I have thus tried, so far as it was possible in one course of lectures, to give you some idea of ancient India, of its ancient literature, and, more particularly, of its ancient religion. My object was, not merely to place names and facts before you, these you can find in many published books, but, if possible, to make you see and feel the general human interests that are involved in that ancient chapter of the history of the human race. I wished that the Veda and its religion and philosophy should not only seem to you curious or strange, but that you should feel that there was in them something that concerns ourselves, something of our own intellectual growth, some recollections, as it were, of our own childhood, or at least of the childhood of our own race. I feel convinced that, placed as we are here in this life, we have lessons to learn from the Veda, quite as important as the lessons we learn at school from Homer and Virgil, and lessons from the Vedânta quite as instructive as the systems of Plato or Spinoza.
I do not mean to say that everybody who wishes to know how the human race came to be what it is, how language came to be what it is, how religion came to be what it is, how manners, customs, laws, and forms of government came to be what they are, how we ourselves came to be what we are, must learn Sanskrit, and must study Vedic Sanskrit. But I do believe that not to know what a study of Sanskrit, and particularly a study of the Veda, has already done for illuminating the darkest passages in the history of the human mind, of that mind on which we ourselves are feeding and living, is a misfortune, or, at all events, a loss, just as I should count it a loss to have passed through life without knowing something, however little, of the geological formation of the earth, or of the sun, and the moon, and the stars—and of the thought, or the will, or the law, that govern their movements.
FOOTNOTES:
[260] On the early use of letters for public inscriptions, see Hayman, Journal of Philology, 1879, pp. 141, 142, 150; Hicks, "Manual of Greek Historical Inscriptions," pp. 1 seqq.
[261] Herod, (v. 59) says: "I saw Phenician letters on certain tripods in a temple of the Ismenian Apollo at Thebes in Bœotia, the most of them like the Ionian letters."
[262] Munch, "Die Nordisch Germanischen Völker," p. 240.
[263] Herod. (v. 58) says: "The Ionians from of old call βὑβλος διφθἑραι, because once, in default of the former, they used to employ the latter. And even down to my own time, many of the barbarians write on such diphtheræ."
[264] Hekatæos and Kadmos of Miletos (520 b.c.), Charon of Lampsakos (504 b.c.), Xanthos the Lydian (463 b.c.), Pherekydes of Leros (480 b.c.), Hellanikos of Mitylene (450 b.c.), etc.
[265] Lewis, "Astronomy," p. 92.