a mere living organism, for the actually living organism was one
with that part of it which had already passed away and that which was
still awaiting rebirth. It is undoubtedly in the often dignified and
beautiful relations which bind the Hindu family together that Hinduism
is seen at its best, and Hindu literature delights in describing and
exalting them.

Traditional usages, or Smriti, were ultimately embodied in codes of law,
of which the most famous is that of Manu; and though disfigured by many
social servitudes repugnant to the Western mind, they represent a lofty
standard of morality based upon a conception of duty, or Dharma,
narrowly circumscribed, but solid and practical. Though these codes of
law, and notably that of Manu in the form in which we possess them, are
of uncertain but probably much later date, they afford us, in
conjunction with the vast body of earlier religious and philosophic
literature, and with a certain amount of scientific literature dealing
with astronomy and astrology, with mathematics and specially with
geometry, and with grammar and prosody, sufficient materials for
appraising, with a fair measure of accuracy, the stage of progress which
the Aryan Hindus had reached in the sixth century B.C. When the world
was young, and they revelled in their recent conquest of a fair portion
in it, they delighted to worship the bright gods who had helped them to
possess it, and worship and war were the ties that kept their loose
tribal organisation together. Out of the primitive conditions of nomadic
and pastoral life, under the leadership of tribal elders who were both
priests and warriors, they gradually passed, after many vicissitudes of
peace and war, into more settled forms of agricultural life and
developed into distinct and separate polities of varying vitality, but
still united by the bond of common religious and social institutions in
the face of the indigenous populations whom they drove before them, or
reduced into subjection and slowly assimilated as they moved down
towards and into the Gangetic plain. As the conditions of life grew more
complex, with increasing prosperity and probably longer intervals of
peace, differentiation between classes and professions grew more marked.
There was time and leisure for thinking as well as for fighting, for
contemplation as well as for action. The "bright" gods that Nature had
conceived for the early Aryans were fashioned and refashioned by
speculation