rds, the first poets of our thoughts, the first givers of our laws,
the first prophets of our gods, and of Him who is God above all gods.

That aristocracy of those who know--_di color che sanno_--or try to
know, is open to all who are willing to enter, to all who have a
feeling for the past, an interest in the genealogy of our thoughts,
and a reverence for the ancestry of our intellect, who are in fact
historians in the true sense of the word, _i.e._ inquirers into that
which is past, but not lost.

_Thirdly_, having explained to you why the ancient literature of
India, the really ancient literature of that country, I mean that of
the Vedic period, deserves the careful attention, not of Oriental
scholars only, but of every educated man and woman who wishes to know
how we, even we here in England and in this nineteenth century of
ours, came to be what we are, I tried to explain to you the
difference, and the natural and inevitable difference, between the
development of the human character in such different climates as those
of India and Europe. And while admitting that the Hindus were
deficient in many of those manly virtues and practical achievements
which we value most, I wished to point out that there was another
sphere of intellectual activity in which the Hindus excelled--the
meditative and transcendent--and that here we might learn from them
some lessons of life which we ourselves are but too apt to ignore or
to despise.

_Fourthly_, fearing that I might have raised too high expectations of
the ancient wisdom, the religion and philosophy of the Vedic Indians,
I felt it my duty to state that, though primitive in one sense, we
must not expect the Vedic religion to be primitive in the
anthropological sense of the word, as containing the utterances of
beings who had just broken their shells, and were wonderingly looking
out for the first time upon this strange world. The Veda may be called
primitive, because there is no other literary document more primitive
than it; but the language, the mythology, the religion and philosophy
that meet us in the Veda open vistas of the past which no one would
venture to measure in years. Nay, they contain, by the side of simple,
natural, childish thoughts, many ideas which to us sound modern, or
secondary and tertiary, as I called them, but which nevertheless are
older than any other literary document, and give us trustworthy
information of a period in the history of human thought