All this is expounded in the Upanishads, the special scriptures of philosophical Brahmanism.[98] Though translated by Professor Max Müller, and lucidly interpreted by Professor Gough, readers of ordinary philosophical culture find them very hard to understand, and in spite of the high commendation of them by Rammohun Roy and Schopenhauer, they will be inclined to question whether these “beginnings of thought,” “conceptions hardly formed,” though essential to a proper knowledge of Indian philosophy, “should be ranked among the outstanding productions of the human mind.”[99] Throughout their long and most tedious verbiage, however, one dominant idea is ever discoverable—that the chief end of the wise man is to know, not the forms of things, but the great self of all things, and seek his deliverance not by practice of religion but by pursuit of Gnosis.[100] Religion would indeed secure rewards, but they would only be transient; religion might regulate and modify the course of migration, but only Gnosis could break its adamantine chain. “The vision of Atman is the only deliverance, for by it all ties are loosened”; “the vision of the self is the light of the world, to which only the purest minds attain.” To reach it not only the bonds of desire must be broken, but of ignorance too. “For Atman is highly exalted above all reverence and effort, above holiness and unholiness.” “It, the uncreated, is beyond all good and evil,” and upon rewards and punishments, upon both good and evil, the sage must turn his back, for he alone who knows the Universal is free, from Karman and from Kâma (action and desire) which hold captive the self in the net of the impermanent.[101]