In the
Br[=a]hmanas man subdues the gods, and fears God. In the Upanishads
man ignores the gods, and becomes God.[1]

Such in a word is the theosophic relations between the three periods
represented by the first Vedic Collection, the ritualistic
Br[=a]hmanas, and the philosophical treatises called Upanishads. Yet
if one took these three strata of thought to be quite independent of
each other he would go amiss. Rather is it true that the Br[=a]hmanas
logically continue what the hymns begin; that the Upanishads logically
carry on the thought of the Br[=a]hmanas. And more, for in the oldest
Upanishads are traits that connect this class of writings (if they
were written) directly, and even closely with the Vedic hymns
themselves; so that one may safely assume that the time of the first
Upanishads is not much posterior to that of the latest additions made
to the Vedic collections, though this indicates only that these
additions were composed at a much later period than is generally
supposed.[2] In India no literary period subsides with the rise of its
eventually 'succeeding' period. All the works overlap. Parts of the
Br[=a]hmanas succeed, sometimes with the addition of whole books,
their proper literary successors, the Upanishads. Vedic hymns are
composed in the Brahmanic period.[3] The prose S[=u]tras, which, in
general, are earlier, sometimes post-date metrical C[=a]stra-rules.
Thus it is highly probable that, whereas the Upanishads began before
the time of Buddha, the Catapatha Br[=a]hmana (if not others of this
class) continued to within two or three centuries of our era; that the
legal S[=u]tras were, therefore, contemporary with part of the
Br[=a]hmanic period;[4] and that, in short, the end of the Vedic
period is so knit with the beginning of the Br[=a]hmanic, while the
Br[=a]hmanic period is so knit with the rise of the Upanishads,
S[=u]tras, epics, and Buddhism, that one cannot say of any one: 'this
is later,' 'this is earlier'; but each must be taken only for a phase
of indefinitely dated thought, exhibited on certain lines. It must
also be remembered that by the same class of works a wide geographical
area may be represented; by the Br[=a]hmanas, west and east; by the
S[=u]tras, north and south; by the Vedic poems, northwest and east to
Benares (AV.); by the epics, all India, centred about the holy middle
land near Delhi.

The meaning of Upanishad as used in the compositions themselves, is
either, as it is us