The Philosophy of the Upanishads c4.8

c4.8

and contrasted with all those realistic developments which together with the creation and transmigration doctrines are known as the "lower knowledge" (*aparâ vidyâ*), and are explained as accommodations of the written revelation to the weakness of human understanding. This accommodation theory of the later Vedântist teachers is not wholly baseless, and needs correction only in the one point that this adjustment to the empirical capacity of the intellect (which works within the relations of time, space and causality) was not intentional and conscious, but unconscious. In this shape the idea of accommodation becomes a key which is fitted to unlock the secrets not only of the doctrinal developments of the Upanishads, but of many analogous phenomena in Western philosophy. For the practice of clothing metaphysical intuitions in the forms of empirical knowledge is met with not only in India, but also in Europe from the earliest times. And for that very reason no account would have been taken of it had not Kant demonstrated the incorrectness of the whole procedure, as I hope to show in detail in the later parts of my work.