e mother of new superstitions--and why not,
in the future, the regenerate child of the purest faith, if only
purified from the dust of nineteen centuries?

You will find yourselves everywhere in India between an immense past
and an immense future, with opportunities such as the old world could
but seldom, if ever, offer you. Take any of the burning questions of
the day--popular education, higher education, parliamentary
representation, codification of laws, finance, emigration, poor-law;
and whether you have anything to teach and to try, or anything to
observe and to learn, India will supply you with a laboratory such as
exists nowhere else. That very Sanskrit, the study of which may at
first seem so tedious to you and so useless, if only you will carry it
on, as you may carry it on here at Cambridge better than anywhere
else, will open before you large layers of literature, as yet almost
unknown and unexplored, and allow you an insight into strata of
thought deeper than any you have known before, and rich in lessons
that appeal to the deepest sympathies of the human heart.

Depend upon it, if only you can make leisure, you will find plenty of
work in India for your leisure hours.

India is not, as you may imagine, a distant, strange, or, at the very
utmost, a curious country. India for the future belongs to Europe, it
has its place in the Indo-European world, it has its place in our own
history, and in what is the very life of history, the history of the
human mind.

You know how some of the best talent and the noblest genius of our age
has been devoted to the study of the development of the outward or
material world, the growth of the earth, the first appearance of
living cells, their combination and differentiation, leading up to the
beginning of organic life, and its steady progress from the lowest to
the highest stages. Is there not an inward and intellectual world also
which has to be studied in its historical development, from the first
appearance of predicative and demonstrative roots, their combination
and differentiation, leading up to the beginning of rational thought
in its steady progress from the lowest to the highest stages? And in
that study of the history of the human mind, in that study of
ourselves, of our true selves, India occupies a place second to no
other country. Whatever sphere of the human mind you may select for
your special study, whether it be language, or religion, or mythology,
or ph