A History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature, so far as it illustrates the Primitive Religion of the Brahmans c6.84

c6.84

The genius of the Greek nation owes its happy and healthy growth to liberty and national independence. The Homeric songs were addressed to a people, proud of his heroes, whether real or legendary. If Persia had crushed the chivalry of Greece, we should never have heard the names of Herodotus, Æschylus, Sophocles, Phidias, and Pericles. Where the feeling of nationality has been roused, the poet is proud to be listened to by his nation, and a nation is proud to listen to her poet. But in times of national degradation the genius of great men turns away from the realities of life, and finds its only consolation in the search after truth, in science and philosophy. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle arose when the Greek nation began to decline; and, under the heavy grasp first of Macedonian sway, then of Roman tyranny, the life of the Greek genius ebbed away, while its immortal productions lived on in the memory of other and freer nations. The Indian never knew the feeling of nationality, and his heart never trembled in the expectation of national applause. There were no heroes to inspire a poet,—no history to call forth a historian. The only sphere where the Indian mind found itself at liberty to act, to create, and to worship, was the sphere of religion and philosophy; and nowhere have religious and metaphysical ideas struck roots so deep in the mind of a nation as in India. The Hindus were a nation of philosophers. Their struggles were the struggles of thought; their past, the problem of creation; their future, the problem of existence. The present alone, which is the real and living solution of the problems of the past and the future, seems never to have attracted their thoughts or to have called out their energies. The shape which metaphysical ideas take amongst the different classes of society, and at different periods of civilisation, naturally varies from coarse superstition to sublime spiritualism. But, taken as a whole, history supplies no second instance where the inward life of the soul has so completely absorbed all the practical faculties of a whole people, and, in fact, almost destroyed those qualities by which a nation gains its place in history.