Gaimini. What has happened in this case in India is what always happens when people resort to names of abuse rather than to an exchange of ideas. Surely a Deity, though it does not cause us to act, and does not itself reward or punish us, is not thereby a non-existent Deity. Modern Vedântists also are so enamoured of their own conception of Deity, that is, of Brahman or Âtman, that they do not hesitate, like Vivekananda, for instance, in his recent address on Practical Vedânta, 1896, to charge those who differ from himself with atheism. He is the atheist,' he writes, who does not believe in himself. Not believing in the glory of your own soul is what the Vedanta calls atheism.'

Is the Purva-Mîmâmsâ a system of Philosophy ?

Let me say once more that, in allowing a place to the Purva-Mîmâmsâ among the six systems of Indian Philosophy, I was chiefly influenced by the fact that from an Indian point of view it always held such a place, and that by omitting it a gap would have been left in the general outline of the philosophic thought of India. Some native philosophers go so far as not only to call both systems, that of Gaimini and Bâdarayana, by the same name of Mîmâmsâ, but to look upon them as forming one whole. They actually take the words in the first Sûtra of the Vedanta-philosophy, 'Now then a desire to know Brahman,' as pointing back to Gaimini's Sûtras and as thereby implying that the Pûrva-Mîmâmsâ should be studied first, and should be followed by a study of the Uttara-Mîmâmsâ afterwards. Besides, the authors of the other five systems frequently refer to Gaimini as an independent thinker, and though his

I treatment of the sacrificial system of the Veda would hardly seem to us to deserve the name of a system of philosophy, he has nevertheless touched on many a problem which falls clearly within that sphere of thought. Our idea of a system of philosophy is different from the Indian conception of a Darsana. In its original meaning philosophy, as a love of wisdom, comes nearest to the Sanskrit Gigñâsâ, a desire to know, if not a desire to be wise. If we take philosophy in the sense of an examination of our means of knowledge (Epistemology), or with Kant as an inquiry into the limits of human knowledge, there would be nothing corresponding to it in India. Even the Vedanta, so far as it is based, not on independent reasoning, but on the authority of the Sruti, would lose with us its claim to the title of philosophy. But we have only to waive the claim of infallibility put forward by Bâdarâyana in favour of the utterances of the sages of the Upanishads, and treat them as simple human witnesses to the truth, and we should then find in the systematic arrangement of these utterances by Bâdarâyana, a real philosophy, a complete view of the Kosmos in which we live, like those that have been put forward by the great thinkers of the philosophical countries of the world, Greece, Italy, Germany, France, and England.

CHAPTER VI.

Samkhya-Philosophy.

HAVING explored two of the recognised systems of Indian philosophy, so far as it seemed necessary in a general survey of the work done by the ancient thinkers of India, we must now return and enter once more into the densely entangled and almost impervious growth of thought from which all the high roads leading towards real and definite systems of philosophy have emerged, branching off in different directions. One of these and, as it seems to me, by far the most important for the whole intellectual development of India, the Vedânta, has been mapped out by us at least in its broad outlines.

It seemed to me undesirable to enter here on an examination of what has been called the later Vedanta which can be studied in such works as the Pañkadasi or the Vedanta-Sâra, and in many popular treatises both in prose and in verse.

Later Vedanta mixed with Samkhya.

It would be unfair and unhistorical, however, to look upon this later development of the Vedanta as simply a deterioration of the old philosophy. Though it is certainly rather confused, if compared with the system as laid down in the old Vedanta-Sutras,

it represents to us what in the course of time became of the Vedanta, when taught and discussed in the different schools of philosophy in medieval and modern India. What strikes us most in it is the mixture of Vedânta ideas with ideas borrowed chiefly, as it would seem, from Sâmkhya, but also from Yoga, and Nyâya sources. But here again it is difficult to decide whether such ideas were actually borrowed from these systems in their finished state, or whether they were originally common property which in later times only had become restricted to one or the other of the six systems of philosophy. In the Pañkadasi, for instance, we meet with the idea of Prakriti, nature, which we are accustomed to consider as the peculiar property of the Sâmkhya-system. This Prakriti is said there to be the reflection, or, as we should say, the shadow of Brahman, and to be possessed of the three Gunas or elements of goodness, passion, and darkness, or, as they are sometimes explained, of good, indifferent, and bad. This theory of the three Gunas, however, is altogether absent from the original Vedanta; at least, it is not to be met with in the purely Vedântic Upanishads, occurring for the first time in the Svetasvatara Upanishad. Again in the later Vedânta works Avidya and Mâyâ are used synonymously, or, if distinguished from one another, they are supposed to arise respectively from the more or less pure character of their substance1. The omniscient, but personal Îsvara is there explained as a reflection of Mâyâ, but as having subdued her, while the

1

'I translate Sattva here by substance, for the context hardly allows that we should take it for the Guna of goodness.

individual soul, Prâgña or Giva, is represented as having been subdued by Avidyâ, and to be multiform, owing to the variety of Avidya. The individual soul, being endowed with a causal or subtle body, believes that body to be its own, and hence error and suffering in all their variety. As to the development of the world, we are told that it was by the command of Îsvara that Prakriti, when dominated by darkness, produced the elements of ether, air, fire, water and earth, all meant to be enjoyed, that is, to be experienced by the individual souls.

In all this we can hardly be mistaken if we recognise the influence of Sâmkhya ideas, obscuring and vitiating the monism of the Vedanta, pure and simple. In that philosophy there is no room for a Second, or for a Prakriti, nor for the three Gunas, nor for anything real by the side of Brahman.

How that influence was exercised we cannot discover, and it is possible that in ancient times already there existed this influence of one philosophical system upon the other, for we see even in some of the Upanishads a certain mixture of what we should afterwards have to call the distinctive teaching of Vedanta, Sâmkhya, or Yogaphilosophy. We must remember that in India the idea of private property in any philosophic truth did hardly exist. The individual, as we saw before, was of little consequence, and could never exercise the same influence which such thinkers as Socrates or Plato exercised in Greece. If the descriptions of Indian life emanating from the Indians themselves, and from other nations they came in contact with, whether Greek conquerors or Chinese pilgrims, can