spoken of everywhere as a
being whose degradation can never be removed, and to touch whom is to
be defiled. Those who belonged to no caste were in a still worse
plight and lived in the greatest misery.

4. Philosophy.--We have seen how both in the ritual system they
administered and in the ideal they formed of the highest good, the
Brahmans were led forward from the old ground of the Vedic
nature-worship to a more inward and subjective religious attitude.
The exaltation of Brahma, the power of prayer, to be the supreme god,
was an advance from an external deity to a deity both external and
present in man's own experience; and the appearance of a new way of
salvation, though only permitted at first to the world-weary ascetic,
in which inner contemplation and absorption could lead to the highest
consummation of life, also showed that a new form of religion was at
hand. In the philosophy of the Brahmanic period, the transition is
made from the service of gods external to man, by the mechanism of
rites, to the acknowledgment of a divine being with whom man feels
himself to be inwardly akin and to whom he draws near by his own
spiritual effort. In this movement, to which we learn that members of
the lay aristocracy and even women of intellectual distinction made
important contributions, and which may have appeared in its
beginnings as a sceptical revolt against their own system, the
Brahmans yet took part, and the works in which the record of it is
contained became a part of revelation. The "Upanishads" or
"communicated doctrines," form the third branch of the sacred
knowledge, and much of this literature belongs to the period before
Buddhism. These books are read still by the educated Hindu as part of
scripture, and the philosophy of them is a part of his religion. We
can only point out the principal terms and notions of that
philosophy.

Seeking to escape from the confusion of many gods the Indian mind is
looking out even from the Vedic period for some means to conceive of
them all as one. In the earliest period each reigned in turn as the
supreme; a god is supreme not because he is essentially the greatest
of the gods, but because circumstances have brought him to the front.
This is Henotheism. Then we have attempts to sum them all up in one
expression. Prajapati, lord of creatures, Visvakarman, maker of all
things, represent such attempts. Then we have as the supreme, Brahma,
the power of prayer,[2] a being of a diffe