And a closer investigation of the contents of the Upanishads amply confirms this preliminary impression.  If we avail ourselves, for instance, of M. Paul Regnaud’s Materiaux pour servir a l’Histoire de la Philosophie de l’Inde, in which the philosophical lucubrations of the different Upanishads are arranged systematically according to topics, we can see with ease how, together with a certain uniformity of general leading conceptions, there runs throughout divergence in details, and very often not unimportant details.  A look, for instance, at the collection of passages relative to the origination of the world from the primitive being, suffices to show that the task of demonstrating that whatever the Upanishads teach on that point can be made to fit into a homogeneous system is an altogether hopeless one.  The accounts there given of the creation belong, beyond all doubt to different stages of philosophic and theological development or else to different sections of priestly society.  None but an Indian commentator would, I suppose, be inclined and sufficiently courageous to attempt the proof that, for instance, the legend of the atman purushavidha, the Self in the shape of a person which is as large as man and woman together, and then splits itself into two halves from which cows, horses, asses, goats, &c. are produced in succession (B/ri/.  Up.  I, 1, 4), can be reconciled with the account given of the creation in the Chandogya Upanishad, where it is said that in the beginning there existed nothing but the sat, ’that which is,’ and that feeling a desire of being many it emitted out of itself ether, and then all the other elements in due succession.  The former is a primitive cosmogonic myth, which in its details shows striking analogies with the cosmogonic myths of other nations; the latter account is fairly developed Vedanta (although not Vedanta implying the Maya doctrine).  We may admit that both accounts show a certain fundamental similarity in so far as they derive the manifold world from one original being; but to go beyond this and to maintain, as Sa@nkara does, that the atman purushavidha of the B/ri/hadara/n/yaka is the so-called Virag of the latter Vedanta—­implying thereby that that section consciously aims at describing only the activity of one special form of I/s/vara, and not simply the whole process of creation—­is the ingenious shift of an orthodox commentator in difficulties, but nothing more.

How all those more or less conflicting texts came to be preserved and handed down to posterity, is not difficult to understand.  As mentioned above, each of the great sections of Brahminical priesthood had its own sacred texts, and again in each of those sections there existed more ancient texts which it was impossible to discard when deeper and more advanced speculations began in their turn to be embodied in literary compositions, which in the course of time likewise came to be looked upon as sacred.  When the creative period had reached its termination, and