24 SOCIAL SCIENTIST republican character of the Sikh polity. For the first time, after Buddhism, Sikhism conceived of religion as a State (Church) in its own right, but without any coalescence of the spiritual and the temporal sovereignty, as in Islam (the Caliphate), God has been predicated as Sacha Patshah. The conception of religion as a State was one of the ways in which Sikhism fought against the might of the feudal polity. It is also significant to note that in the Sikh polity, the priestly class is not given the same role or position that it had in the feudalized Brahminical polity. In other words, there is an interrelationship between the Sikh polity and the Sikh religion but an intermixture or coalescence which is characteristic of the feudalistic polity is absent. The coalescence of the spiritual and the temporal sovereignty, realized in the person of Guru Gobind Singh, ended when the Guru bestowed the one on the Adi Granth and the other on the Khalsa Panth; the two realms, though interconnected, were thus made relatively autonomous and distinct from each other. The Sikh polity does not envisage a theocratic state in the sense of coalescence of the spiritual and the temporal authority and domination of the priestly class in the institutions and processes of the temporal state. To provide an anti-feudal ideational basis to the Sikh movement, Guru Nanak introduced some new concepts into the system of Indian philosophy. Spintualist-Materialist Philosophy Guru Nanak, discarding the spiritualist-idcalist (Vedantic) tradition, evolved his own distinctive approach which may be termed as the spi ritualist-materialist mode of thought; a spiritualist conception of the Absolute Being was coordinated with a materialist conception of the phenomenal reality through the notion of creation' as a new kind of causal relationship. It may be remembered here that along with the spiritualist-idealist (Vedantic) tradition, a current of materialism is also noticeable in the history of Indian philosophy; its astic form has also remained predominant. To understand the distinctive ontological character of the Sikh philosophy we have to keep in view this materialist tradition also. The prc-Nanak Indian materialism could not evolve a conception of reality with change as its inner characteristic^ }aw or principle. Either the very reality of change was denied or the efficient cause of change was seen existing externally, that is, transcendentally. Either way, Indian materialism had a weakness that from one side or the other pushed it towards Vedantic idealism. The pre-Nanak materialism viewed matter as eternal and possessing an in-itself reality; but being devoid of intrinsic dynamism, it remained dependent upon an external, transcendental source for the initiation or innervation of the process of becoming. Guru Nanak gave a new orientation and complexion to the materialist tradition : instead of holding matter as eternal (monistically) or coetcrnal with non-material reality (dualisti-cally), he envisaged the phenomenal, material reality as a creation of the transcendental spiritual reality (1k Onkar). According to Guru Nanak's