RELIGIONS OF ANCIENT INDIA 471 



III 



We can sum up the investigations thus far mentioned by saying 

 that students of ancient, related religions endeavor by their com- 

 parisons to extend the knowledge of direct tradition backwards 

 into prehistoric periods. It is of course quite evident that a much 

 brighter light falls upon fields that lie nearer historic times than 

 upon the more remote past. It may accordingly appear for a mo- 

 ment paradoxical to speak of pressing back still farther, and to 

 assert that the certainty of our undertaking not only does not any 

 longer diminish; on the contrary it begins to increase. The cer- 

 tainty increases because we are dealing with those prehistoric 

 periods when the play of racial individualities has not yet become 

 unfathomable, but a kind of law with which we can reckon, which 

 everywhere produces like forms. 



I am now speaking of scientific movements that are still in their 

 infancy. I am well aware that many an investigator of great authority 

 does not share my conclusions. I can only voice my own conviction; 

 the future must decide whether it be right or not. 



The young science of ethnology carries us back to primitive forms 

 of religions, far beyond Indo-European conditions. From it we learn, 

 as you know, that certain rudest types of religious conceptions and 

 practices are found everywhere among peoples of the same low 

 level of civilization in apparently w r onderful though undoubted 

 agreement. Religious research here assumes somewhat the attitude 

 of the natural science. What it reports does not differ much from a 

 chapter taken from the life of animals. A further inference has been 

 drawn from the above-mentioned agreement. It is not less widely 

 known that these very same primitive forms must have been the 

 basis, likewise, of all higher forms of religion in the distant past. 

 Hence the investigation of Indian religions is clearly placed in new 

 and very far-reaching relations. If it formerly carried on a coasting- 

 trade, so to speak, it must now venture out upon the high seas. It 

 ventures to make comparisons that are no longer restricted to the 

 Indo-European field. It throws aside for a time the tools of com- 

 parative grammar, the time-honored technique of philology, and leaps 

 over boundary lines usually set for the routine work of the science. In 

 order to discover the greatest antiquity, it studies the present. It 

 accompanies the journeys of the traveler among the Red Indians, 

 Kaffirs, Australians, and those less pretentious travels of discovery 

 among those classes of our own people, where so many primitive 

 modes of thought are found even to-day. It then searches in its 

 own field for the primitive religious forms that it found there. We 

 find the same impulse here as everywhere in historical science, and 

 also in art, to put new life into the old material and the old 



