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Rh which we are now speaking, earnest and thoughtful Hindus had ventured to go beyond the rituals of the Brahmana literature, and had inquired into the mysteries of the soul and its Creator. The composers of the Upanishads had conceived the bold idea that all animate and inanimate nature proceeded from one universal deity, and were portions of one pervading soul. Inquiries were made into the mysteries of death and the future world, conjectures were made about the transmigration of souls, and doctrines were started containing in a crude form the salient principles of later Hindu philosophy.

Few, however, could devote their lives to these speculations and the abstruse philosophy which they involved. The mass of the Aryan householders—Brahmans, Kshatriyas, and Vaisyas—contented themselves with performing the rites, unintelligible to them, which the Brahmanas had laid down and the Sutras had condensed.

For the Sudras, who had come under the domination of the Aryan religion, there was no religious instruction, no religious observance, no social respect. Despised and degraded in the very community in which they were forced to live, they sighed for a change, and as they increased in number, pursued various useful industries, owned lands and villages, and gained in influence and power, they became more and more conscious of the unbearable conditions to which they were condemned.

To an earnest and inquisitive mind, to a