The Philosophy of the Upanishads and Ancient Indian MetaphysicsPainos 1

First Published in 2000. This is volume IX of 10 in the Oriental Series based on India and its language and literature and is concerned with a collection of the philosophy of the Upanishads and the ancient Indian metaphysics. Those interested in the general history of philosophy will find in this book an account of a very early attempt, on the part of thinkers of a rude age and race, to form a cosmological theory. The real movement of philosophic thought begins, it is true, not in India, but in Ionia; but some degree of interest may still be expected to attach to the procedure of the ancient Indian cosmologists. The Upanishads are so many “ songs before sunrise,”— spontaneous effusions of awakening reflection, half poetical, half metaphysical, that precede the conscious and methodical labour of the long succession of thinkers to construct a thoroughly intelligible conception of the sum of things. For the general reader, then, these pages may supply in detail, and in the terms of the Sanskrit texts themselves, a treatment of the topics slightly sketched in the third chapter of Archer Butler's1 ’first series of “ Lectures on the History of Ancient Philosophy.”