we observe their struggles against priestly domination, their successes and their failures; we study with interest their great social and religious revolutions and their far-reaching consequences. And this great story of a nation's intellectual life is nowhere broken and nowhere disconnected. The great causes which led to great social and religious changes are manifest to the reader, and he follows the gradual development of ancient Hindu civilization through thirty centuries, from 2000 B.C. to one thousand years after Christ.
The story of India's success is not more instructive than the story of her failure. The hymns of Visvamitra, the philosophy of Kapila, and the poetry of Kalidasa have no higher lessons for the modern reader than the decadence of her political life and the ascendency of priests. The story of the religious rising of the people under the leadership of Gautama Buddha and Asoka is not more instructive than the absence of any efforts after popular freedom. And the great heights to which the genius of Brahmans and Kshatriyas soared are not more suggestive and not more instructive than the absence of genius in the people at large in their ordinary pursuits and trades in mechanical inventions and maritime discoveries, in sculpture, architecture, and arts, in manifestations of popular life and the assertion of popular power.
The history of the intellectual and religious life of the ancient Hindus is matchless in its continuity, its fulness, and its philosophical truth. But the historian who paints only the current of that intellectual
