d: whether looking at the
pagodas of China, or the Parthenon of Athens, or the cathedral of
Cologne: whether reading the sacred books of the Buddhists, of the
Jews, or of those who worship God in spirit and in truth, we ought to
be able to say, like the Emperor Maximilian, 'Homo sum, humani nihil a
me alienum puto,' or, translating his words somewhat freely, 'I am a
man, nothing pertaining to man I deem foreign to myself.' Yes, we must
learn to read in the history of the whole human race something of our
own history; and as in looking back on the story of our own life, we
all dwell with a peculiar delight on the earliest chapters of our
childhood, and try to find there the key to many of the riddles of our
later life, it is but natural that the historian, too, should ponder
with most intense interest over the few relics that have been
preserved to him of the childhood of the human race. These relics are
few indeed, and therefore very precious, and this I may venture to
say, at the outset and without fear of contradiction, that there
exists no literary relic that carries us back to a more primitive, or,
if you like, more child-like state in the history of man[9] than the
Veda. As the language of the Veda, the Sanskrit, is the most ancient
type of the English of the present day, (Sanskrit and English are but
varieties of one and the same language,) so its thoughts and feelings
contain in reality the first roots and germs of that intellectual
growth which by an unbroken chain connects our own generation with the
ancestors of the Aryan race,--with those very people who at the rising
and setting of the sun listened with trembling hearts to the songs of
the Veda, that told them of bright powers above, and of a life to come
after the sun of their own lives had set in the clouds of the evening.
Those men were the true ancestors of our race; and the Veda is the
oldest book we have in which to study the first beginnings of our
language, and of all that is embodied in language. We are by nature
Aryan, Indo-European, not Semitic: our spiritual kith and kin are to
be found in India, Persia, Greece, Italy, Germany; not in Mesopotamia,
Egypt, or Palestine. This is a fact that ought to be clearly
perceived, and constantly kept in view, in order to understand the
importance which the Veda has for us, after the lapse of more than
three thousand years, and after ever so many changes in our language,
thought, and religion.

[Footnote 9: '