The Sanchyá Philosophy would be more properly designated in our modern Philosophic phraseology as a system of complete Dualism, where two substances are represented as co-existent--on one hand, a self-existent energy of Nature, which emanated, or eternally emanates, from itself; and on the other hand, eternal truth, or the Supreme and Infinite Mind.
The Indian Philosophers in general were so inclined to regard the whole outward world of sense as the product of illusion, as a vain and idle apparition, that we can well imagine they were unable to reconcile the creation of such a world (which appeared to them a world of darkness, or perhaps, on a somewhat higher scale, as an intermediate state of illusion) with their mystical notion of the infinite perfection of the Supreme Being and Eternal Spirit. For even in ethics, they were wont to place the idea of Supreme Perfection in a state of absolute repose, but not (at least to an equal degree) in the state of active energy or exertion. Great as the error of such a system of dualism may be--there is yet a mighty difference between a philosophy which denies, or at least misconceives, the Creation, and one which denies the existence of the Deity; for such atheism never occurred to the minds of those philosophers. The doctrine of a primary self-existing energy in Nature, or of the eternity of the Universe, may in a practical point of view, appear as gross an error; but in philosophy we must make accurate distinctions, and forbear to place this ancient dualism on the same level with that coarse materialism--that destructive and atheistic Atomical philosophy, or any other doctrines professed by the later sects of a dialectic Rationalism.
Valuable, undoubtedly, as are such extracts and communications from the originals in a branch of human science still so little known, yet they will not alone suffice, and, without a certain philosophic flexibility of talent in the enquirer, they will fail to afford him a proper insight into the true nature, the real spirit and tendency of those ancient systems of philosophy. That the Indian philosophy, even when it has started from the most opposite principles, and when its circuitous or devious course has branched more or less widely from the common path, is sure to wind round, and fall into the one general track--the uniform term of all Indian philosophy--is well exemplified by the second part of the Sanchyá system (called the Yoga philosophy), where we find a totally different principle proclaimed; and while it utterly abandons the primary doctrine of a self-existent principle in Nature laid down in the first part of the philosophy, it unfolds those maxims of Indian mysticism which recur in every department of Hindoo literature. That total absorption in the one thought of the Deity, that entire abstraction from all the impressions and notions of sense--that suspension of all outward, and in part even of inward, life effected by the energy of a will tenaciously fixed and entirely concentrated on a single point; and by which, according to the belief of the Indians, miraculous power and supernatural knowledge are attained,--are held up in the second part of the Sanchyá system as the highest term of all mental exertion. The word Yoga signifies the complete union of all our thoughts and faculties with God--by which alone the soul can be freed--that is, delivered from the unhappy lot of transmigration; and this, and this only, forms the object of all Indian philosophy.