanishadic theory of a single creation is replaced by a doctrine of beginningless and endless successions of emergence and reabsorption of the phenomenal world (see section 23).

The force that moves the absolute Idea to conceive itself as a plurality of determinate subjects and objects of empiric thought is, according to S'ankara, Ignorance, which, though itself strictly negative, is the basis of that positive illusion, the phenomenal world (see section 16). Ignorance creates "determinations," upadhi, modes of thought limiting the self-conception of the absolute Brahma, and Ignorance causes the empiric soul thus produced to confuse Brahma with the determinations

falsely imposed upon him, so that Brahma is imagined variously as individual soul, a world of experience, and a personal God.