ilosophy, whether it be laws or customs, primitive art or
primitive science, everywhere, you have to go to India, whether you
like it or not, because some of the most valuable and most instructive
materials in the history of man are treasured up in India, and in
India only.

And while thus trying to explain to those whose lot will soon be cast
in India the true position which that wonderful country holds or ought
to hold in universal history, I may perhaps be able at the same time
to appeal to the sympathies of other members of this University, by
showing them how imperfect our knowledge of universal history, our
insight into the development of the human intellect, must always
remain, if we narrow our horizon to the history of Greeks and Romans,
Saxons and Celts, with a dim background of Palestine, Egypt, and
Babylon,[12] and leave out of sight our nearest intellectual
relatives, the Aryans of India, the framers of the most wonderful
language, the Sanskrit, the fellow-workers in the construction of our
fundamental concepts, the fathers of the most natural of natural
religions, the makers of the most transparent of mythologies, the
inventors of the most subtle philosophy, and the givers of the most
elaborate laws.

There are many things which we think essential in a liberal education,
whole chapters of history which we teach in our schools and
universities, that cannot for one moment compare with the chapter
relating to India, if only properly understood and freely interpreted.

In our time, when the study of history threatens to become almost an
impossibility--such is the mass of details which historians collect in
archives and pour out before us in monographs--it seems to me more
than ever the duty of the true historian to find out the real
proportion of things, to arrange his materials according to the
strictest rules of artistic perspective, and to keep completely out of
sight all that may be rightly ignored by us in our own passage across
the historical stage of the world. It is this power of discovering
what is really important that distinguishes the true historian from
the mere chronicler, in whose eyes everything is important,
particularly if he has discovered it himself. I think it was Frederick
the Great who, when sighing for a true historian of his reign,
complained bitterly that those who wrote the history of Prussia never
forgot to describe the buttons on his uniform. And it is probably of
such historica