A History of Indian Literature v1.c8.s9.92

v1.c8.s9.92

However, it was not the belief in their divine revelation which gave these philosophical poems (there is hardly a better name for them) such enormous power over the minds of men: for even the silliest hymns and the most stupid Brāhmaṇa passages were regarded as uttered by the deity: but it was rather the circumstance that, arrayed in the language of *poetry*, they appealed just as much to the heart as to the intellect. And it is not because, as Schopenhauer asserts, they present the "fruit of the highest human knowledge and wisdom,” and contain “almost superhuman conceptions,” “whose originators can hardly be regarded as mere men”¹ that across the space of thousands of years the Upaniṣads *still* have much to tell *us also*; not because, as Deussen thinks, these thinkers have obtained, “if not the most scientific, yet still the most intimate and immediate light upon the last secret of existence;” and because (with which Deussen seeks to justify the belief of the Indians in revelation) in the Upaniṣads “there are philosophical conceptions unequalled in India or perhaps anywhere else in the world.”² No, it is because these old thinkers *wrestle* so earnestly for the truth, because in their philosophical poems the eternally unsatisfied human yearning for knowledge has been expressed so fervently. The Upaniṣads do not contain “superhuman conceptions,” but human, absolutely human attempts to come nearer to the truth—and it is this which makes them so valuable to us.