INTRODUCTION 28
in the heyday of its youth, as in the times of Plato and Aristotle, it leaned for support on some other study, as politics or ethics. It was theology for the Middle Ages, natural science for Bacon and Newton, history, politics and sociology for the nineteenth-century thinkers. In India philosophy stood on its own legs, and all other studies looked to it for inspiration and support. It is the master science guiding other sciences, without which they tend to become empty and foolish. The Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad speaks of Brahma-vidyā or the science of the eternal as the basis of all sciences, sarva-vidyā-pratiṣṭhā. “Philosophy,” says Kautilya, “is the lamp of all the sciences, the means of performing all the works, and the support of all the duties.”[1]
Since philosophy is a human effort to comprehend the problem of the universe, it is subject to the influences of race and culture. Each nation has its own characteristic mentality, its particular intellectual bent. In all the fleeting centuries of history, in all the vicissitudes through which India has passed, a certain marked identity is visible. It has held fast to certain psychological traits which constitute its special heritage, and they will be the characteristic marks of the Indian people so long as they are privileged to have a separate existence. Individuality means independence of growth. It is not necessarily unlikeness. There cannot be complete unlikeness, since man the world over is the same, especially so far as the aspects of spirit are concerned. The variations are traceable to distinctions in age, history and temperament. They add to the wealth of the world culture, since there is no royal road to philosophic development any more than to any other result worth having. Before we notice the characteristic features of Indian thought, a few words may be said about the influence of the West on Indian thought.
The question is frequently raised whether and to what extent Indian thought borrowed its ideas from foreign sources, such as Greece. Some of the views put forward by Indian thinkers resemble certain doctrines developed in ancient Greece, so much that anybody interested in discrediting this
- ↑ See I.A., 1918, p. 102. See also B.G., x. 32.
