A Rational Refutation of the Hindu Philosophical Systems

A Rational Refutation of the Hindu Philosophical Systems (1862) is Nehemiah Goreh’s systematic examination of the six classical darshanas — Sankhya, Yoga, Nyaya, Vaisheshika, Mimamsa, and Vedanta. He wrote it first in Hindi as Shad-darshana-darpana (1860); Fitz-Edward Hall rendered it into English two years later. Goreh was a Chitpavan Brahmin of Benares, trained as a Sanskrit pandit, who had argued against Christianity before converting to it, and the book carries the weight of that reversal.

What sets it apart is that it works from the inside. Goreh argues from the primary Sanskrit texts, quotes the standard commentaries, and takes each system in its strongest form before objecting to it. The long third section on Vedanta — half the book — is the core: chapters on the three kinds of existence, the falseness of the world, and whether the soul can be identical with Brahma while remaining subject to ignorance. He pauses, too, to dismiss the then-fashionable comparison between Vedantic idealism and the philosophy of Berkeley.

The result is autobiographical in argument rather than in narrative. This is the reasoning that took apart Goreh’s own former position, set out at length — the fuller, more technical companion to his shorter and better-known Letter to the Brahmos.

Our public-domain edition of Fitz-Edward Hall’s 1862 English translation is mechanically cleaned from the original OCR and not yet fully proofread — its transliterated Sanskrit especially warrants care — and we present it in a clean, readable format with a free source linked as well.

This edition follows Fitzedward Hall’s English translation of Nehemiah Goreh’s Shad-darsana-darpana, published at Calcutta in 1862. Goreh wrote the book first in Hindi, for his own countrymen.

A THIRD OF THIS BOOK IS FOOTNOTES, and that is what kept it unpublished here until now. Goreh argues with the pandits in their own terms: he quotes the sutras, the standard commentaries, Sánkara and Vijnána Bhikshu and Aben — and every quotation is in a note at the foot of the page. A scanner reads a page from top to bottom, so those notes came off it welded into the middle of the sentences they hang from. The second chapter opened, in the scan, like this:

“their end is, to inculcate expedients for salvation, f therefore, the good and evil works of souls suffice, through merit and demerit, to account for the universe … See the Nyáya-sútra-vritti, pp 175-177 … Again, according to all of them alike, ignorance is the chief system the foremost matters are, the aim of the soul …”

which is three different things in one sentence.

HOW THEY WERE SEPARATED. A footnote is set in smaller type, so more characters fit on its line — and the scan keeps that, because it records what was actually on each printed line. Goreh’s two streams are plainly apart: his text sets at fifty-nine characters to the line and his notes at seventy-six. Every line of every page was measured, the notes were lifted out from the foot of each page, and the count came to 61,358 words of text and 37,561 of notes — which is, to the word, what went in. Nothing was discarded and nothing was rewritten.

WHERE THE NOTES ARE NOW. At the end of each of the three Sections, in the order they were printed. We would rather have set each one against the sentence it belongs to, and this edition’s tools can do that — but not here: Goreh’s note markers are single letters that the scan has mangled past recognition, and guessing which note belongs to which sentence is exactly the kind of invention this library does not do. Endnotes by section is what the evidence supports.

THE SANSKRIT DID NOT SURVIVE. Goreh quotes the sutras in Devanagari, and no scan of this book renders that script as anything but rubble — 113 words of it remain, in 32 places, all of them inside the notes. They are left as they are rather than silently deleted, so that a reader can see where a citation stood; the free scan linked from this book’s page has the page images, and the citations beside them are legible there.

What has otherwise been repaired is damage done by the scanner, not by Goreh or his translator. Running heads, page numbers and the digitizer’s watermark have been removed; words broken at a line ending have been rejoined. Hall’s transliteration of Sanskrit is his own and stands as he set it, including the forms no one uses now — Sánkhya, Vedánta, Naiyáyika, Vais’eshika.

Prepared by T.S. Baker Books, 2026.