Until the Orientalist has proved
all this, he can be accorded but small justification for assuming that
air of authority and supreme contempt which is found in almost every
work upon India and its Past. Having no knowledge himself whatever of
those incalculable ages that lie between the Aryan Brahman in Central
Asia, and the Brahman at the threshold of Buddhism, he has no right to
maintain that the initiated Indo-Aryan can never know as much of them
as the foreigner. Those periods being an utter blank to him, he is
little qualified to declare that the Aryan, having had no political
history "of his own...." his only sphere was "religion and
philosophy.... in solitude and contemplation." A happy thought
suggested, no doubt, by the active life, incessant wars, triumphs, and
defeats portrayed in the oldest songs of the Rik-Veda. Nor can he with
the smallest show of logic affirm that "India had no place in the
political history of the world," or that "there are no synchronisms
between the history of the Brahmans and that of other nations before the
date of the origin of Buddhism in India;" for he knows no more of the
prehistoric history of those "other nations" than of that of the
Brahman.
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