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OF THE HINDI'S.
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are not wholly unknown to the literature of the people. The Indian mind, even amongst the least instructed, has a ready tendency to contemplative reflexion, and delights in subtle and metaphysical research. We need not be surprised, therefore, to find the great mysteries of the universe, some attention to which is forced upon the least civilized portions of the human race, favourite objects of inquiry amongst the Hindus from the earliest periods of their traditional history, or that they should from the first have expatiated freely in conjecture and hypothesis, how the universe came to be and whence, what is the nature of man, what his origin, and what his destination. What were at first conjectures only were soon transmuted into dogmas. These were next moulded into systems, and a variety of works have in all ages been composed by Hindu writers, in which it is attempted, with considerable profundity of thought and subtlety of reasoning, and with still more unhesitating positiveness, to solve all the most dark and difficult perplexities of our condition, but leaving them, as all the efforts of human wisdom unassisted by revelation have ever left them, still in darkness and perplexity.
The Hindus boast of six different schools or systems of metaphysical philosophy. They are called the Púrva Mímánsá, Uttara Mímánsá, or Vedanta, the Sánkhya, the Pátanjala, the Nyáyika, and the Vaišeshika: these, although some of them offer irreconcilable contradictions to essential doctrines of their religious belief, are recognised by the Brahmans as
