Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts c10.11

c10.11

There seems reason to conjecture that the sciences took their rise in India, and were carried there to a high degree of perfection before they were transplanted in other countries: This transplantation might be more or less partial according to the inclination or abilities of those that came into India for instruction; and by the intermixture of these with their own different tenets, we may perhaps account for that confused jumble of truth and fiction that we meet with in what are called the placits of the philosophers. If the Indians knew the theory of comets and had reduced them to calculation, the Chaldeans from thence might have easily learnt that comets were only planets moving in very eccentric orbits, without being able either to calculate their places or to find their distance. To tell us that Pythagoras had the same idea, is only an additional confirmation; we know that he went to India to be instructed; but the capacity of the learner determines his degree of proficiency, and if Pythagoras on his return had so little knowledge in geometry as to consider the forty-seventh of Euclid as a great discovery, he certainly was entirely incapable of acquiring the Indian method of calculation, through his deficiency of preparatory knowledge; and therefore could only get such general notions and principles of things as he was capable of understanding; as the system of the universe, the idea of comets, the plurality of worlds and the doctrine of transmigration: this also accounts for the contradictory opinions of ancient authors concerning the invention of the sciences, and whether the Chaldeans were capable or incapable of predicting the returns of comets and foretelling eclipses, as authors dispute; for each teacher, or head of sect that drew his knowledge from the Indian sources, might conceal his instructors to be reckoned an inventor, and the art itself would be estimated according to the capacity or proficiency of the promulgator, or his followers; thus Berosus the Chaldean is considered by Vitruvius as the inventor of concave sun-dials, though probably the invention had come from the Bramins, as there is now a similar instrument at Benares. Another reason why the sciences were perfected in India is the Indians having been much longer civilised than any other nation, and we know that when people are civilised they begin to study the arts. That they have been much longer civilised, is plain from their state at present, for notwithstanding the slowness of its revolution they have evidently gone through almost the whole political circle of legislative degradation; and are nearly arrived to that despicable state of feeble insignificance, which separates the barbarity of a state of nature, from that of a state of society; and which has all the miseries of both, without any of the advantages of the former.