A Constructive Survey of Upanishadic Philosophy c13.s6.3

c13.s6.3

Of the strictly philosophical essays on Upanishadic subjects, we have, in the first place, Josiah Royce's essay on the Mystical Conception of Being, as illustrated primarily from the Upanishads, in his *World and the Individual*. Royce tells us that he dwells so long on the Upanishads, because, as he says, "they contain already the entire story of the mystic faith so far as it had a philosophical basis" (p. 175). Royce characterises the mystical method as immediacy, and though he is not himself in sympathy with mysticism, nobody could have explained the mystic position better than Royce has done. Prof. Radhakrishnan's *Reign of Religion in Contemporary Philosophy*, McMillan, 1920, ends with a chapter on "Some suggestions for an approach to Reality based on the Upanishads ”. We might see from this how Prof. Radhakrishnan himself regards the Upanishads as capable of giving us a point of view in contemporary thought. Prof. G. H. Langley, of Dacca University, writes an essay on the *Conception of the Universal Spirit in the Upanishads, and its identity with the Individual Spirit* in the *Indian Philosophical Review*, edited by A. G. Widgery and R. D. Ranade, April, 1920. Herein also he points out how the Upanishads differ from Kant. Not that Kant himself, according to Prof. Langley, is ultimately right, “for Kant regards that the Self in synthesising the given intuitions distorts the representations of the real object which give rise to them. On the other hand, Croce must be regarded as nearer the truth than Kant, when he says that the Self in synthesising is not distorting that which is given in experience, but is exercising only the essential function of spirit in revealing its true nature ” ( pp. 126-127 ). Finally, Dr. Barua in his *Pre-Buddhist Philosophy*, Calcutta, 1921, goes into a very detailed analysis of all the Thinkers of India before the days of Buddha, and naturally has to consider *in extenso* the teachings of Upanishadic philosophers like Uddālaka, Yājñavalkya, Pippalāda, and others. The great difficulty in the case of these Upanishadic Philosophers is, however, to clinch their personalities and doctrines, and if this could be successfully done, a volume on the “ Philosophers of the Upanishads ” could well be written on the lines followed by Dr. Burnet in his *Early Greek Philosophy*. Rudiments of such a possible work have been already indicated in the first chapter of the present volume.