While in this manner one constructive system superseded the other, the formal side of knowledge did not remain without a keen and penetrating examination. The objects and means of knowledge were tested; men occupied themselves with fixing the categories of the idea, of doubt, of contradiction, of fallacies, of false generalisation, and conversion; and at last inquiries were made into the syllogism and the members of it, and more especially into the categories of cause and effect. Researches of this kind quickly grew into a system, the Nyaya or logic, which chiefly used the results of the theory of knowledge to establish the authority of the Veda, and overthrow the arguments brought against the revelation of it.[383] In themselves, at any rate in the late form in which we have them, the logical researches of the Indians are scarcely behind the similar works of modern times in the acuteness and subtilty of their categories.
In the period between the years 800 and 600 B.C. the valley of the Ganges must have been filled with the stir of intellectual life. No doubt the times were long past when the ancient hymns of the Veda were sung at the place of sacrifice, when the poems of victory and the heroic deeds of men—the Epos in its original form—were recited at the courts of princes or the banquets of the military nobility—the Kshatriyas. The contest of the Brahmans and the Kshatriyas was also over; the Brahmans had not only gained currency for their teaching in the sphere of religion and the state, but had already developed it to its consequences. They put before the princes and the people the canon of correct life, of purity, of sins and penalties, of punishments beyond the grave and regenerations, and held up the true law to the state. They revised the Epos from their point of view; they established the ritual, they justified every declaration and every ordinance in it from the Veda, the sacred history; they explained the words and the sense of the Veda; they went beyond the opposition of schools and authorities to independent examination of the idea of Brahman, of the causes and connection of the world, and to speculative philosophy. They have so far succeeded that no nation has devoted its interest and power to religion to the same degree as the Indians. The longer they lingered in the magic world of gods and spirits, into which they were plunged by the sacrifices, legends, and doctrines of the Brahmans, the more familiar they became with these dreams, the more passive must they have grown to the actual and prosaic connection of things, the more indifferent to the processes going on in the world of reality. Hence in the end the Indians knew more of the world of the gods than of the things of the earth; they lived in the next world rather than in this. The world of fancy became their fatherland, and heaven was their home. The more immutable the limits of the castes, the heavier the taxation of the state, the greater the caprice of the officers, the less the space left for the will or act of the individual, the more uniform the life,—the more did the people become accustomed to seek their fears and hopes in the kingdom of fancies and dreams, in the world to come. Excluded from action in the state, the Indians turned the more eagerly to the questions of worship and dogma; for that was the only sphere in which movement found nothing to check it, and the separation of the people into a number of tribes, the mutual exclusiveness of the castes and local communities limited the common feeling of the nation on the Ganges to the faith which they all acknowledged.
FOOTNOTES:
[345] Lassen, "Ind. Alterth." 2, 80.
[346] M. Müller, "Hist. Anc. Skt. Lit." p. 469 ff.
[347] "Rigveda," 1, 162, according to M. Müller's translation, loc. cit. p. 553 ff.
[348] "Çatapatha-Brahmana," 13, 3, 1, 1, in M. Müller, loc. cit. p. 37 ff.
[349] "Ramayana," ed. Schlegel, 1, 11 ff. A. Weber, "Vorles." s. 1262.
[350] "Vishnu-Purana," ed. Wilson, p. 470, 471. Lassen, "Ind. Alterth." 22, 319, 346, 963, 1001.
[351] M. Müller has placed the period of the origin of the Brahmanas in the period from 800 to 600 B.C.—very successfully, so far as I can see. The collection of the Atharvan will belong to the end of this period, but not merely on the internal ground of the increase in the ceremonial brought about with and through the Brahmanas. The book of the law consistently cites the triple Veda; the sutras of the Buddhists and the Epos as consistently cite four. That the magic formulas of Atharvan and Angiras are quoted in Manu 11, 33, and not those of the Atharvaveda, seems also to prove that the latter collection was not made when the citations were written. Cp. A. Weber, "Vorl." s. 1652.