The Religion of the Veda: The Ancient Religion of India (from Rig-Veda to Upanishads) c10.55

c10.55

I am now come at last to the "how" of Hindu higher thought, that is, my task is now to show how the main or essential thoughts of Hindu theosophy arose. In the transition from the nature gods, the legends, the ritual, and the folk-lore practices, to the settled theosophy of later times, many conceptions flit like phantoms across the vision of these speculators or seers, sometimes not to be heard of a second time. The air is charged with experimental, electric thought. No religious or philosophic literature of ancient times has buried so many "lost children" as the Hindu in the storm and stress period that ends with the Upanishads. No people of thinkers have started to rear so many edifices of thought to be abandoned without regret or scruple when found wanting in the end. They have left behind them many a ruin which they might well enough have finished, and within which the religious thinkers of many another nation, less exacting, would have cheerfully settled upon as permanent and congenial habitations. Philip Sidney's saying: "Reason cannot show itself more reasonable than to leave off reasoning on things above reason," does not hold with the Hindus. They would certainly have stigmatised such sweet reasonableness as the philosophy of sloth, if they had ever heard of it. On the contrary, the old questions of whence, why, and whither fascinate and enthrall their thoughts from the time of the Vedic Rishis to the present day. Remarkable as this may sound, we have really no record of any period of Hindu thought of which we can say definitely that it was wanting in the highest and most strenuous thought, from the time of the riddle-hymn of Dīrghatamas and the creation-hymn,¹ to the modern Vedāntins and Paramahansas of the type of Rāmakrishna and Vivekānanda.