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and combat, or as a market for cheating and huckstering, but as a resting place, a mere waiting room at a station on a journey leading them from the known to the unknown, but exciting for that very reason their utmost curiosity as to whence they came and whither they were going. So in those palmy days of India a large class of people, not only the priestly class but the nobility also, not only men but women also, never looked upon their life on earth as something real. What was real to them was the invisible, the life to come. What formed the theme of their conversations, what formed the subject of their meditations was the real that alone lent some kind of reality to this unreal phenomenal world. Whoever was supposed to have caught a new ray of truth was visited by young and old, was honoured by princes and kings, nay, was looked upon as holding a position far above that of kings and princes.
I told you last Sunday that out of these rays of truth based on the Vedic literature of the Hindus six systems of philosophy arose. The first was the Nyāya system. The followers of that philosophy hoped by cultivating the instruments of knowledge --Perception, Inference, Analogy, Testimony to reach final beatitude by right inquiry. They generalized from the phenomena of life to an extra cosmic deity of superhuman powers commanding our homage and worship. The inanimate universe, including the soul and mind of man, they left to itself and believed it to be the result of an act of divine creation. The Vaišeşikas accepted the
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