The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c26.12

v1.c26.12

It is not a mere accident that the books produced by a people who dwelt so far away from India should to-day contribute to our knowledge of ancient India. In the Greek republics a new quality was appearing in the world—or rather the development of a certain factor in the human mind to an activity and power not seen before—the quality which we may describe as Rationalism. That is what makes the essential continuity between the ancient Mediterranean civilisation and the civilisation which has developed so wonderfully in Europe during the last five centuries. A characteristic of this rationalism is a lively curiosity as to the facts of the Universe, an interest which directs itself upon the endless variety of the world, in contrast with that movement of the spirit, exemplified in the sages of India and in the piety of medieval Europe, which seeks to flee from the Many to the One. To be interested in a fact as such, to care so much about its precise individual character, as to examine and verify and try to get its real contours, to value hypothesis only so far as it can be substantiated by reference to objective truth—these are the motives behind modern Western Science; and a disinterested intellectual curiosity in the facts of the outside world has actually helped to give the West a power to modify and control that world for practical uses never before possessed by man. It was the beginning of this interest in the facts of the world, the desire to see things as they really were, which marked ancient Greek culture, as expressed in its writings and its art. The universal curiosity of Herodotus in the fifth century B.C., the eager eyes of the men of science and of action who accompanied Alexander, the industrious enquiries of Megasthenes—it is to these that we owe such information about India as the Greek and Latin books contain.