Note 42 — Chapter III · PROGRESS UNDER ANCIENT RELIGIONS

But in the later form of the Vedânta, “the end of the Veda,” a monistic and pantheistic teaching holds its ground in our own day, after all the ups and downs of Brahmanism, alongside of the aboriginal cults which Brahmanism adopted in its battle with Buddhism; alongside, too, of the worship of the Veda itself as an eternal and miraculous document. “The leading tenets [of the Vedânta] are known to some extent in every village.”42 Yet the Vedântists, again, treat the Upanishads in turn as a miraculous and inspired system,43 and repeat in their case the process of the Vedas: so sure is the law of fixation in religious thought, while the habit of worship subsists.