ng that
we do not know already, or teach us something which we do not care to
know?"

This seems to me a most unhappy misconception, and it will be the
chief object of my lectures to try to remove it, or at all events to
modify it, as much as possible. I shall not attempt to prove that
Sanskrit literature is as good as Greek literature. Why should we
always compare? A study of Greek literature has its own purpose, and a
study of Sanskrit literature has its own purpose; but what I feel
convinced of, and hope to convince you of, is that Sanskrit
literature, if studied only in a right spirit, is full of human
interests, full of lessons which even Greek could never teach us, a
subject worthy to occupy the leisure, and more than the leisure, of
every Indian civil servant; and certainly the best means of making any
young man who has to spend five-and-twenty years of his life in India,
feel at home among the Indians, as a fellow-worker among
fellow-workers, and not as an alien among aliens. There will be
abundance of useful and most interesting work for him to do, if only
he cares to do it, work such as he would look for in vain, whether in
Italy or in Greece, or even among the pyramids of Egypt or the palaces
of Babylon.

You will now understand why I have chosen as the title of my lectures,
"What can India teach us?" True, there are many things which India has
to learn from us; but there are other things, and, in one sense, very
important things, which we too may learn from India.

If I were to look over the whole world to find out the country most
richly endowed with all the wealth, power, and beauty that nature can
bestow--in some parts a very paradise on earth--I should point to
India. If I were asked under what sky the human mind has most full
developed some of its choicest gifts, has most deeply pondered on the
greatest problems of life, and has found solutions of some of them
which well deserve the attention even of those who have studied Plato
and Kant--I should point to India. And if I were to ask myself from
what literature we, here in Europe, we who have been nurtured almost
exclusively on the thoughts of Greeks and Romans, and of one Semitic
race, the Jewish, may draw that corrective which is most wanted in
order to make our inner life more perfect, more comprehensive, more
universal, in fact more truly human, a life, not for this life only,
but a transfigured and eternal life--again I should point to India.