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224
THE PRACTICAL PATH.
one, men are apt to feel mystified, and must be excused if errors are committed by them. The Upanishads tried to remove this mystic and misty uncertainty from their religion, and went a long way in breaking up the dark dungeons of ignorance and superstition ; but the torch of intellectualism which they lighted seems to have burnt only ‘in a fitful manner. They are not even altogether free from mystic symbology, and the light which they shed neither penetrates into all the dark corners of their faith nor is always to be distinguished from shade. The six famous schools of philosophy, which followed the Upanishad period, exhaust themselves in refuting one another, and give different and contradictory explanations of the world, the only point of agreement among them being the infallibility of the Vedas as revealed truth. Shut out from a wider field of research, and with their horizon narrowed down by the supposed revelation of a mystic scripture, they failed to appreciate even the true philosophical standpoint, and became entangled in the meshes of a system of one-sided absolutism wbich lies in wait for the unwary. The result is that,
* Only a very little reflection would show that these systems of philosophy are neither happily conceived, nor characterised by a scientific or philosophical precision. They even miss the philosophical standpoint at the very commencement, and in most cases display complete ignorance of the kinds or sources of pramana (valid knowledge). Their enumeration of the tattvas is also unscientific and misleading.
To begin with the philosophical standpoint, even learned Hindus feel constrained to confess that none of their six daršunas is philosophically sound. The following passage which occurs in the preface to the ninth volume of the Sacred Books of the Hindus may be taken to be a fair expression of the Hindu mind :
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