regard to incongruous teaching.  Manu is no more Sankhyan than Vedantic.  Indeed in the main part of the work the teaching is clearly more Vedantic.  But it suffices here to point out that the [=a]tm[=a]-philosophy and religion is not ignored; it is taught as essential.  Nevertheless, it is not taught in such a way as to indicate that it is requisite for the vulgar.  On the contrary, it is only when one becomes an ascetic that he is told to devote himself to the pursuit of the knowledge of [=a]tm[=a].  In one passage there is evidence that two replies were given to this fundamental question in regard to works and knowledge.  For after enumerating a list of good acts, among which are knowledge and Vedic ceremonies, it is asked which among them most tends to deliverance.  The answer is vital.  Or it should be, but it is given in an ambiguous form (xii. 85-6):  “Amid all these acts the knowledge of self, [=a]tm[=a], is the highest, for it produces immortality.  Amid all these acts the one most productive of happiness, both after death and in this life, is the Vedic ceremony.”

Knowledge gives real immortality; rites give temporary bliss.  The Upanishads teach that the latter is lower than the former, but each answers the question.  There were two answers, and Manu gives both.  That is the secret of many discrepancies in Hindu rules.  The law-giver cannot admit absolutely and once for all that the Vedic ceremony is of no abiding use, as it can be of no use to one that accepts the higher teaching.  He keeps it as a training and allows only the ascetic to be a philosopher indeed.  But at the same time he gives as a sort of peroration to his treatise some ‘elegant extracts’ from philosophical works, which he believes theoretically, although practically he will not allow them to influence his ritualism.  He is a true Brahman priest.

It is this that is always so annoying in Brahmanic philosophy.  For the slavery of tradition is everywhere.  Not only does the ritualist, while admitting the force of the philosopher’s reasons, remain by Vedic tradition, and in consequence refuse to supplant ‘revelation’ with the higher wisdom and better religion, which he sees while he will not follow it; but even the philosopher must needs be ‘orthodox,’ and, since the scriptures themselves are self-contradictory, he is obliged to use his energies not in discovering truth, but in reconciling his ancestors’ dogmas, in order to the creation of a philosophical system which shall agree with everything that has been said in the Vedas and Upanishads.  When one sees what subtlety and logical acumen these philosophers possessed, he is moved to wonder what might have been the outcome had their minds been as free as those of more liberal Hellas.  But unfortunately they were bound to argue within limits, and were as much handicapped in the race of thought as were they that had to conform to the teachings of Rome.  For though India had no church, it had an inquisitorial priestly caste, and the unbeliever was an outcast.  What is said of custom is true of faith:  “Let one walk in the path of good men, the path in which his father walked, in which his grandfathers walked; walking in that path one does no wrong” (Manu iv. 178).  Real philosophy, unhampered by tradition, is found only among the heretics and in the sects of a later time.