HINDU PHILOSOPHY..
MIS dissertation is a slightly modified reprint of an Essay to which was accorded a moiety of a prize of 300/. offered by a member of the Bengal Civil Service. The prize was offered for the best statement and refutation in English of the fundamental errors of the Vedanta, Nyaya, and Sankhya philosophies, ac- companied by a demonstration of these cardinal principles of Christian Theism. 1. The real and distinct existence of God, and the creation by Him of all other spirits and of matter, in op- position to the Vedanta. 2. "The non-eternity of separate souls and their creation by God, in opposition to the Nyaya and Sankhya." 3. The creation of matter in opposition to the tenet of its eternity in the shape of atoms as maintained in the Nyaya School, or as a kind of ideal nature or nature naturans, if we rightly apprehend, which is the doctrine of the Sankhya. 4. The moral character and government of God, and the real and eternal difference between moral good and evil, in opposition to the antagonizing dogmas in the above systems. These systems, three in number, may be considered as the essential and representative divisions of the six actual ramifications of the Hindu Philosophy. These three systems Dr. Ballantyne tells us cliffer more in ap- pearance than reality. They have a common ground of agree- ment, and thus each is "viewed with a certain amount of favour by Orthodox Hindas." They all implicitly accept the Vedas, but they explain them differently. They are all alike the enemies of the Infidel Buddhist, who denies the Vedas, their canonical scrip- tures, "though his notion of the chief end of man differs in no respect from that of the others ; " just as the Catholic, the Anglican, and the Dissenter, all acknowledge the authority of the Old and New Testament writings, and unite in condemnation of the Bible-rejecting Theist, though he believe with them in the same universal Father, the same law of love and duty_ on earth, the same heaven of happiness and holiness beyond. This Oriental reproduction of the religious status of the West is at once curious and. instructive. Still more so, perhaps, is the evidence of the mental relationship of mankind, afforded by the intellectual correspondences, in the philosophical developments of Europe and. Asia. Through the variety of race and diversity of time and. position, we discern the uniformities of human thought, tracing everywhere the "workings of one mind, the features of the same face.
Philosophy has for its object the interpretation of Nature, the explanation of the universe. The earlier philosophies are all theological or metaphysical. The Hindu is specially so. Its three systems differ mainly in their severally regarding the universe from different points of view ; as it stands related either to sensation, emotion, or intellection. The Nyaya system confines itself to sensation. It refers the influx of knowledge to five different channels, "the five senses; for which it imagines five
• Christianity contrasted with Hindu Philosophy; An BOW in tivs. books Sanskrit and English, &c. By James IL Batista ne, LL.D., Professor of Moral Philosophy and Principal of the Government Gel age at Bermes. Published by James Madden.
different externals,—the five elements," the aggregate of what the Nyaya regards as the causes of affliction." The word Nyaya
means propriety. It is at once a Method and a Logic. It proposes
the knowledge of the truth as the chief end of man, and under- takes to show him the proper method of arriving at that know- ledge, and the fit mode of setting forth an argument. This " Propriety " system was delivered by Gautama, and is summed up in his so-called Five Lectures, the first of which contains sixty aphorisms. The initial aphorism declares that supreme happiness is the consequence of the knowledge of the truth. With the knowledge of the truth false notions depart ; interest in external objects ceases ; action terminates ; posthumous retribution be-
comes unnecessary ; the "regeneration" or revival to reward or punishment is no longer requisite ; capacity for pain is impossible ; and "the absence of pain" is the Nyaya conception of the sum- mum bonum. This philosophy further informs us what are the instruments of right knowledge, specifying the senses, the recogni- tion of signs, the recognition of likeness, and speech or testimony. The objects of right knowledge are numerous. We shall only mention soul, &iffy, mind, activity, and transmigration. The soul is a distinct entity from the mind, which is an atom. Not so the seal, as Ritter erroneously supposes. It is the "all-pervading, the knower," the thinking principle, employing the mind, or the faculty of limited attention, as its organ or inlet "to only one thought at a time." " Activity " originates vocal utterance, intellectual cognition, and corporeal movement. It is the cause of birth, which is the cause of pain, to annihilate which is to achieve beatitude. Our faults are classed under the heads of Affection, Aversion, and Stolidity, which, issuing in action, are the occasion of Retribution, the infliction of which in some state of mundane existence, postpones the great end of entire emancipation. The immediate obstacle to this end is transmigration, or more correctly, post mortem renascence. Thus birth, which is succeeded by death, is followed by birth again, till the final emancipation or absolute deliverance from pain be achieved. Such is a brief summary of the Nyaya or Propriety philosophy. The second system is called the Sankhya, or Discriminative phi- losophy, as promising beatitude to those who rightly discriminate between soul and nature. It was delivered by Kapila in an aphoristic form. It too teaches that the chief end of man is the cessation from pain. The soul, a pure and free intelligence, is in bondage. This bondage in which the soul groans is due to its conjunction with nature. It is, however, an illusory or imagi- nary bondage, "like the redness of pellucid crystal when a China rose is near it," or "like Don Quixote hanging in the dark from the ledge of a supposed enormous precipice, and bound to hold on for his life till daybreak," while all the time the ground is within six inches of his feet, only he doesn't know it. Nature in this system is defined as a sort of balance of the powers,—goodness, passion, and darkness. From nature proceeds intellect ; from in- tellect self-consciousness ; from self-consciousness the five subtile elements, &e. ; from the subtile elements the gross elements. From self-consciousness also proceed the two sets of organs, external and internal, and besides these there is the soul. Experience of pleasure and pain terminates with the execution of that mental process by which the soul is contradistinguished from nature. Souls alone are regarded as substances ; the phenomena of the external world being catalogued as qualities, pleasing, displeasing, or in- different. Hence the discriminative philosophy might also be termed the emotional. It is a slight simplification of the Nyaya, from which it differs, in repudiating the dogma of Annihilation. A further degree of simplification is attained by the Vedanta sys- tem, or that of Intellection. It proclaims that nothing really exists but One ; this one real being is absolutely simple ; this one simple being is knowledge. Soul is the one reality, "not as a substance as in the Nyaya, but as the thing, or literally that which abides." This soul is God. He willed to make the world out of nothing. The world is really an evolution of himself. There is no room for limited intelligences, for God is omniscient ; there- fore there are no limited intelligences. There is but one intelli- gence. True it is that the individual soul does not spontaneously recognize itself as God. But this very fact is the solution of the difficulty. The soul would know itself for God, if it were not for its ignorance of the fact. Attributing something like individual distinctness to this ignorance, the Vedanta declares that Ignorance makes the world, and designates it "energy." And this energy is the power of God ; for we admit only the self-existence of God. But the world would not even appear to be real were it not for ignorance. Its apparent reality, then, is illusion or mayo. Fi- nally, this Maya, with a capital 31, becomes a person, a goddess, a wife—the wife of Brahma the Creator ! Ignorance consists of three qualities,—happiness, pain, indifference. Their aggregate is the opposite of soul, or not-soul ; and as the soul takes the name of knowledge, so it takes the name of not-knowledge. It has two powers, that by which it envelopes the soul and gives rise to the conceit of personality, and that by which it projects the phantasmagoria of a world which seems external to the individual himself. The destruction of evil is effected by the recognition of the identity of the Me with the One, the elimination of self as the object of thought, and the exclusive existence of the subject alone, as a being, a thought, a joy, and as these three are only one, "the existent joy-thought."
Such is a brief sketch of the Hindu philosophy which the Christian missionary has to encounter. We are reminded as we read of the spiritual pantheism of St. Paul ; of the pervading sentiment of the modern religioniet that "the world is all a fleeting show for man's delusion given ; " of the doctrine of Berkeley, Hume, Fichte, Spinoza, Hegel. We recall the line of Shelley—" The one remains, the many change and pass ; " we think of Hegel and his "world spirit, who has at last suc- ceeded in freeing himself from all encumbrances, and is able to conceive himself as Absolute Intelligence ; " and we remember the magnificent sarcasm of Heine, when he "was young and proud, and it pleased his vain glory to learn from Hegel that the true God was not as my grandmother believed, the God who lives in Heaven, but myself here upon Earth." The second part of Dr. Ballantyne's book is written in English and Sanskrit. It institutes a comparison between Christianity and Hindu philosophhy. He meets and endeavours to answer the reasonings in the three systems, on philosophical grounds ; he assumes the soundness of the teleogical argument ; he adduces the testimony of the first Christian martyrs, and asserts the reality of the Christian miracles. Of the mysterious dogmas of the religion which be vindicates he attempts no explanation, alleging that mystery is not distinctive of Christianity, and falling back on the new popularized canon of contradictory opposites. He concludes the second part of his Essay with a discourse on the Analogy of Religion to the Constitution and Course of Na- ture; convinced with Origen that the believer in Revelation will expect to find in it difficulties similar to those which he finds in the order of Creation ; an edifying reflection to one who has already embraced Christianity, but which seems unavailing and irrelevant to a Hindu or any other unbeliever. The appendix to this volume contains various notes on the Hindu metaphysical terminology, and suggests a method of reproducing the scientific nomenclature of Europe in the languages of India, to the exclusion of the present "Billy Ruffian" system, which perverts hydriodate of potash into haiclraiyat af patass, on the principle of the "British sailor who held that the word hat was naturally significant, and that the Spaniards were fools for calling it a sombrero. Why can't they call it a hat, when they must know it is one ?" In a separate section Dr. Ballantyne vindicates the Hindoo Logic against the attacks of Sir William Hamilton, affirming that the five-membered exposition to which his scornful remark alludes is not the Hindi' syllogism at all, but the Hindu rhetorical exposition. He shows how the Hindoos have the analy- tical syllogism of Epicurus, the synthetic syllogism of Aristotle, and an expression for the Hamiltonian syllogism "in thought," in its organic unity. The author of various educational works on the Hindustani, Sanskrit, and other Eastern languages, Dr. Ballantyne has pro- duced a book which will be intelligible to the general reader of cultivated mind, and particularly valuable to the untutored mis- sionary among the learned Hindoos. He may learn from itspages the intellectual opposition which awaits him from these " subtile- souled pyschologists; " he may estimate the formidable character of that opposition from the presentment of their metaphysic, their logic, and their rhetoric, afforded by our author, and hesitate to go unweaponed and unshielded, into the strife of mind with mind. If we rightly understand Dr. Ballantyne, it is with the educated that the battle must be fought. "When those who are educated shall come to be won over, the uneducated masses will follow. The baptism of Clovis entails that of armies and of crowds."
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