o knowledge himself whatever of
those incalculable ages that lie between the Aryan Brahman in Central
Asia, and the Brahman at the threshold of Buddhism, he has no right to
maintain that the initiated Indo-Aryan can never know as much of them
as the foreigner. Those periods being an utter blank to him, he is
little qualified to declare that the Aryan, having had no political
history "of his own...." his only sphere was "religion and
philosophy.... in solitude and contemplation." A happy thought
suggested, no doubt, by the active life, incessant wars, triumphs, and
defeats portrayed in the oldest songs of the Rik-Veda. Nor can he with
the smallest show of logic affirm that "India had no place in the
political history of the world," or that "there are no synchronisms
between the history of the Brahmans and that of other nations before the
date of the origin of Buddhism in India;" for he knows no more of the
prehistoric history of those "other nations" than of that of the
Brahman. All his inferences, conjectures and systematic arrangements of
hypotheses begin very little earlier than 200 "B.C.," if even so much,
on anything like really historical grounds. He has to prove all this
before he can command our attention. Otherwise, however "irrefragable
the evidence of language," the presence of Sanskrit roots in all the
European languages will be insufficient to prove, either that (a) before
the Aryan invaders descended toward the seven rivers they had never left
their northern regions; or (b) why the "eldest brother, the Hindu,"
should have been "the last to leave the central home of the Aryan
family." To the philologist such a supposition may seem "quite
natural." Yet the Brahman is no less justified in his ever-growing
suspicion that there may be at the bottom some occult reason for such a
programme. That in the interest of his theory the Orientalist was
forced to make "the eldest brother" tarry so suspiciously long on the
Oxus, or wherever "the youngest" may have placed him in his "nascent
state" after the latter "saw his brothers all depart towards the setting
sun." We find reasons to believe that the chief motive for alleging
such a procrastination is the necessity to bring the race closer to the
Christian era. To show the "brother" inactive and unconcerned, "with
nothing but himself to ponder on," lest his antiquity and "fables of
empty idolatry," and perhaps his traditions of other people's doings,
should i