A Constructive Survey of Upanishadic Philosophy c2.10.2

c2.10.2

With the advance of knowledge and with the innumerable means for communication and interchange of thought, the whole world is being made one, and the body of Western philosophers could ill afford to neglect the systems of Indian philosophy, and more particularly the Upanishads. The same problems which at the present day divide a Bradley from a Bosanquet, a Ward from a Royce, a Pringle-Pattison from a McTaggart, also divided the Upanishadic philosophers of ancient times. Here we have the same conflict of views about the relation between the Absolute and the Individual, the nature of Immortality, the problem of Appearance, and the Norm of human conduct. The *élan vital*, which, in Bergson, wears not much more than a physiological aspect, appears in Āruṇi (Chh. VI. 11) as a great organic force, only much more psychologised and spiritualised. The pyramidal depiction of Reality as on the basis of Space and Time with the qualitative emergence of Life and Mind and Deity in the course of evolution, which we meet with in Alexander and Lloyd Morgan, is present in those old Upanishads only with a stress on the inverted process of Deity as the primary existent, from which came forth Mind and Life and Space and Time in the course of devolution.