The Hindu Realism- Being an Introduction to The Meta-Physics of The Nyaya-Vaisheshika System of Philosophy

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In the following pages I have made an attempt to present the main metaphysical doctrines of two of the Hindu Schools of Philosophy, the Vaisheshika and the Nyaya, constituting what may be called Hindu Realism.

The attempt has been made after I have tried, during my residence at Cambridge, to understand and assimilate the European attitude in matters philosophical and the European mode of philosophic thinking.

I have not made any explicit comparison between the Realism, or any other phase, of European thinking and the Realism of the Hindus; but I have always kept the European ideas and attitude before my mind, so as to make this presentation of Hindu Realism intelligible to the Western reader. Although written as early as 1824, and with insufficient material before him, yet the Essay of Colebrooket on the Nyaya-Vaisheshika is still perhaps the best work on the subject in any European language. But excellent as the essay is, Colebrooke wrote it as a philologist more than a philosopher; and I doubt very much if a Western student of philosophy can at all get from it an intelligent idea of the Hindu system.

And if the earliest essay on the subject is not, nor was perhaps intended to be, a rational presentation of the Nyaya-Vaisheshika system, neither is the latest a reasoned statement of the case. For I am equally doubtful if, by reading Professor Max Muller's account of the system, a European student of philosophy can form an idea as to the reason or reasons why the Hindu Realists held, and do hold even now, the metaphysical doctrines which are taught in their system.

As for the translations of original Sanskrit works on the system, they can hardly be understood by anyone but those Orientalists themselves who are, or must be, already well acquainted with the Hindu mode of thinking and Hindu terminology.