ons
presuppose the hymns, and, to judge from the utter inability of the
authors of the Brahmanas to understand the antiquated language of the
hymns, these Brahmanas must be ascribed to a much later period than that
which gave birth to the hymns."

If we would criticise the documents for Indian mythology in a scientific
manner, it is now necessary that we should try to discover, as far as
possible, the social and religious condition of the people among whom
the Vedas took shape. Were they in any sense "primitive," or were
they civilised? Was their religion in its obscure beginnings or was it
already a special and peculiar development, the fruit of many ages of
thought? Now it is an unfortunate thing that scholars have constantly,
and as it were involuntarily, drifted into the error of regarding
the Vedas as if they were "primitive," as if they exhibited to us the
"germs" and "genesis" of religion and mythology, as if they contained
the simple though strange utterances of PRIMITIVE thought.(1) Thus Mr.
Whitney declares, in his Oriental and Linguistic Studies, "that the
Vedas exhibit to us the very earliest germs of the Hindu culture". Mr.
Max Muller avers that "no country can be compared to India as
offering opportunities for a real study of the genesis and growth of
religion".(2) Yet the same scholar observes that "even the earliest
specimens of Vedic poetry belong to the modern history of the race, and
that the early period of the historical growth of religion had passed
away before the Rishis (bards) could have worshipped their Devas
or bright beings with sacred hymns and invocations". Though this is
manifestly true, the sacred hymns and invocations of the Rishis are
constantly used as testimony bearing on the beginning of the historical
growth of religion. Nay, more; these remains of "the modern history of
the race" are supposed to exhibit mythology in the process of making, as
if the race had possessed no mythology before it reached a comparatively
modern period, the Vedic age. In the same spirit, Dr. Muir, the learned
editor of Sanskrit Texts, speaks in one place as if the Vedic hymns
"illustrated the natural workings of the human mind in the period of
its infancy".(3) A brief examination of the social and political and
religious condition of man, as described by the poets of the Vedas,
will prove that his infancy had long been left behind him when the first
Vedic hymns were chanted.

(1) Ibid., Rig-Veda Sanhi