Should the Mimamsa be called atheistic? Though the reply to this question would seem to be in the affirmative in the light of the traditional conception of the Mimamsa philosophy we have described above, doubts are raised by such a competent authority as Max Miiller.

Bearing in mind that of all schools the Mimamsa claims to follow the Vedas most faithfully, he finds it difficult to believe that it could reject the Vedic belief in God.

The arguments educed by the Mimamsakas against the conception of a creator of the universe mean, according to Max Miiller, that if God were supposed to be the creator, He would be liable to the charges of cruelty, pardality, etc.

But the rejection of a creator God, he contends, is not necessarily the rejection of God. Even some forms of pantheism like those of the Advaita Vedanta and Spinoza, Max Miiller contends, do not accept the reality of creation; and it is unfair to call them atheistic, just because they do not conform to the customary conception of God.

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If the Mimarhsa is to be judged by the Vedic ancestry, of which it is so proud, then Max Miiller is perhaps right. But judged by what the Mimamsa itself does and says, his contention cannot be fully accepted.

When we find that the early Mlmarnsakas are silent about God and later ones reject the proofs for the existence of God, like thejainas, without replacing them by any other, we have no positive proof that the early Vedic faith was still alive in them.

The different Vedic deities of course still form necessary parts of the sacrifices performed. Depending on this evidence one might say at best that the Mimamsa believes in polytheism.

But even such a view is rendered doubtful by the facts that these deities are not regarded as objects of worship, nor even belived to have any existence anywhere except in the Vedic hymns (mantras) that describe them.

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While the Vedic hymns are inspired by the living presence of the deity in the place of worship, the Mimamsa wonders how the deity can be simultaneously present in different places where he is invoked polytheism of the ordinary kind cannot also be attributed to the Mimamsa without some qualification.

The deities of the Mimamsaka are immortal entities. They are not existing persons, belonging to the space-time world.

But they are not the products of our imagination either; they are eternal and self-manifesting entities described by the eternal, self-revealing Vedas.

There may be some grandeur and even purity in such a conception of deities, but one would miss here the living faith of the Vedas It would not be fair, then, to judge the Mimamsa simply by its Vedic ancestry.

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Inherited elements of a faith, like inherited limbs, become atrophied by disuse. The Vedic conception of God had no active place in the Mimamsa scheme of life, as it had in the Vedanta one, and it is natural that it should gradually fade away.

The Mimamsa is one of the many examples in human history of how an over-emphasised means becomes its own end, and how gods are sacrificed for temples, prophets and books.

In its great anxiety to maintain the supremacy of the Vedas, the Mimamsa relegates God to an ambiguous position.

It is here that the Vedanta comes to differ from it, utilising its faith in the Vedas to develop a still greater faith in God, as we shall see in the next chapter.