Philosophy of the Upanishads and Ancient Indian Metaphysics

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.”

Archibald Edward Gough