The old questions of Whence? Why? and Whither? fascinated and enthralled their thoughts. They may have but little of practical wisdom to teach us, for they paid but small attention to the arts of peace and war. But, though they fell in consequence an easy prey to their neighbours, they had something nevertheless which their barbarous conquerors had not. They had their own view of the world, and this view, different as it is from our own, deserves to be looked at carefully and seriously by us. Whatever we may think of the world which they had built up for themselves, and in which they lived, their idea of the Godhead is certainly higher, purer, and more consistent than that of Greeks, Romans, and Hebrews. They passed through polytheism, henotheism, and monotheism, and they arrived at last at what is generally called pantheism, but a pantheism very different from vulgar pantheism. They started with the firm conviction that what we mean by God must be a Being without a second, without beginning or end, without limitations of any kind. Whatever there is or seems to be, call it mind or matter, man or nature, can have one substance only, one and the same, whatever we name it, God, or Brahman, the Absolute, or the Supreme Being. They never say, like other pantheists, that everything in this phenomenal world is God, but that everything has its being in God.

How the change from the real to the phenomenal came about, or, as we say, how the world was created, they can tell us as little as we can tell them. They simply point to the fact that it has come about, that it is there, that it is and can be nothing but phenomenal to us, but that the phenomenal could not even seem to be without the real behind it. In order to restore the phenomenal world to its reality, they hold that all that is wanted is knowledge or philosophy, which destroys that universal Nescience which makes us all take the phenomenal for the real, the objective for the subjective. Their philosophy is chiefly the Vedânta, though other systems also pursue the same object. Each man is in substance or in self identical with God, for what else could he be? If they say that each man is God, that would, no doubt, offend us, but that man and everything else has its true being in the Godhead is a very different kind of pantheism. To regain that full self-consciousness or God-consciousness, to return to God, to break down the artificial wall that seemed to separate man from God, is the highest object of Indian philosophy, and in some form or other these thoughts have gradually leavened all classes of society from the highest to the lowest.

In order to be able to appreciate the true value of the Vedânta, we have to study its growth in the Upanishads, and in the minute disquisitions of the Vedânta-Sûtras and their commentaries. No doubt these are sometimes very tedious, and to us, in this age of the world, may often appear childish and useless. And yet the Vedânta view of the world has a right to claim the same attention as that of Heraclitus, Plato, Spinoza, or Kant. It is as true and as untrue as any of these philosophical intuitions, but it possesses an attraction of its own which has held the best minds of India captive for generations, and will continue to do so for ages to come.

Nay, as we have always had among us Platonists, Spinozists, and Kantians, the time will come, nay, has come already, when European philosophers will try to look at the world through the glasses of the Vedânta also. It is well known that Schopenhauer, no mean thinker of modern times, declared the Vedânta as taught in the Upanishads “the product of the highest wisdom” (Ausgeburt der höchsten Weisheit). May not these words make other philosophers pause before they reject as childish a philosophy which Schopenhauer placed above the philosophy of Giordano Bruno, Malebranche, and Spinoza?

India should be known, not from without, but from within, and it will require a long time and far abler hands than mine before we really know what India was meant to be in the development of mankind. Heinrich Simon remarked very truly, “Our history is miserable because we have no biographies.... If a man’s life lies open before me from day to day in all his acts and all his thoughts, so far as they can be represented externally, I gain a better insight into the history of the time than by the best general representation of it.” What we want to know is, how the prominent men of India imbibed the Vedânta, and how the principles they had imbibed from that source influenced their lives, their acts, and their thoughts. With us philosophy remains always something collateral only. Our mainstay is formed by religion and ethics. But with the Hindus, philosophy is life in full earnest, it is but another name for religion, while morality has a place assigned to it as an essential preliminary to all philosophy. Most of our greatest philosophers and of their followers seem to lead two lives, one as it ought to be, the other as it is. One of our greatest philosophers, Berkeley, knew quite well what the world is, but he lived as a bishop, unconcerned about the unreal character of all with which he had to deal. There have been cases of true Vedântists, also, who have led useful, active lives as ministers and organisers of states, but he who has grasped the highest truths of the Vedânta, or has been grasped by them, is driven at once into the solitude of the forests, waiting there for the solution of all riddles, for perfect freedom, and in the end for the truest freedom of all, for death—Θανοῦμαι καὶ ἐλευθερήσομαι.