Hindu expansion had covered all India, that is, the
peninsula from the Himalayas to Cape Comorin. Then, all India, including
Ceylon, was Hinduized, though in differing degrees; the purest Aryan
civilization being in the north, the less pure in the Ganges Valley and
south and east, while the least Aryan and more Dravidian was in Bengal,
Orissa, and India south of the Kistna River.

This story of the spread of Hindu civilization is a brilliant one, and
seems as wonderful as the later European conquest of the land, and of
the other "Indians" of North America from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
Beside the conquests in material civilization of these our fellow-Aryans
(who were the real Indians, and who spoke the language which is the
common ancestor of our own and of most European tongues), what impresses
us most of all, in these Aryans, is their intellectual energy. The
Hindus of the rationalistic age made original discoveries. They invented
grammar, geometry, arithmetic, decimal notation, and they elaborated
astronomy, medicine, mental philosophy and logic (with syllogism) before
these sciences were known or perfected in Greece. In the seventh century
before Christ, Kapila taught a system of philosophy, of which that of
the Europeans, Schopenhaur and Hartmann, seems largely a reproduction.

Following this agnostic scheme of thought, came, several centuries
later, the dualistic Yoga[5] system in which the chief feature is the
conception of Deity as a means of final emancipation of the human soul
from further transmigration, and of union with the Universal Spirit or
World Soul. There is, however, perhaps no sadder chapter in the history
of human thought than the story of the later degeneration of the Yoga
system into one of bloody and cruel rites in India, and of superstition
in China.

Still other systems followed: one by Gautama, of the same clan or family
of the later Buddha, who develops inference by the construction of
syllogism; while Kanada follows the atomic philosophy in which the atoms
are eternal, but the aggregates perishable by disintegration.

Against these schools, which seemed to be dangerous "new departures,"
orthodox Hindus, anxious for their ancient beliefs and practices as laid
down in the Vedas, started fresh systems of philosophy, avowedly more in
consonances with their ancestral faith. One system insisted on the
primitive Vedic ritual, and another laid emphasis on the belief in a
Universal Soul first