abstraction or super-subtle materialization preponderates most. The advantages which Skepticism or negation are enabled to derive from idealism will frequently be shown in the course of our researches. That a race of thinkers like the Hindus, who are almost equally adepts at idealizing the real and realizing the ideal, to whom neither matter nor spirit, when required for purposes of intellection or philosophical systematization, presents any difficulties, possesses peculiar qualifications for negative speculation, must therefore be obvious. Accordingly negation carried to its utmost limits may be called the main characteristic of Hindu thought. Whatever presents itself as a subject or object of thought is ipso facto regarded as an object of non-thought or at least non-affirmation. But with all its negative propensities Hindu speculation is based upon a few rudimentary dogmas common to all its schools of thought, and these are of so rare and peculiar a character as to be almost restricted to Hindu thinkers. Thus all alike maintain that existence is an evil from which humanity has to seek deliverance. That the world and its deities perish and renew themselves in recurrent cycles. That the human soul undergoes metempsychosis from which the wise will endeavour to obtain emancipation by means of gradual self-extinction. That the present existence of every man is affected by the good or ill he may have done in prior states, and his future will be similarly determined by his actions in the present life. That the highest knowledge makes all religious rites and sacrificial observances quite needless. These propositions comprehend what may be called the national creed of the Hindus. They comprise a standpoint of human thought and effort partly theological, partly philosophical, partly positive, partly negative, to which no other system of thought, ancient or modern, bears resemblance. But upon this general soil of ultimate national conviction we find a luxuriant outgrowth of many various systems, differing widely from each other in origin, method, and object, and resembling each other only in the negative tendencies common more or less to all. Of these I have selected for our purpose the principal systems known as the Sankhya, the Nyaya, the Vedanta, and the Buddha. In all of them we shall discover, in varying proportions, sometimes Skeptical, sometimes negative thought; but all bearing some impress of peculiarity on account both of their dogmatic source and their manner of evolution.

I.

'The ancient Hindus,' says Max Müller, were a nation of philosophers such as could nowhere have existed except in India.'1 1 Chips from a German Workshop, vol. i. p. 66.

But philosophy in India, as in Greece and in every other country where it has existed, received its first impulse from Skepticism. Its advent seems marked by the insurrection of Kapila-the traditional founder of the Sankhya philosophy-against the Brahmanic dogmatism and sacerdotalism previously existing. This event, itself the precursor of a yet broader and fuller system of mental freedom, i.e. Buddhism, probably happened about 600 B.C., and was therefore nearly contemporaneous with the first awakening of Hellenic philosophy in the school of Elea. The main tendency of Kapila's thought was the assertion of a devout and mystic rationalism (the word Sankhya means ratiocination or deliberation), as against the doctrine and ritual of the Brahmans. It announced perfection by knowledge as opposed to perfection by sacrificial acts. As the latter were based upon the Veda, Kapila must to a certain extent have declared war against the ancient scriptures of the Hindus; indeed, he pronounces the sacred writings to be incapable of assuring to men liberation and final beatitude. From the same standpoint of reason, he protested against the personified powers of nature by means of which vulgar minds assigned a direct volitional purpose to all its phenomena. Instead of these divinities of the Indian Olympus, Kapila imagined an unconscious, non-willing principle of nature, not unlike in character and attributes to the forces or laws which modern science has substituted for the divine volition of theologians. In other words, Kapila was a materialist, though not in the gross sense we attach to that designation. The Primordial matter which he regarded as the cause of the universe was a certain rarified essence of matter, possibly not unlike the materia prima of the schoolmen, or the nebulous matrix out of which was evolved, according to some astronomers, the existing planetary systems. It should, however, be added that Kapila did not formally deny volition to this ultimate and semi-material first cause; he rather refused to predicate it. He seems to have adopted, in short, the suspensive attitude of a Greek Skeptic in relation to it. This, however, did not save him from the imputation of atheism any more than a similar Skeptical caution, with regard to the gods of Greece, saved Sokrates from being indicted as an atheist. But Kapila's greatest service to Hindu thought was his vindication of the human conscience and reason. The chief object of his teachings was to concentrate all truth, and the blessedness which comes of possessing truth, in the personal consciousness of the inquirer. This was the Skeptical leaven which trans formed the whole subsequent course of Hindu speculation. As a

rationalist, Kapila was a despiser of all mere dogma, except so far as it might be authenticated by the investigation and deliberate conviction of the individual thinker. He has accordingly been compared to Sokrates and Descartes, and there can be little doubt that he resembles in many respects those great defenders of intellectual freedom. Like Sokrates, he substituted inquiry for authoritative teaching, and studiously ignored the deities of his country. Like Descartes, he directed men's attention to consciousness as the only reliable basis of truth. He has also affinities with other and more modern Free-thinkers in his opposition to Brahmanic dogma and the exclusive authority of the Veda, for in his classification of methods of certitude, he gave the highest place to reason and the lowest to revelation, i.e. it is to be presumed, in the sense of unverified dogma. He thus broke the chains of Brahmanic tyranny and sacerdotalism in the only way in which chains of a similar kind can be broken.

But Kapila is thoroughly Hindu in his conception of the aims of philosophy and truth-quest. What Sokrates set before him as a disinterested search after truth unalloyed by any calculations of pleasure or pain, profit or loss, being utterly indifferent to what fate might have in store for him, Kapila and his school conceived as a method of deliverance from pain. The first aphorism of the Sankhya Karika begins thus:

1

The inquiry is into the means of precluding the three sorts of pain, for pain is embarrassment.' 1 This human evil he subdivides into three classes-1. Internal or personal. 2. What springs from external sources (Human). 3. What has a superhuman origin. The general cause of these evils is the alliance of soul with matter, and its remedy consists in the liberation of the soul from material shackles which can only be accomplished by the perfection of knowledge. In the complete scheme or conspectus of his system he divides existence, together with the human faculties related to it, into twentyfive categories, starting from the principle of nature and descending by successive stages of transcendentalism, like the divisions in some of the Gnostic systems, until he arrives at the grosser forms of terrene elements. His twenty-fifth category consists of the individual soul as the single subject in which all these objective elements inhere. His summary of these categories, which we need not follow, bear a very remarkable resemblance to the teaching of Scotus Erigena.2 More noteworthy for our purpose is Kapila's

Colebrooke's Essays, vol. i. p. 272.

2 Colebrooke ut supra, i. p. 256. Comp. J. Scoti Erigenæ de Div. Nat.

elaborate account of the hindrances to human knowledge. These he seems to have investigated far more profoundly, or at least with much greater amplitude of classification, than did Pyrrhôn or Sextos Empeirikos. In contrast to the 10 tropoi of Greek Skeptics, Kapila assigns five primary obstructions to the true working of the human faculties-(1) obscurity or error; (2) illusion or conceit; (3) extreme illusion or passion; (4) gloom or hatred; (5) utter darkness or fear; but these he afterwards subdivides into no less than sixty-two different kinds. Making allowance for the fanciful character and numerical extravagance which attaches to all Hindu classification, we must admit that his conception of the difficulties besetting the path of the truth-seeker is based upon a larger view of the complicated structure of the human mind, and the diverse agencies by which it is acted upon, than we find in the case of any other freethinker. And the fact of such a minute exploration of all conceivable sources of error must be accepted as a proof of the Skeptical animus of the Hindu Sokrates. I have already noted Kapila's Skeptical attitude with respect to the being of a God, and his similarity in this particular to Sokrates, but the resemblance between the Hellenic and the Hindu stage of speculation is further marked by the high moral purity of the Sankhya philosophy, and by the fact that there is a second or theological phase of the Sankhya of which the founder was Patanjali, just as the Sokratic dialectic was succeeded by the idealism and theosophy of Plato and his successors. The extreme negation of the Sankhya is expressed in the sixty-fourth aphorism of the Sankhya Karika as follows: 'So through study of principles the conclusive incontrovertible one only knowledge is attained, that neither I am, nor is aught mine, nor do I exist.' 2 This at first sight would seem to be an affirmation of the complete extinction of the individual soul such as we have in the Nyaya philosophy and in the Nirvana of the Buddhists, but in reality it is an affirmation of the unbodied soul's supreme existence. The Sankhya indeed expressly repudiates the charge of craving annihilation. In the forty-seventh aphorism we are told that 'in neither way, whether as a means or as an end, is this, viz.

lib. v., and see chapter on the Semi-Skepticism of the Schoolmen,' vol. ii. Evening ix.

1 Colebrooke, i. p. 265. Comp. Thompson, Bhagavad-Gita, p. xlii. Other writers, as, e.g. Dr. R. Williams, Christianity and Hinduism, p. 279, make the religious successor of Kapila to be Sakya Muni, the founder of Buddhism.

2 Colebrooke, i. p. 287.

annihilation, the soul's aim. The final beatitude of the soul, according to this philosophy, consists in the discrimination of itself from nature (or matter). No doubt practically the separation of the individual soul from all terrestrial and corporeal association, from all functions and means of knowledge, is an idea almost as metaphysically abstruse and negative as its total annihilation; yet, theoretically, there is a wide difference between self-discrimination and self-extinction. In the former case the condition is conceived as intellectual rather than mystical, an active instead of a passive state. The soul in the Sankhya only gains knowledge by being invested with the 'subtle person'-a kind of half spiritual individuality, consisting apparently of disposition, temperament, &c. before being clothed upon' with a gross material body. It is in this state that the soul is properly the Ego, and while thus situated she stands in the same relation to her various agencies and modes of acquiring knowledge as the mechanic does to his tools. Nevertheless the state itself is an imprisonment, and her final deliverance is effected by discarding the senses, perceptions, reason, and other material agencies by which she has been informed and rendered capable of liberation. Without stopping to point out the pregnant nature of this principle, or the manifold forms it has received both within and without Christianity, we can perceive its negative tendency. The pathway to Sankhya perfection is that of Skepticism. Ordinary sources of knowledge are distrusted. The conclusions of the senses, the convictions of the reason, are, as far as possible, discarded. The sole mark of truth left is an accidental, unregulated, unverifiable intuition, for the Sankhya perfection, like the Buddhist Nirvana, may be attained in this life. Nature or matter having contributed its quota to the liberation of the soul, disappears. The Ego, the man with his terrene investitures, his faculties and personality, is no more. Nothing is left but the soul in the full enjoyment of her eternal self-discrimination and self-contemplation.3

Nor is it unimportant to note that the Sankhya, in common with other Hindu schemes of thought, has discovered means of attaining a goal of negation, besides a Skeptical analysis or vivisection of the opposing position. Instead of confining human energy to a piecemeal abstraction from methods of knowledge of one mode after the other-first, e.g. taking away the senses, then the reasoning powers, &c.-it has found a shorter course by insisting on a direct contemplation of the ultimate object sought. The

3

Ballantyne, Christianity contrasted with Hindu Philosophy, Intro. p. xxx.

2 Sankhya Karika, Aph. lvii. Colebrooke, Essays, i. p. 278.

Sankhya Karika, Aph. lxvii. Colebrooke, i. p. 279. Comp. also Aph. lxviii.