This story of the spread of Hindu civilization is a brilliant one, and
seems as wonderful as the later European conquest of the land, and of
the other "Indians" of North America from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
Beside the conquests in material civilization of these our fellow-Aryans
(who were the real Indians, and who spoke the language which is the
common ancestor of our own and of most European tongues), what impresses
us most of all, in these Aryans, is their intellectual energy. The
Hindus of the rationalistic age made original discoveries. They invented
grammar, geometry, arithmetic, decimal notation, and they elaborated
astronomy, medicine, mental philosophy and logic (with syllogism) before
these sciences were known or perfected in Greece. In the seventh century
before Christ, Kapila taught a system of philosophy, of which that of
the Europeans, Schopenhaur and Hartmann, seems largely a reproduction.
Following this agnostic scheme of thought, came, several centuries
later, the dualistic Yoga[5] system in which the chief feature is the
conception of Deity as a means of final emancipation of the human soul
from further transmigration, and of union with the Universal Spirit or
World Soul. There is, however, perhaps no sadder chapter in the history
of human thought than the story of the later degeneration of the Yoga
system into one of bloody and cruel rites in India, and of superstition
in China.
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