cts of nature and the changing
conditions of society, about duty and pleasure, philosophy and
morality--articulate voices reaching us from a distance from which we
never heard before the faintest whisper; and instead of thrilling with
delight at this almost miraculous discovery, some critics stand aloof
and can do nothing but find fault, because these songs do not
represent to us primitive men exactly as they think they ought to have
been; not like Papuas or Bushmen, with arboraceous habits and
half-animal clicks, not as worshipping stocks or stones, or believing
in fetiches, as according to Comte's inner consciousness they ought to
have done, but rather, I must confess, as beings whom we can
understand, with whom to a certain extent we can sympathize, and to
whom, in the historical progress of the human intellect, we may assign
a place not very far behind the ancient Jews and Greeks.

Once more then, if we mean by primitive, people who inhabited this
earth as soon as the vanishing of the glacial period made this earth
inhabitable, the Vedic poets were certainly not primitive. If we mean
by primitive, people who were without a knowledge of fire, who used
unpolished flints, and ate raw flesh, the Vedic poets were not
primitive. If we mean by primitive, people who did not cultivate the
soil, had no fixed abodes, no kings, no sacrifices, no laws, again, I
say, the Vedic poets were not primitive. But if we mean by primitive
the people who have been the first of the Aryan race to leave behind
literary relics of their existence on earth, then I say the Vedic
poets are primitive, the Vedic language is primitive, the Vedic
religion is primitive, and, taken as a whole, more primitive than
anything else that we are ever likely to recover in the whole history
of our race.

When all these objections had failed, a last trump was played. The
ancient Vedic poetry was said to be, if not of foreign origin, at
least very much infected by foreign, and more particularly by Semitic
influences. It had always been urged by Sanskrit scholars as one of
the chief attractions of Vedic literature that it not only allowed us
an insight into a very early phase of religious thought, but that the
Vedic religion was the only one the development of which took place
without any extraneous influences, and could be watched through a
longer series of centuries than any other religion. Now with regard to
the first point, we know how perplexing it is in the