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300 OUTLINES OF INDIAN PHILOSOPHY quite secondary. This important change should have been brought about by a desire on the part of the later exponents of the Mimāṁsā to bring it into line with the other systems of thought and not allow it to remain a mere liturgical discussion bearing upon rites which probably had by that time become more or less defunct. The change has not taken place in the Kalpa-sūtras, if we leave out the few references to self-realization (ätma-lābha) in them'; but it is clearly seen in Upavarşa and Sabarasvāmin, early commentators on the Sūtra of Jaimini, and is very common in their successors. The darśana aspect of it is, therefore, comparatively late. The speculative spirit underlying it is not new to the Veda as a whole, for it is found in the Upanişads and in the allegorical interpretations of rites sometimes given in the Brāhmaṇas themselves. But the special type of philosophic theory which it now represents follows quite other lines. It is not derived from the philosophy of the Mantras, neither does it continue Upanişadic speculation. It is traceable to sources other than the Veda and is therefore neither a religion of nature nor a philosophy of the Absolute. Some of its minor tenets may be allied to what is found in the philosophic portions of the Veda; but, strange as it may seem, the larger part of them and the more important among them have, as we shall see, been borrowed from the Nyāya-Vaišeşika. The spirit of the Brāhmaṇas was to supersede the simple nature-worship of the Mantras; the spirit of the fully developed Mimāṁsā is to supersede ritualism as taught in the Brahmanas and later systematized in the Srouta-sūtras. But the supersession in neither stage is complete, so that the Mimāṁsā as now known is an admixture of the rational and the dogmatic, the natural and the supernatural and the orthodox and the heterodox. It is with the darśana aspect of the system that we shall deal here and not with its ritualistic theories or its exegetical principles.
The main source of authority in regard to this system is Jaimini's Mimāṁsā-sūtra. Its date, as in the case of the other philosophical Sutras, is quite indefinite; but it is commonly believed now to have been the earliest of them all and assigned
See Note I on p. 93.
