need or as a handmaid to amplify and elucidate its preachings. Philosophers have stood as a class by themselves. Their systems of thought have been recognized as the results of concentrated thinking on the problems of existence, or as the findings of human reason. Philosophy has from its earliest days been regarded in Greece as a secular attempt of the human mind to solve the riddles of life. India, on the other hand, has classed all such thinkers as one group of seers, sages, or prophets and held the utterance of every thinker as inspired. The unknown Vedic seer who sings of the water as the germ of life in the hymn of creation is giving expression to revealed truth, whereas Thales of Miletus, who declares water as the first principle, speaks in terms of cosmogonic philosophy. Kapila's great Sankhya system of numbers is enshrined for all time as divinely vouchsafed. When his Greek contemporary, Pythagoras, preaches that number is the first principle of the world, he passes as a lay thinker grafting his metaphysics on numbers.
With the advent of the great thinkers who weave their metaphysical speculations into creative systems of philosophy, higher religion in India tends to be philosophical religion, and metaphysical speculation becomes religious philosophy. The philosophical religion thus propounded by the great thinkers is embodied in the Upanishads. These Upanishads are appendices to Brahmanas and represent the essence of higher Brahmanism. They set aside the Vedic gods. The supreme God of the Brahmanic period was Prajapati or Brahma, a personal god like the various gods of the Vedic pantheon. The Upanishads replace this father-god by the impersonal world-soul. They teach the principle of divine immanence. Personality implies the existence of another, as an 'I' to a 'thee.' It is limitation. According to the thinkers, nothing exists outside of Brahma; all is Brahma. They teach idealistic monism. Brahma is the only reality, all else is illusion. The individual self is a mere reflex of the Self or Brahma. It is identical with the universal Self. It is due to ignorance and illusion that this fundamental truth is not recognized. It is knowledge that leads the individual to discover for himself that the outward Brahma and his inner self are one and the same. Man had always extolled God and humiliated himself. God was infinite when man was finite. God was all powerful, man was a weakling. God was king and man was his subject.
