Page:The Religion of the Veda.djvu/72

 The Religion of the Veda present themselves, one after another, and one be- side another, there is manifested one and the same true being. Therefore the Upanishads are in his eyes the fruit of the profoundest insight that the world has ever seen; almost superhuman thought, whose authors can scarcely be imagined to have been mere men. Schopenhauer unquestionably caught with lynx- like perspicacity, through the murky medium of the Oupnekhat, the spirit of the Upanishads, which are now before us in many editions of their Sanskrit originals. It is what is known in philosophy as monism the most uncompromising, perfervid monism that the world has ever seen. Nor is his estimate of the religious or philosophical quality of the Upanishads to be brushed aside lightly. Pro- fessor Deussen, one of the profoundest living students of Hindu philosophy, himself a trained philosopher, does not fall far behind Schopen- hauer when he says that the thought of the Upanishads has not its equal in India nor per- haps anywhere else in the world; that to these thinkers came, if not the most scientific, yet the most intimate and immediate insight into the ultimate mystery of being. This is not far behind Schopenhauer's estimate; both estimates reflect pretty nearly the position of the Hindus 56 1