Parallelism between the Aryas of India and Eran.

Who can see the green earth any more As she was by the sources of Time ?

imagines her fields as she lay In the sunshine unworn by the plough ?

Who thinks as they thought, The tribes who then roamed on her breast,

                          Her vigorous, primitive sons ?”
                                                                         Matthew Arnold, from The Future.

IN a work which undertakes to present, in a set of parallel pictures, the history of several nations, differing in race, culture, and religion, but covering pretty much the same span of the world’s age, it is at times very difficult to keep them well apart, because the influences to which they mutually subject one another cannot be ignored, unless we are willing to content ourselves with fragmentary and fanciful sketches, leaving a good half of the characteristic traits either indistinct or unaccounted for. This difficulty increases considerably when we have to do with two nations derived from the same stock  and exhibiting such striking affinities, such undeniable resemblances, as to betray their original identity at every turn and make us feel as though we can actually grasp and hold fast the time when they were as yet undivided, even though that time may lie far beyond all calculable bounds of historical research. Two such sister nations we have in the Aryan Hindus and Eranians. It is impossible to do justice to the history and culture of the one without drawing the other into the same field of vision and  comparing the two,—a process which necessarily brings out their common origin, by presenting identical or similar features, obviously borrowed by neither from the other, but inherited by both from a common ancestry. It was thus that in a former volume, when treating of the Eranians, their culture and their religion, we were unavoidably led to trespass on the ground reserved for the present work. We found it impossible, “ in dealing with the Aryan peoples of Eran, to separate them entirely from their brethren of India, these two Asiatic branches of the Aryan tree being so closely connected in their beginnings, the sap coursing through both being so evidently the same life-blood, that a study of the one necessarily involves a parallel study of the other.” 2 Thus we were actually compelled to stop for a brief glimpse at the conditions which regulated the existence of the ancestors of both in the period that has been called “ Indo-Eranian,” i. e., the period before the future settlers of Eran and the future conquerors of India had separated, before they had severally wandered into the countries, far distant from one another and from the primeval home, of which they were to win and hold possession through well-nigh countless future ages.  A cursory sketch was sufficient for the comprehension of Eranian history, because the nations of this branch soon diverged very widely from the parent stock, and went their own separate and strongly individual way. Not so the peoples who descended into India and settled there. The nations of this branch were merely the continuation of the mother trunk. They did not break with any of their ancestral traditions, but, on the contrary, faithfully treasured them, and only in the course of time and further migrations,developed from them, not an opposition, but a progressive and consistent sequel, in the shape of a more elaborate religion and, later on, philosophical systems and speculations, based on the same principles, which, in ruder, simpler forms, had been their intellectual inheritance from the first. At the present stage of our studies, therefore, we must pause for a longer and more searching retrospect, if we mean to follow out and comprehend the long and gradual evolution of the people who, of all Orientals, are nearest akin to us in thought, in feeling, in manner, and in language. By doing so, we feel assured that we are reconstructing the past of our own race at its entrance on the career of conscious humanity, that we are learning how our own fathers, in incalculably remote ages, not only lived and labored, but thought and prayed,—nay, how they began to think and to pray.

Method of work.

A fascinating task, but not as easy as it would seem. For, if learning be a difficult achievement, far more difficult is that of ^/learning,—forgetting what we have assimilated through years of that conscious or unconscious process of absorption which not only fills but, so to speak, permeates our brains, moulds and shapes them, till our mental acquirements become  part of our being, in fact the most tenacious, the most inalienable part of ourselves. Yet this is exactly what we must strive to do, if we would successfully identify ourselves with these beginnings of all the things of which we, in this our span of life, are witnessing the bloom, the fruition, the perfection, and, alas! in many cases, the decay. We must not forget for a time what forms as much a part of our intellectual consciousness, as breath or motion does of our physical existence. This mode of working backward, dropping item after item of our intellectual ballast as we go, alone enables us to divest ourselves of our obtrusive and narrow self and to put ourselves in the place of our remote progenitors, to think their eager but as yet untutored  thoughts, to feel with their simple directness, their unsophisticated intenseness.