The real aim of all Indian schools and systems of Philosophy, whether atheistic or theistic, is to teach the means whereby eternal happiness can be attained before, as well as after, death. The Vedas say, “What has to be known is the Soul; it must be distinguished from nature, and hence it will never come again.” That means that it is exempt from metempsychosis and likewise from bodily form, so that it does not after death make its appearance in another body. This blessed condition therefore is, according to the Sanc’hya, a perfect and eternal release from every kind of ill. It reads:—“Through Thought, the true Science, this freedom can be accomplished; the temporal and worldly means of procuring enjoyment and keeping off spiritual or bodily evil are insufficient; even the methods advocated by the Vedas are not effectual for the purpose, and these are found in the revealed form of worship, or in the performance of religious ceremonies as directed in the Vedas.” The offering up of animals is specially valuable as such a means; and in this regard the Sanc’hya rejects the Vedas; such an offering is not pure, because it is connected with the death of animals, and the main tenet in the former is not to injure any animal. Other methods of deliverance from evil are in the excessive acts of penance performed by the Indians, to which a retreat within themselves is added. Now when the Indian thus internally collects himself, and retreats within his own thoughts, the moment of such pure concentration is called Brahma, the one and the clearly supersensuous state, which the understanding calls the highest possible existence. When this is so with me, then am I Brahma. Such a retreat into Thought takes place in the Religion as well as in the Philosophy of the Indians, and they assert with reference to this state of bliss that it is what is highest of all, and that even the gods do not attain to it. Indra, for example, the god of the visible heavens, is much lower than the soul in this life of internal contemplation; many thousand Indras have passed away, but the soul is exempt from every change. The Sanc’hya only differs from Religion in that it has a complete system of thought or logic, and that the abstraction is not made a reduction to what is empty, but is raised up into the significance of a determinate thought. This science is stated to subsist in the correct knowledge of the principles—which may be outwardly perceptible or not—of the material and of the immaterial world. The Sanc’hya system separates itself into three parts: the method of knowledge, the object of knowledge, and the determinate form of the knowledge of principles.