The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c40.s13.9

v2.c40.s13.9

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.