_shekels_. Here we have again the Babylonian sexagesimal system, a
system which owes its origin and popularity, I believe, to the fact
that _sixty_ has the greatest number of divisors. Shekel was
translated into Greek by _Stater_, and an Athenian gold stater, like
the Persian gold stater, down to the times of Croesus, Darius, and
Alexander, was the sixtieth part of a mina of gold, not very far
therefore from our sovereign. The proportion of silver to gold was
fixed as thirteen or thirteen and a third to one; and if the weight of
a silver shekel was made as thirteen to ten, such a coin would
correspond very nearly to our florin.[14] Half a silver shekel was a
_drachma_, and this was therefore the true ancestor of our shilling.
Again you may say that any attempt at fixing the relative value of
silver and gold is, and always has been, a great mistake. Still it
shows how closely the world is held together, and how, for good or for
evil, we are what we are, not so much by ourselves as by the toil and
moil of those who came before us, our true intellectual ancestors,
whatever the blood may have been composed of that ran through their
veins, or the bones which formed the rafters of their skulls.
And if it is true, with regard to religion, that no one could
understand it and appreciate its full purport without knowing its
origin and growth, that is, without knowing something of what the
cuneiform inscriptions of Mesopotamia, the hieroglyphic and hieratic
texts of Egypt, and the historical monuments of Phoenicia and Persia
can alone reveal to us, it is equally true with regard to all the
other elements that constitute the whole of our intellectual life. If
we are Jewish or Semitic in our religion, we are _Greek_ in our
philosophy, _Roman_ in our politics, and _Saxon_ in our morality; and
it follows that a knowledge of the history of the Greeks, Romans, and
Saxons, or of the flow of civilization from Greece to Italy, and
through Germany to these isles, forms an essential element in what is
called a liberal, that is, an historical and rational education.
But then it might be said, Let this be enough. Let us know by all
means all that deserves to be known about our real spiritual ancestors
in the great historical kingdoms of the world; let us be grateful for
all we have inherited from Egyptians, Babylonians, Phoenicians,
Jews, Greeks, Romans, and Saxons. But why bring in India? Why add a
new burden to what every man has to bear already, before he can call
himself fairly educated? What have we inherited from the dark dwellers
on the Indus and the Ganges, that we should have to add their royal
names and dates and deeds to the archives of our already overburdened
memory?
There is some justice in this complaint. The ancient inhabitants of
India are not our intellectual ancestors in the same direct way as
Jews, Greeks, Romans, and Saxons are; but they represent,
nevertheless, a collateral branch of that family to which we belong by
language, that is, by thought, and their historical records extend in
some respects so far beyond all other records and have been preserved
to us in such perfect and such legible documents, that we can learn
from them lessons which we can learn nowhere else, and supply missing
links in our intellectual ancestry far more important than that
missing link (which we can well afford to miss), the link between Ape
and Man.
I am not speaking as yet of the literature of India as it is, but of
something far more ancient, the language of India, or Sanskrit. No one
supposes any longer that Sanskrit was the common source of Greek,
Latin, and Anglo-Saxon. This used to be said, but it has long been
shown that Sanskrit is only a collateral branch of the same stem from
which spring Greek, Latin, and Anglo-Saxon; and not only these, but
all the Teutonic, all the Celtic, all the Slavonic languages, nay, the
languages of Persia and Armenia also.
What, then, is it that gives to Sanskrit its claim on our attention,
and its supreme importance in the eyes of the historian?
First of all, its antiquity--for we know Sanskrit at an earlier period
than Greek. But what is far more important than its merely
chronological antiquity is the antique state of preservation in which
that Aryan language has been handed down to us. The world had known
Latin and Greek for centuries, and it was felt, no doubt, that there
was some kind of similarity between the two. But how was that
similarity to be explained? Sometimes Latin was supposed to give the
key to the formation of a Greek word, sometimes Greek seemed to betray
the secret of the origin of a Latin word. Afterward, when the ancient
Teutonic languages, such as Gothic and Anglo-Saxon, and the ancient
Celtic and Slavonic languages too, came to be studied, no one could
help seeing a certain family likeness among them all. But how such a
likeness between these languages came to be, and how, what is far more
difficult to explain, such striking differences too between these
languages came to be, remained a mystery, and gave rise to the most
gratuitous theories, most of them, as you know, devoid of all
scientific foundation. As soon, however, as Sanskrit stepped into the
midst of these languages, there came light and warmth and mutual
recognition. They all ceased to be strangers, and each fell of its own
accord into its right place. Sanskrit was the eldest sister of them
all, and could tell of many things which the other members of the
family had quite forgotten. Still, the other languages too had each
their own tale to tell; and it is out of all their tales together that
a chapter in the human mind has been put together which, in some
respects, is more important to us than any of the other chapters, the
Jewish, the Greek, the Latin, or the Saxon.
The process by which that ancient chapter of history was recovered is
very simple. Take the words which occur in the same form and with the
same meaning in all the seven branches of the Aryan family, and you
have in them the most genuine and trustworthy records in which to read
the thoughts of our true ancestors, before they had become Hindus, or
Persians, or Greeks, or Romans, or Celts, or Teutons, or Slaves. Of
course, some of these ancient charters may have been lost in one or
other of these seven branches of the Aryan family, but even then, if
they are found in six, or five, or four, or three, or even two only of
its original branches, the probability remains, unless we can prove a
later historical contact between these languages, that these words
existed before the great _Aryan Separation_. If we find _agni_,
meaning fire, in Sanskrit, and _ignis_, meaning fire, in Latin, we may
safely conclude that _fire_ was known to the undivided Aryans, even if
no trace of the same name of fire occurred anywhere else. And why?
Because there is no indication that Latin remained longer united with
Sanskrit than any of the other Aryan languages, or that Latin could
have borrowed such a word from Sanskrit, after these two languages had
once become distinct. We have, however, the Lithuanian _ugnis_, and
the Scottish _ingle_, to show that the Slavonic and possibly the
Teutonic languages also, knew the same word for fire, though they
replaced it in time by other words. Words, like all other things, will
die, and why they should live on in one soil and wither away and
perish in another, is not always easy to say. What has become of
_ignis_, for instance, in all the Romance languages? It has withered
away and perished, probably because, after losing its final
unaccentuated syllable, it became awkward to pronounce; and another
word, _focus_, which in Latin meant fireplace, hearth, altar, has
taken its place.
Suppose we wanted to know whether the ancient Aryans before their
separation knew the mouse: we should only have to consult the principal
Aryan dictionaries, and we should find in Sanskrit _mush_, in Greek
[Greek: mus], in Latin _mus_, in Old Slavonic myse, in Old High German
_mus_, enabling us to say that, at a time so distant from us that we
feel inclined to measure it by Indian rather than by our own chronology,
the mouse was known, that is, was named, was conceived and recognized as
a species of its own, not to be confounded with any other vermin.
And if we were to ask whether the enemy of the mouse, the _cat_, was
known at the same distant time, we should feel justified in saying
decidedly, No. The cat is called in Sanskrit mar_g_ara and vi_d_ala.
In Greek and Latin the words usually given as names of the cat,
[Greek: _galee_] and [Greek: _ailouros_], _mustella_ and _feles_,
did not originally signify the tame cat, but the weasel or marten. The
name for the real cat in Greek was [Greek: _katta_], in Latin
_catus_, and these words have supplied the names for cat in all the
Teutonic, Slavonic, and Celtic languages. The animal itself, so far as
we know at present, came to Europe from Egypt, where it had been
worshipped for centuries and tamed; and as this arrival probably dates
from the fourth century A.D., we can well understand that no common
name for it could have existed when the Aryan nations separated.[15]
In this way a more or less complete picture of the state of
civilization, previous to the Aryan Separation, can be and has been
reconstructed, like a mosaic put together with the fragments of
ancient stones; and I doubt whether, in tracing the history of the
human mind, we shall ever reach to a lower stratum than that which is
revealed to us by the converging rays of the different Aryan
languages.
Nor is that all; for even that Proto-Aryan language, as it has been
reconstructed from the ruins scattered about in India, Greece, Italy,
and Germany, is clearly the result of a long, long process of thought.
One shrinks from chronological limitations when looking into such
distant periods of life. But if we find Sanskrit as a perfect literary
language, totally different from Greek and Latin, 1500 B.C., where can
those streams of Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin meet, as we trace them
back to their common source? And then, when we have followed these
mighty national streams back to their common meeting-point, even then
that common language looks like a rock washed down and smoothed for
ages by the ebb and flow of thought. We find in that language such a
compound, for instance, as _asmi_, I am, Greek [Greek: esmi].
What would other languages give for such a pure concept as _I am_?
They may say, _I stand_, or _I live_, or _I grow_, or _I turn_, but it
is given to few languages only to be able to say _I am_. To us nothing
seems more natural than the auxiliary verb _I am_; but, in reality, no
work of art has required greater efforts than this little word _I am_.
And all those efforts lie beneath the level of the common Proto-Aryan
speech. Many different ways were open, were tried, too, in order to
arrive at such a compound as _asmi_, and such a concept as _I am_. But
all were given up, and this one alone remained, and was preserved
forever in all the languages and all the dialects of the Aryan family.
In _as-mi_, _as_ is the root, and in the compound _as-mi_, the
predicative root _as_, to be, is predicated of _mi_, I. But no
language could ever produce at once so empty, or, if you like, so
general a root as _as_, to be. _As_ meant originally _to breathe_, and
from it we have _asu_, breath, spirit, life, also _as_ the mouth,
Latin _os_, _oris_. By constant wear and tear this root _as_, to
breathe, had first to lose all signs of its original material
character, before it could convey that purely abstract meaning of
existence, without any qualification, which has rendered to the higher
operations of thought the same service which the nought, likewise the
invention of Indian genius, has to render in arithmetic. Who will say
how long the friction lasted which changed _as_, to breathe, into
_as_, to be? And even a root _as_, to breathe, was an Aryan root, not
Semitic, not Turanian. It possessed an historical individuality--it
was the work of our forefathers, and represents a thread which unites
us in our thoughts and words with those who first thought for us, with
those who first spoke for us, and whose thoughts and words men are
still thinking and speaking, though divided from them by thousands, it
may be by hundreds of thousands of years.
This is what I call _history_ in the true sense of the word, something
really worth knowing, far more so than the scandals of courts, or the
butcheries of nations, which fill so many pages of our Manuals of
History. And all this work is only beginning, and whoever likes to
labor in these the most ancient of historical archives will find
plenty of discoveries to make--and yet people ask, What is the use of
learning Sanskrit?
We get accustomed to everything, and cease to wonder at what would
have startled our fathers and upset all their stratified notions,
like a sudden earthquake. Every child now learns at school that
English is an Aryan or Indo-European language, that it belongs to the
Teutonic branch, and that this branch, together with the Italic,
Greek, Celtic, Slavonic, Iranic, and Indic branches, all spring from
the same stock, and form together the great Aryan or Indo-European
family of speech.
But this, though it is taught now in our elementary schools, was
really, but fifty years ago, like the opening of a new horizon of the
world of the intellect, and the extension of a feeling of closest
fraternity that made us feel at home where before we had been
strangers, and changed millions of so-called barbarians into our own
kith and kin. To speak the same language constitutes a closer union
than to have drunk the same milk; and Sanskrit, the ancient language
of India, is substantially the same language as Greek, Latin, and
Anglo-Saxon. This is a lesson which we should never have learned but
from a study of Indian language and literature, and if India had
taught us nothing else, it would have taught us more than almost any
other language ever did.
It is quite amusing, though instructive also, to read what was written
by scholars and philosophers when this new light first dawned on the
world. They would not have it, they would not believe that there could
be any community of origin between the people of Athens and Rome, and
the so-called Niggers of India. The classical scholar scouted the
idea, and I myself still remember the time, when I was a student at
Leipzig, and began to study Sanskrit, with what contempt any remarks
on Sanskrit or comparative grammar were treated by my teachers, men
such as Gottfried Hermann, Haupt, Westermann, Stallbaum, and others.
No one ever was for a time so completely laughed down as Professor
Bopp, when he first published his Comparative Grammar of Sanskrit,
Zend, Greek, Latin, and Gothic. All hands were against him; and if in
comparing Greek and Latin with Sanskrit, Gothic, Celtic, Slavonic, or
Persian, he happened to have placed one single accent wrong, the
shouts of those who knew nothing but Greek and Latin, and probably
looked in their Greek dictionaries to be quite sure of their accents,
would never end. Dugald Stewart, rather than admit a relationship
between Hindus and Scots, would rather believe that the whole Sanskrit
language and the whole of Sanskrit literature--mind, a literature
extending over three thousand years and larger than the ancient
literature of either Greece or Rome--was a forgery of those wily
priests, the Brahmans. I remember too how, when I was at school at
Leipzig (and a very good school it was, with such masters as Nobbe,
Forbiger, Funkhaenel, and Palm--an old school too, which could boast
of Leibnitz among its former pupils) I remember, I say, one of our
masters (Dr. Klee) telling us one afternoon, when it was too hot to do
any serious work, that there was a language spoken in India, which was
much the same as Greek and Latin, nay, as German and Russian. At first
we thought it was a joke, but when one saw the parallel columns of
numerals, pronouns, and verbs in Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin written on
the blackboard, one felt in the presence of facts, before which one
had to bow. All one's ideas of Adam and Eve, and the Paradise, and the
tower of Babel, and Shem, Ham, and Japhet, with Homer and AEneas and
Virgil too, seemed to be whirling round and round, till at last one
picked up the fragments and tried to build up a new world, and to live
with a new historical consciousness.
Here you will see why I consider a certain knowledge of India an
essential portion of a liberal or an historical education. The concept
of the European man has been changed and widely extended by our
acquaintance with India, and we know now that we are something
different from what we thought we were. Suppose the Americans, owing
to some cataclysmal events, had forgotten their English origin, and
after two or three thousand years found themselves in possession of a
language and of ideas which they could trace back historically to a
certain date, but which, at that date, seemed, as it were, fallen from
the sky, without any explanation of their origin and previous growth,
what would they say if suddenly the existence of an English language
and literature were revealed to them, such as they existed in the
eighteenth century--explaining all that seemed before almost
miraculous, and solving almost every question that could be asked?
Well, this is much the same as what the discovery of Sanskrit has done
for us. It has added a new period to our historical consciousness, and
revived the recollections of our childhood, which seemed to have
vanished forever.
Whatever else we may have been, it is quite clear now that, many
thousands of years ago, we were something that had not yet developed
into an Englishman, or a Saxon, or a Greek, or a Hindu either, yet
contained in itself the germs of all these characters. A strange
being, you may say. Yes, but for all that a very real being, and an
ancestor too of whom we must learn to be proud, far more than of any
such modern ancestors, as Normans, Saxons, Celts, and all the rest.
And this is not all yet that a study of Sanskrit and the other Aryan
languages has done for us. It has not only widened our views of man,
and taught us to embrace millions of strangers and barbarians as
members of one family, but it has imparted to the whole ancient
history of man a reality which it never possessed before.
We speak and write a great deal about antiquities, and if we can lay
hold of a Greek statue or an Egyptian Sphinx or a Babylonian Bull, our
heart rejoices, and we build museums grander than any royal palaces to
receive the treasures of the past. This is quite right. But are you
aware that every one of us possesses what may be called the richest
and most wonderful Museum of Antiquities, older than any statues,
sphinxes, or bulls? And where? Why, in our own language. When I use
such words as _father_ or _mother_, _heart_ or _tear_, _one_, _two_,
_three_, _here_ and _there_, I am handling coins or counters that were
current before there was one single Greek statue, one single
Babylonian Bull, one single Egyptian Sphinx. Yes, each of us carries
about with him the richest and most wonderful Museum of Antiquities;
and if he only knows how to treat those treasures, how to rub and
polish them till they become translucent again, how to arrange them
and read them, they will tell him marvels more marvellous than all
hieroglyphics and cuneiform inscriptions put together. The stories
they have told us are beginning to be old stories now. Many of you
have heard them before. But do not let them cease to be marvels, like
so many things which cease to be marvels because they happen every
day. And do not think that there is nothing left for you to do. There
are more marvels still to be discovered in language than have ever
been revealed to us; nay, there is no word, however common, if only
you know how to take it to pieces, like a cunningly contrived work of
art, fitted together thousands of years ago by the most cunning of
artists, the human mind, that will not make you listen and marvel more
than any chapter of the Arabian Nights.
But I must not allow myself to be carried away from my proper subject.
All I wish to impress on you by way of introduction is that the
results of the Science of Language, which, without the aid of
Sanskrit, would never have been obtained, form an essential element of
what we call a liberal, that is an historical education--an education
which will enable a man to do what the French call _s'orienter_, that
is, "to find his East," "his true East," and thus to determine his
real place in the world; to know, in fact, the port whence man
started, the course he has followed, and the port toward which he has
to steer.
We all come from the East--all that we value most has come to us from
the East, and in going to the East, not only those who have received a
special Oriental training, but everybody who has enjoyed the
advantages of a liberal, that is, of a truly historical education,
ought to feel that he is going to his "old home," full of memories, if
only he can read them. Instead of feeling your hearts sink within you,
when next year you approach the shores of India, I wish that every one
of you could feel what Sir William Jones felt, when, just one hundred
years ago, he came to the end of his long voyage from England, and saw
the shores of India rising on the horizon. At that time, young men
going to the wonderland of India were not ashamed of dreaming dreams
and seeing visions; and this was the dream dreamed and the vision seen
by Sir William Jones, then simple Mr. Jones:
"When I was at sea last August (that is in August, 1783), on
my last voyage to this country (India) I had long and
ardently desired to visit, I found one evening, on inspecting
the observations of the day, that _India_ lay before us,
_Persia_ on our left, while a breeze from _Arabia_ blew
nearly on our stern. A situation so pleasing in itself and to
me so new, could not fail to awaken a train of reflections in
a mind which had early been accustomed to contemplate with
delight the eventful histories and agreeable fictions of this
Eastern world. It gave me inexpressible pleasure to find
myself in the midst of so noble an amphitheatre, almost
encircled by the vast regions of Asia, which has ever been
esteemed the nurse of sciences, the inventress of delightful
and useful arts, the scene of glorious actions, fertile in
the productions of human genius, and infinitely diversified
in the forms of religion and government, in the laws,
manners, customs, and languages, as well as in the features
and complexions of men. I could not help remarking how
important and extensive a field was yet unexplored, and how
many solid advantages unimproved."
India wants more such dreamers as that young Mr. Jones, standing alone
on the deck of his vessel and watching the sun diving into the
sea--with the memories of England behind and the hopes of India before
him, feeling the presence of Persia and its ancient monarchs, and
breathing the breezes of Arabia and its glowing poetry. Such dreamers
know how to make their dreams come true, and how to change their
visions into realities.
And as it was a hundred years ago, so it is now; or at least, so it
may be now. There are many bright dreams to be dreamed about India,
and many bright deeds to be done in India, if only you will do them.
Though many great and glorious conquests have been made in the history
and literature of the East, since the days when Sir William Jones[16]
landed at Calcutta, depend upon it, no young Alexander here need
despair because there are no kingdoms left for him to conquer on the
ancient shores of the Indus and the Ganges.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: Pliny (VI. 26) tells us that in his day the annual drain
of bullion into India, in return for her valuable produce, reached the
immense amount of "five hundred and fifty millions of sesterces." See
E. Thomas, "The Indian Balhara," p. 13.]
[Footnote 2: Cunningham, in the "Journal of the Asiatic Society of
Bengal," 1881, p. 184.]