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The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c40.s13: § 13. The Significance of the Philosophy of the Upaniṣads

The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c40.s13

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§ 13. The Significance of the Philosophy of the Upaniṣads

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What judgement are we to pass on the main thought of the Upaniṣads? Are they really the expressions at an early date of the deepest principles of philosophy, or are they merely of historical value, interesting pictures of the early thought of man, important not *per se*, but because of their dominating influence on the future philosophy and life of India? The two interpreters, who have of recent times been most impressed by the nature of that philosophy as idealism, have passed the most diametrically opposed views on the question: Gough was impressed with the necessity of explaining the defects of the subject of which he treated by the admixture of blood among the Indians, and the corrupting influences of a low order of civilization, while Deussen¹ is lost in admiration of the Upaniṣads, as was Schopenhauer before him: ‘Eternal philosophical truth’, he says, ‘has seldom found more decisive and striking expression than in the doctrine of the emancipating knowledge of the Ātman.’ He claims² that Yājñavalkya had anticipated the view of Schopenhauer regarding immortality as indestructibility without continued existence; he regards the view of the nature of the self as an anticipation of the doctrine of Kant; he defends the doctrine of transmigration as the best expression of the true state of matters in the terms of empirical thought, while recognizing that such an expression is misleading: nay, he argues that the Kantian argument regarding immortality, based on the realization of the moral law within us, points not to ordinary immortality, but rather to the process of transmigration, and transmigration has been solemnly upheld as philosophic doctrine at the present time by competent authorities.

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¹ *Phil. of Up.*, pp. 38–50.

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² *Op. cit.*, p. 350. Contrast the judgement of Lanman (*Beginnings of Hindu Pantheism*, p. 24): ‘What a prospect, dark and void—this Supreme Spirit, before whom all human endeavour, all noble ambition, all hope, all love, is blighted! What a contrast, a relief, when we turn from this to the teachings of the gentle Nazarene!’

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The position of Deussen is, of course, coloured by his acceptance of the view that Kant has finally³ shown that the knowledge of the ultimate reality is not possible, with which he combines the Schopenhauerian doctrine of the primacy of the will which he traces to Christianity, and his view of the Upaniṣads is, therefore, greatly determined by his double desire, to find in them the anticipation of Kant and to show that the views of Kant, as modified by Schopenhauer, are the only possible views of philosophy. To those who do not accept his theories the arguments adduced by him fall with the theories themselves, but the investigation of this question belongs to a general philosophical discussion, which is hardly here necessary or appropriate. The more important question which arises is to what extent the doctrines of the Upaniṣads do foreshadow the views of Kant.

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³ A view, of course, rejected by various schools on different grounds, e. g. H. Jones, *Philosophy of Lotze*, pp. 371 ff.; E. Caird, *Critical Philosophy of Kant*; Hobhouse, *Theory of Knowledge*; Pritchard, *Kant’s Theory of Knowledge*; Taylor, *Elements of Metaphysics*; J. Ward, *A Study of Kant* (1922); F. H. Bradley, *The Principles of Logic* (1922) E. Cassirer, *Das Erkenntnisproblem*.

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The answer to this question must candidly admit that the conception of the Upaniṣads formed by Deussen as containing a definite doctrine of idealism, that of Yājñavalkya, which is variously broken down by realistic intrusions, and accommodations to common-sense, is one which is contrary to all probability and reason. The ideas of Yājñavalkya, that is of the men who framed and attributed to his famous name those views, are the high-water mark of the speculation of the Upaniṣads : the rest of the material is merely the natural development of the Brāhmaṇa theories. Those theories are of historic interest : as philosophy, they are unworthy of a moment’s consideration. On the other hand the views of Yājñavalkya do certainly go the length of asserting the unknowableness of the subject and the fact that the Ātman, the subject matter of the philosophy of the age, was the knowing subject within the man : it is further clear that he maintained that the Ātman was the only real thing, and that plurality was illusory. It is quite true that even in the section attributed to him there are many expressions which will not harmonize with this conception, but it would be unfair not to take the doctrines at their face value, and to recognize that we cannot reasonably expect full consistency on these matters. It is, therefore, necessary to consider these doctrines in themselves in their value for thought.

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The essential result appears to lie in this, that the distinction of subject and object is realized, and that, with the recognition of this distinction, it is seen that, as such, the subject cannot possibly be an object of thought or knowledge. These propositions are perfectly true, if duly confined to what they assert : consciousness essentially involves the distinction of subject and object, and clearly it is impossible to make the subjective activity an object of knowledge in exactly the same sense as the content of that activity is an object of knowledge.¹ But with this doctrine we make little progress to the understanding of the world, and the theory that it was really an anticipation of the view that the thing-in-itself is unknowable is not supported by any evidence whatever. On the contrary, the assertion of the unity of the self and the denial of plurality cannot be deduced on any legitimate manner from the doctrine so far arrived at, and these theories amount to no more than the desire to arrive at the conception of some permanent and abiding thing. But the identity of the self and the absolute is based merely on the abstraction of the self as subjectivity, and that of the absolute as subjectivity, and the identity is therefore meaningless and a mere matter of words.

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¹ For the later views on this point cf. Keith, *JRAS.* 1916, pp. 371, 372. The real problem of individuality is, of course, merely stated, not solved by this contrast. The question is, What is the explanation of the quasi-permanence of the knowing subject? No Indian philosophy deals with this effectively; Buddhism, if we believe C. Rhys Davids (*JRAS.* 1903, pp. 587 ff.), has not even the courage to face the problem. For an attempt to restate the Buddhist view of rebirth, see her *Buddhist Psychology*, pp. 244–68.

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Moreover the utter difference between Yājñavalkya and Kant appears clearly when we realize that Yājñavalkya, with his theory of the unity of the absolute, has no theory at all of the relation of the empiric world to the absolute, i. e. that he really leaves the whole question of philosophy unsolved, and that the followers of his theory were at the last forced to fall back, as early as the Çvetāçvatara Upaniṣad, on the mere phrase of Māyā, ‘illusion’, which turns the supreme lord into a conjurer.¹ The Kantian doctrine, it need hardly be said, leaves us with the whole empiric world regulated under definite principles in time and space, and subject to causality, and it merely assures us that behind these relations we must not expect by intellectual means to find the meaning of existence. That meaning, however, it finds in the moral consciousness, which then becomes of infinite importance. In the doctrine of Yājñavalkya on the contrary we have nothing save denial of all real causality and multiplicity, and on the other the normal cosmogonism of the Brāhmaṇas. Of moral principles Yājñavalkya’s main text is entirely innocent: the pure intellectuality of his doctrine led to the consequence that the moral acts of the person who had knowledge were indifferent, a fact which no sophistry could conceal and which was recognized at an early date:² it has its precise counterpart in the view, prevalent in the Middle Ages in Europe as in India, that devotion to God or an idol was enough to wipe out any infamies.

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¹ Hence in Mahāyāna Buddhism we reach the logical result that all knowledge is falling away from truth and reality and its suppression is essential; cf. Schayer, *Mahāyānistische Erlösungslehre*, p. 49; Asaṅga, *Sūtrālaṁkāra* in *ZII.* ii. 103 ff.

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² Hence the constant discussion in the epic of the problem of determinism (Dahlmann, *Die Sāṁkhya-Philosophie*, pp. 113 ff., 265 ff.); O. Strauss, *Ethische Probleme aus dem Mahābhārata*. For Buddhism, see Keith, *Buddhist Philosophy*, pp. 97, 113, 135 f., 175, n. 1; Stcherbatsky (*The Central Problem of Buddhism*, pp. 5, 32), who insists on the limited role of Karman.

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When we pass to the doctrine of Karman, the hopeless inconsistencies of the view of Yājñavalkya become painfully obvious: the doctrine of Karman is now introduced as explaining the nature of man’s fate in life, without regard to the other doctrine that knowledge means emancipation at once. How on the theory of Yājñavalkya conduct could have any effect at all, or any bearing on the matter, cannot be understood, but it is really incomprehensible how Deussen can accept the view that the knowledge of the unity of the Ātman produces liberation. All the effect of the philosophy of Yājñavalkya is to declare the difference of subject and object, and then to assert that the Ātman is one, in which there is no difference of subject and object, and therefore no consciousness, and these views do not show any connexion with emancipation or transmigration by degree of merit of conduct. It is simply inconceivable why on the ground of such theoretic knowledge men should abandon the desire for children, should give up their property, and wander about like beggars, practising a foolish asceticism. Nor as a matter of fact can we imagine that any such conception normally entered the heads of the ascetics of the Vedic age: they doubtless deemed, as the texts indeed show, that what they would attain by these practices was the mystic contemplation of the divine which mystics of every time and clime have aimed at winning.¹ This fact, which is clearly proved by the evidence of the many passages in which union with the absolute is aimed at, and regarded as a state of abiding bliss, is not in any degree compatible with the view that what the priests and sages of the Upaniṣads believed in was the mere fact that there existed a thing in itself, which was for ever unknowable. From such premises no such conclusions as are drawn by the Upaniṣads could possibly be derived at any time. The essence of the doctrine of the Upaniṣads must be looked for in something else.

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¹ The similarity of result between the views of Plotinus and of the Vedānta is sometimes (as by Lassen, *Ind. Alt.* iii. 379 ff.; Garbe, *Phil. of Anc. India*, pp. 46 ff.) attributed to borrowing by Neo-Platonism; for a complete refutation of the view see Caird, *Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers*, where it is shown that the Neo-Platonic views were in all essentials the natural, and almost inevitable, outcome of earlier Greek philosophy. In Buddhism we have the Jhānas and Iddhis and similar ridiculous states. See also T. Whittaker, *The Neo-Platonists* (1918); F. Heidemann, *Plotin* (1921); below, Chap. 29.

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Nor indeed is there the slightest doubt as to what that belief was, apart from occasional flashes of insight which led to other conclusions. The absolute is conceived as an ideal, with which unity is as ardently desired, as it was desired in earlier times with the gods in heaven, and the unity with the absolute is conceived in the same mode as unity with the divine had been conceived. The Upaniṣads are essentially pantheistic with a strong theistic leaning, but the extent of that theism differs from passage to passage, and in the case of Yājñavalkya and others doubtless a still more intellectual view of the situation was taken, in which the chief stress was laid on the conception of the Ātman as the one and only reality, free from pollution, serene, unalterable, far above empirical being, or thought of any kind. But this cool intellectualism is not by any means the pervading doctrine of the Upaniṣads,² nor indeed in the record of Yājñavalkya’s views are we without indication that the Ātman itself inspired devotion of a marked kind, as comes out plainly in his address to Maitreyī, on deciding to abandon his goods and his wives and wander forth into the wilderness.³ For most of his contemporaries, who devoted themselves to the study of philosophy, it may confidently be believed that they were pantheists, who were delighted with their discovery of this as the truth of the universe, and who conceived the fate of the enlightened soul as the enjoyment of bliss in the existence to come in union with the one essence of the world.

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² Bloomfield, *Rel. of Veda*, p. 281.

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³ BAU. ii. 4; iv. 5.

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It is these two aspects of the Upaniṣads which explain the two diverse interpretations which, as we have seen, Çaṅkara, following Gauḍapāda and some Aupaniṣada school on the one hand, and Bādarāyaṇa,⁴ doubtless with another Aupaniṣada school, on the other, placed on the Upaniṣads. The purely negative character of the universe of experience is insisted upon by Çaṅkara as a result of the stress laid on the unknowability of the Ātman, and its separation from all empirical reality, while Bādarāyaṇa takes the more simple view, which sees in the absolute a divine nature, and finds a place for the world and the souls beside that nature, though still in some degree pantheistically regarded as part of the divine. The result of true knowledge as the attainment of union with the supreme deity is thus much more easily brought into concord with the utterances of the Upaniṣads themselves. Moreover, the sense of devotion to the absolute was thus brought into accord with metaphysical reality and at the same time opportunity given to adapt the Viṣṇu worship of the masses¹ to the esoteric side of the philosophy of the Upaniṣads, a task carried out by Rāmānuja in his great commentary on the *Brahma Sūtra*.²

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⁴ Thibaut, SBE. xxxiv. pp. c ff.

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¹ Cf. Senart, *Album-Kern*, pp. 104 ff.

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² Cf. Keith, *ERE. s.v.*

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From the point of view of ethics the demerits of the system of the Upaniṣads are even more glaring than from the point of view of the intellect. It is doubtless impossible to arrive at certainty on questions of the ultimate nature of reality, but it is an easier matter to establish some principles of moral obligation, and to bring them into harmony with a scheme of the universe which if theoretical shall none the less be at any rate plausible. The defect of the Upaniṣads is that they render morality in the ultimate issue valueless and meaningless. We may reasonably assume that any complete metaphysic must seek to explain as essential ingredients of existence, truth, goodness, and beauty, and we may safely conclude that a system, which, like that of the Upaniṣads, regards beauty and goodness as nothing but hollow mockeries, is defective and essentially unsound in its theoretic basis.

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It might indeed seem at first sight that the doctrine of Yājñavalkya which ascribes results to the action of Karman, would supply us with a ground for morality, and the Buddhist system has indeed been praised³ as an ingenious effort to establish a rigid rule of moral order in the world and to negate selfishness by maintaining the doctrines that there is no real self on the one hand, and that every action is causally determined by some previous action on the other. Even, however, in the case of Buddhism the theory is by no means satisfactory or convincing. The conception of Karman serves indeed in an excellent way to defend and protect the established order of things, but it is essentially fatalistic, and fatalism is not for a normal mind a good incentive to moral progress. If, on the one hand, the doing of an evil deed is restrained by the thought that it will be punished in another life,⁴ it is equally true that reflection shows that the actor has really no option in his acts and is an absolutely predetermined person, whose former acts produce his present motives and reasonings without the possibility of intervention of any kind on his part. This fatalism haunts the Vedānta and the Sāṁkhya no less than the Buddhist system and practically every modern system of absolute idealism,⁵ and it is noteworthy that in the doctrine of Rāmānuja there is a real effort to find some place for independence on the part of the individual soul, just as in Buddhism and Jainism alike free will is often tacitly assumed as existing. Again, while in the occidental systems of absolute idealism there is ever an effort to find real value for the individual by seeing in him the conscious working of the absolute which realizes itself in some degree of reality in him, in Buddhism no such satisfaction is possible. We are indeed sometimes¹ invited to see in the Buddhists of the Pāli texts lovers of empirical pyschology and hedonists who believed that life of a certain kind, the full and perfect efflorescence of mind and character on earth, was fair and lovely beyond all non-being, beyond all after-being. Unhappily in this view we have merely the ascription to Buddhism of ideals cherished by a modern sect, in flagrant defiance of the obvious fact that the *summum bonum* of the system envisaged by these writers was precisely non-being, for in death alone have unhealthy moral conditions completely passed away for ever from a sage. From such an end the only deduction bearing upon action must obviously be the rule of avoiding passion and emotion and action of every kind, and it is significant that the development of the doctrine of active compassion in the Buddhist faith is coincident with the development of the religious aspect of that belief, which in effect overthrows entirely the old ideal and which in large measure was accomplished during foreign dominion in India under the stress of spreading the Buddhist gospel beyond the narrow bounds of India proper.

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³ Walleser, *Die philosophische Grundlage des älteren Buddhismus*, pp. 74, 75.

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⁴ Speyer, *Indische Theosophie*, p. 90, who takes a very favourable view of this doctrine.

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⁵ Cf. J. Ward, *The Realm of Ends* (1911), pp. 270 ff.; J. Royce, *Lectures on Modern Idealism* (1919); W. R. Sorley, *Hibbert Journal*, ii. 703 ff.; *Moral Values and the Idea of God* (1918) against Bosanquet, *Principle of Individuality and Value* (1912); *The Meeting of Extremes in Contemporary Philosophy* (1921); Bradley, *Appearance and Reality*; Inge, *Plotinus*, ii. 181 ff.

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¹ C. Rhys Davids, *Buddhist Manual of Psychological Ethics*², pp. xciv ff. Contrast Stcherbatsky, *The Central Conception of Buddhism*, pp. 49 ff. In her *Buddhist Psychology*, pp. 278 ff., Mrs. Rhys Davids shows a clearer appreciation of the defects of Buddhism.

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In the case of the Upaniṣads, however, the position for morality is still less favourable than in the Buddhist system. It is quite impossible to make Karman the leading principle of these texts, to many of which it was clearly a sealed book. Moreover it is quite impossible to make the Karman doctrine harmonize with the doctrine of salvation by knowledge, and this doctrine is superior to all morality. Doubtless, when restricted within the narrow circles in which it first became recognized as the fundamental truth, the doctrine of salvation by knowledge alone was not likely to produce evil living, but the effect of a doctrine, which makes morality negligible, on less trained minds can easily be recognized, and is admirably illustrated by the effect of the doctrine of faith when divorced from works. But more directly and fundamentally the system failed wholly to provide, just as the Buddhist failed to provide, a criterion for morality, since for it also the *summum bonum* had no intelligible relation to moral activity of any sort. On the contrary it declared the world of reality to be a delusion or at least not true reality and to be miserable; it encouraged the declaration of one Upaniṣad¹ that devotion to children, wife, or parents is a means of keeping back the self from its saving knowledge: it drove Yājñavalkya to abandon his dear wife for ever, and not, as in the more sympathetic version of the Buddha legend, subject to the possibility of relations of friendship at a later period. The essence of its doctrine is that of the saving of the individual soul, which must resolutely refuse to allow itself to be blinded by the ordinary desires and sympathies of mankind. This is a logical conclusion of the metaphysic of the system. When Yājñavalkya² declares that the husband is dear to the wife not for his own sake but for the sake of the self, and applies the same principle to the other relations of human life, to the wife, to children, to riches, to other men, to the gods, and the universe, he is doubtless concerned mainly with a metaphysical doctrine; but not only is the selfish conclusion obvious to ordinary minds,³ but it is essentially connected with the teaching itself, for on ultimate analysis the aim of the self turns out to be the annihilation of every human desire and activity, an ideal which renders all active philanthropy idle, and which has caused the chief virtues of India to take the form of resignation, passive compassion, and charity.⁴

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¹ Maitr. vi. 28.

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² BAU. ii. 4. 5.

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³ Oltramare, *L'histoire des idées théosophiques*, i. 137.

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⁴ Cf. Oldenberg, *Aus dem alten Indien*, pp. 1 ff., on the difference of Maitrī and Christian love.

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On the other hand, the attainment of the ideal of union with the absolute led to the addiction to the practise of meditation, and above all in ever increasing measure in later times to the seeking of mystic states of absorption in the absolute. It is right to recognize that of this tendency on its worst side the Upaniṣads have very little to show. It is an exception when the Chāndogya Upaniṣad⁵ solemnly assures us that the possession of saving knowledge enables a man to have at pleasure the presence of the Fathers, the Mothers, brothers, sisters, friends, garlands, perfumes, music, and women: doubtless in some degree concession had to be made to the desires of those who, unlike Naciketas, preferred material joys and the houris of paradise⁶ to the knowledge of the truth of the fate of man after death. But it was inevitable that a doctrine, which regarded morality as not really existent, and preached the attainment of union with the absolute by means of mystic abstraction, should be productive of means of attaining the desired end which were grossly immoral: the Tantras of the later Hinduism, which in Bengal⁷ have ousted the Veda, which in a very real sense are the most important books of a large section of Hindus, and which are certainly by no means without occidental and American admirers, are in ultimate analysis descendants of one side of the mysticism of which a higher form appears in the Upaniṣads. The same tendencies were from the first marked in Buddhism, as in the earliest texts we find the possession of certain supernatural powers admitted as real.

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⁵ viii. 2; 12. 3.

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⁶ KU. i. 25. Cf. Kauṣ. i. 4.

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⁷ Ewing, JAOS. xxiii. 65; Weber, *Religionssoziologie*, ii. 322 ff.

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The final judgement passed on the Upaniṣads cannot, therefore, be in doubt :¹ they are the products of the indigenous philosophy of India, most interesting expositions of early and acute efforts to grasp the nature of the universe and man’s place in the cosmos, of vital importance for the understanding of Indian philosophy and religious life in later times, since the conceptions which they enunciate have for the rest of Indian intellectual progress preponderant weight and influence. In comparison with the rest of Indian philosophy they excel in interest no less than in literary form and in freedom of thought : the deadly defect of the Buddhist dialogues, interminable repetition and dullness accentuated by the heaping up of synonyms or quasi-synonyms, is only nascent in the Upaniṣads, which again are happily exempt from the painful duty imposed on Çaṅkara of expounding his idealism in the form of commentaries on texts which he must take as binding upon him and expressing one consistent doctrine, in face of the fact that obviously they do nothing of the sort. On the other hand, regarded as serious contributions to the solution of the fundamental problems of philosophy, the value of the Upaniṣads must be considered to be comparatively small : moreover they became known to the western world at a time when the development of philosophy had reached a point at which it could acquire little or nothing of great value from the Upaniṣads : to measure the exact effect of their influence on Schopenhauer would be extremely difficult,² especially having regard to the fact that he knew them only in a version which often completely misrepresented their sense ; but in the long run Schopenhauer himself represents merely a back current in the course of the stream of philosophy to its unattainable goal.

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¹ Cf. Oldenberg, *Die Kultur der Gegenwart*², I. v. 56, whose judgement of Indian philosophy concludes : Für den westlichen Geist—‘ welch Schauspiel! aber ach ! ein Schauspiel nur ! ’ Contrast S. Radhakrishnan, *The Reign of Religion in Contemporary Philosophy*, p. 451.

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² M. F. Hecker, *Schopenhauer und die indische Philosophie* (1897) ; Oldenberg, *Die Kultur der Gegenwart*², I. v. 53–5 ; Speyer, *Indische Theosophie*, pp. 306 ff. Oldenberg (*Die Lehre der Upanishaden*, pp. 195 ff.) rightly emphasizes the fact that mystics like Meister Eckhardt are far more akin than Kant to the spirit of the Upaniṣads.

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A stronger claim,³ however, has been made for the value of the doctrine of the Upaniṣads as a school of mysticism, ‘ an attempt to gain personal experience of God found within the heart as a result of self-purification ’, or ‘ as a constant process of self-purification to the intent that God may be found within ’, definitions in which as applied to the Upaniṣads God must be understood as the Brahman. It is claimed from this point of view that the Upaniṣads have the superiority over Christian mysticism in originality, since that depends vitally on Plotinus, while it is admitted that the mysticism of the Upaniṣads is too purely metaphysical, and lacks the ethical and social content of Christian mysticism. Much of Christian mysticism, however, seems defective in this regard equally with the Upaniṣads, though it may be conceded that, unlike the Upaniṣads, the Christian mystics professed a faith in which essential stress was laid on morality. Christian mysticism,¹ however, is undoubtedly differentiated from that of the Upaniṣads by reason of the difference between the conception of God and that of the Brahman, even though in certain mystics the personal character of the divinity tends to be merged, while in the later Upaniṣads a personal deity appears in lieu of an impersonal absolute. In harmony with this distinction is the normally greater personal character of the mysticism of Christian seers, men and women alike. From this point of view the Upaniṣads may justly be accorded greater value and importance than from that of philosophy proper, and it is significant that it is in Christian mystics that we find utterances which the seers of the Upaniṣads would have found far easier to interpret than the Kantian system, such as that of St. Catherine, ‘My being is God, not by simple participation, but by a true transformation of being’, or Eckhardt’s, ‘When the soul has lost itself and everything in God, it finds itself again in God when it attains to the knowledge of Him, and it finds also everything which it had abandoned in God’, or his emphatic denial that God has any definite character of his own.²

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³ Cf. R. Gordon Milburn, *The Religious Mysticism of the Upanishads*, pp. 26 ff.

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¹ See, e.g., C. A. Bennett, *A Philosophical Study of Mysticism*; R. Otto, *The Idea of the Holy*; James, *Varieties of Religious Reference*; von Hügel, *Mystic Element in Religion*; Underhill, *Mysticism, and The Mystic Way*; cf. Keith, *Buddhist Philosophy*, p. 127. For Egyptian parallels, cf. Weinreich, *Archiv für Rel.* xix. 165 ff.

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² Cf. John Scotus: Deus propter excellentiam non immerito nihil vocatur; Angelus Silesius: Gott ist ein lauter nichts. (James, *op. cit.*, pp. 416 f.)

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It is this fact of universalism that gives the mysticism of the Upaniṣads in its purest form its chief appeal to many minds, which find in the cult of a personal deity too narrow an outlook and too selfish a destiny for man. To such spirits as these the ideal of merger in the absolute presents an effective antidote to the narrowness of traditional religion, and thus the philosophy of the Upaniṣads has for them the same attraction as systems of absolute idealism have had for many types of western mind. The chief distinction, however, between the standpoint of the Upaniṣads in this regard and that of western theories of the absolute is that the Upaniṣads do not feel any serious necessity for finding a place for morality and political life, while in the west from Hegel onwards heroic, if unsuccessful, efforts have been made by the followers of this ideal³ to establish morality and civil life as an essential element in the absolute. The contrast admits of explanation on many grounds, but one of the most obvious is the fact that the system of caste provided ready-made an ethical framework which no philosopher cared to attack, while political organization remained almost stationary.

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³ e.g. Bosanquet, *Philosophical Theory of the State*. Cf. Hobhouse, *Metaphysical Theory of the State*.

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