Excerpt from Hindu Religions: An Account of the Various Religious Sects of India
The Hindu religion is a term, that has been hitherto employed in a collective sense, to designate a faith and worship of an almost endlessly diversified description: to trace some of its varieties is the object of the present enquiry.
An early division of the Hindu system, and one conformable to the genius of all Polytheism, separated the practical and popular belief, from the speculative or philosophical doctrines. Whilst the common people addressed their hopes and fears to stocks and stones, and multiplied by their credulity and superstition the grotesque objects of their veneration, some few, of deeper thought and wider contemplation, plunged into the mysteries of man and nature, and endeavoured assiduously, if not successfully, to obtain just notions of the cause, the character and consequence of existence. This distinction prevails even in the Vedas, which have their Karma Kanda and Jnyana Kanda, or Ritual and Theology.
The worship of the populace being addressed to different divinities, the followers of the several gods, naturally separated into different associations, and the adorers of Brahma", Vishnu, and Siva, or other phantoms of their faith, became distinct and insulated bodies, in the general aggregate: the conflict of opinion on subjects, on which human reason has never yet agreed, led to similar differences in the philosophical class, and resolved itself into the several Dersanas, or schools of philosophy.
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