If ever there was such an eclectic school, have these scholars paused to enquire who their modern representatives are?, Or is it that there are no such representatives to-day? The real fact is that this was the only true Philosophic creed of the majority of the people, and this philosophy has subsisted untarnished during the last 3000 years or more. During the Upanishat period, the schools whose existence could be distinctly marked are the Lokayata or Nastika, Kapila's Sankhya, Mimamsa of Jaimini, Nyaya and Vaiseshika and Yoga. The first three were Atheistical and the latter Theistic. And of course all these were professed Hindus*, and none would have deviated from the rituals and practices prescribed for the Hindu, though academically speaking, he would have held to this or that view of philosophy. And this inconsistency is what strikes a foreigner even now in the character of the modern Hindu. Mrs. Besant aptly describes this as "the Hindu's principle of rigidity of conduct and freedom of thought". All these schools were based on a certain number of tattvas or categories. The Nastika postulated four and only four tattvas, namely, earth, air, fire and water and would not even believe in Akas or ether.

Kapila increased the number of categories he believed in, to 19 which he grouped under Purusha and Pradhdna. The Mlmamsaka believed practically in nothing more, though he laid stress on the authority and eternality of the Vedas. The next three theistic schools believed in 24 or 25 tattvas which they grouped under Purusha, Pradhdna, and Isvara or God. As all these schools based their theoretical philosophy on a certain number of tattvas, † Sankhya, the theoretic Philosophy, came to be called Sankhya as distinguished from the practical Religion and code of Morality. And during the Upanishat period and even in the time of the Mahabharata, the word had not lost its general significance. And it will be noticed when ascertaining what these various categories are, that, with the exception of the Nastika, all the other five schools believed in almost the same things, though the enumerations were various, except as regards the postulating of God. And even in this idea of God, there was practically very little difference between Kapila and Patanjali. To both of them, the freed Purusha was equal to Isvara, only Kapila believed that no Isvara was necessary, for the origination and sustenance, etc., of the worlds; but according to Patanjali, there existed an eternally freed Being who created these worlds and resolved them again into their original components.

And in the Upanishat period, the Yoga school was the dominant cult and these Upanishats including the Svetasvatara and Kaivalya etc, were all books of the yoga school. And the theoretical or argumentative part of the philosophy or creed was called by the name of Sankhya and the practical part, Yoga. As this yoga postulated the highest end achieved by a study of the Vedas, which were set forth m these Upanishats, it was also coming slowly to be called Vedanta. That the word Upanishat was actually used as a synonym for yoga, we have an example in Chandog, (i-i-io). "The sacrifice which a man performs with knowledge, faith, and the Upanishat is more powerful." Knowledge' or.jnan here meant the knowledge of the categories and their relation, which according to Kapila was alone sufficient to bring about man's freedom. This, the Vedanta held to be insufficient, unless it was accompanied by earnestness and love and by the contemplation of a Supreme Being. This contemplation brought the thinker nearer and nearer to the object of his thoughts, till all distinctions of object and subject were thoroughly merged (distinction of I and Mine) and the union or one-ness was reached and all bhanda or pasa vanished.

This is the root-idea in both words 'Upanishat' and 'Yoga.' Yoga means union, union of two things held apart and brought together, when the bonds or fetters which separated fell off or perished. And Upanishat is also derived from Upa near, ni quite, sat to perish. Here also the nearing of two things, and the perishing of something is clearly meant. Of course, the two things brought together are the Soul and God, and the perishable thing is certainly the Pasa; and the Soul when bound by Pasa is called Pasu accordingly

* Monier Williams was the first to point this out.

* The Majority of every people and nation are virtually atheistic and materialistic, though professing a belief in God and conforming to the usages of society.

† Tirumular, a Tamil Saint of about the first century A. C. thus distinguishes the schools existing in his time. "The 96 tattvas or categories are common to all. 36 categories are special to the Saivas. 28 are the categories of the Vedanti, 24 categories belong to Vaishnavas. 26 categories are those of the Mayavadi." The particular thing to be noted here is the distinction drawn between Vedanti and Mayavadi.

This was the condition of the Philosophic thought down to the days of the Mahabharat, and we hold this was anterior to the rise of Buddhism and continued for some centuries after Gautama Buddha and till the time of Badarayana. It was during this time that the philosophy of India spread into and permeated the thought of Europe, and Professor Garbe has lucidly proved in his short History of "The Philosophy of Ancient India," that the influence received by the Greeks down to the neo-Platonic school was almost Sankhyan in its character. It was during this time again, that the blending of the Aryan and Tamilian in art and civilization and Philosophy took place (and we could not here consider how much was common to both, and how much each gained from the other). We have an exactly parallel word in Tamil to the word 'Sankhya' and this word is en) which means both 'number' and 'to think', and both Anvaiyar and Tiruvalluvar use the words to mean logic and tnataphysics: the primary science, on which all thought was„built, being mathematics or the science of number. A systematic and historical study of the Tamil works will make good our position; and even to-day the most dominant cult in. the Tamil is the Sankhya and Yoga as represented in the Upanishats or Vedanta. This system must have been thoroughly establishad in the Tamil language and literature before the time of Chirist and before Badarayana's composition of the Sariraka Sutras. So much so, when Badarayana's system came into vogue in Southern India, it was recognized as a distinct school. As Badarayana professed expressly to interpret the Upanishat or Vedanta texts, his school of