Page:History of India Vol 1.djvu/331

Rh of the world, creator and nature, framer and frame, doer and deed. At the consummation of all things, all are resolved into Him. The Supreme Being is one, sole existent, secondless, entire, without parts, sempiternal, infinite, ineffable, invariable, ruler of all, universal soul, truth, wisdom, intelligence, happiness."

Such are the six systems of philosophy which were developed in India in the Philosophic Period; such are the answers which Hindu philosophers have given to the questions which were started in the Upanishads, to questions which rise in the mind of every reflective man, but which it is not given to him to answer completely—What is God, and what is man?

Summed up as a whole, this rationalistic period of philosophy and laws was rich in results of which every Hindu may be proud. Besides producing the first recorded systems of mental philosophy and logic, and codifying a body of civil and criminal law, it developed the infant sciences of geometry and grammar. The administration of government was perfected in the latter part of this period and the whole of Northern India was brought under a single great ruler. And, lastly, it was in this period that the great reformer Gautama Buddha proclaimed that religion of equality and brotherhood of man which is at the present day the living faith of one-third of the human race. To the story of that great revolution we now turn.