and practical needs. The ideal of knowledge for its own sake is rarely
to be found. Knowledge is desired merely as a means towards salvation.
Philosophy and science, said Aristotle, have their roots in
wonder,--the desire to know and understand for the sole sake of
knowing and understanding. But the roots of Indian thought lie in the
anxiety of the individual to escape from the ills and calamities of
existence. This is not the scientific, but the practical spirit. It
gives birth to religions, but not to philosophies. Of course it is a
mistake to imagine that philosophy and religion are totally separate
and have no community. They are in fact fundamentally akin. But they
are also distinct. Perhaps the truest view is that they are identical
in substance, but different in form. The substance of both is the
absolute reality and the relation of all things, including men, to
that reality. But whereas philosophy presents this subject-matter
scientifically, in {15} the form of pure thought, religion gives it in
the form of sensuous pictures, myths, images, and symbols.

And this gives us the second reason why Indian thought is more
properly classed as religious than philosophical. It seldom or never
rises from sensuous to pure thought. It is poetical rather than
scientific. It is content with symbols and metaphors in place of
rational explanations, and all this is a mark of the religious, rather
than the philosophical, presentation of the truth. For example, the
main thought of the Upanishads is that the entire universe is derived
from a single, changeless, eternal, infinite, being, called Brahman or
Paramatman. When we come to the crucial question how the universe
arises out of this being, we find such passages as this:--"As the
colours in the flame or the red-hot iron proceed therefrom a
thousand-fold, so do all beings proceed from the Unchangeable, and
return again to it." Or again, "As the web issues from the spider, as
little sparks proceed from fire, so from the one soul proceed all
living animals, all worlds, all the gods and all beings." There are
thousands of such passages in the Upanishads. But obviously these
neither explain nor attempt to explain anything. They are nothing but
hollow metaphors. They are poetic rather than scientific. They may
satisfy the imagination and the religious feelings, but not the
rational understanding. Or when again Krishna, in the Bhagavat-Gita,
describes himself as the moon among the lun