,
its embodiment and representative.

But what a system? How large, how difficult to understand! So vast, so
complicated, so full of contradictions, so various and changeable, that
its very immensity is our refuge! We say, It is impossible to do justice
to such a system; therefore do not demand it of us.

India has been a land of mystery from the earliest times. From the most
ancient days we hear of India as the most populous nation of the world,
full of barbaric wealth and a strange wisdom. It has attracted conquerors,
and has been overrun by the armies of Semiramis, Darius, Alexander; by
Mahmud, and Tamerlane, and Nadir Shah; by Lord Clive and the Duke of
Wellington. These conquerors, from the Assyrian Queen to the British
Mercantile Company, have overrun and plundered India, but have left it the
same unintelligible, unchangeable, and marvellous country as before. It is
the same land now which the soldiers of Alexander described,--the land of
grotto temples dug out of solid porphyry; of one of the most ancient Pagan
religions of the world; of social distinctions fixed and permanent as the
earth itself; of the sacred Ganges; of the idols of Juggernaut, with its
bloody worship; the land of elephants and tigers; of fields of rice and
groves of palm; of treasuries filled with chests of gold, heaps of pearls,
diamonds, and incense. But, above all, it is the land of unintelligible
systems of belief, of puzzling incongruities, and irreconcilable
contradictions.

The Hindoos have sacred books of great antiquity, and a rich literature
extending back twenty or thirty centuries; yet no history, no chronology,
no annals. They have a philosophy as acute, profound and, spiritual as any
in the world, which is yet harmoniously associated with the coarsest
superstitions. With a belief so abstract that it almost escapes the grasp
of the most speculative intellect, is joined the notion that sin can be
atoned for by bathing in the Ganges or repeating a text of the Veda. With
an ideal pantheism resembling that of Hegel, is united the opinion that
Brahma and Siva can be driven from the throne of the universe by any one
who will sacrifice a sufficient number of wild horses. To abstract one's
self from matter, to renounce all the gratification of the senses, to
macerate the body, is thought the true road to felicity; and nowhere in
the world are luxury, licentiousness and the gratification of the
appetites carried so far. Every civil right