RITES and institutions have introduced us to the religious life of India. We must now look at that religious life from within, from the point of view of men's consciences. For the very reason that the character of India was made up of a welter of different things, the elements of reflection were extremely heterogeneous, and one would say that there was all the more need for thought to concentrate in order to attempt some sort of unification. And indeed the collective efforts of meditation have nowhere been so intense and systematic as in India. Almost every activity was religious, and in the élite, among the races of higher culture, religion made sufficient appeal to personal reflection to deserve to be called philosophy. Speculative systems free of dogma and ritual existed from the dawn of historical times, and more than one of them afterwards gave birth to dogmas and ritual. Religious thought and free thought run into one another endlessly.
To divide the history of Indian thought into phases must needs be an arbitrary process of over-simplification. The religious life of the country, like its social life, is nothing but the confused total of local traditions, the history of which, far from being written, is hardly possible to write. From Kashmir to the Maratha country, from Bengal to Malabar, conditions vary very greatly, and in any one of these regions the many strata of the population are divided by insurmountable differences. An immense supply of notes on folk-lore, a searching examination of manners, a thorough clearing of overgrown jungles of literature, and an abundant booty of archaeological finds would be necessary everywhere before a few inferences could be drawn. Treating of India in general, we are bound to be vague.
Nor is that all. In assuming a priori a development in the world of Indian thought, we run against native sentiment. Let us admit that the impulse to look for development in every domain, even when the facts do not compel us to do so, may be a European prejudice. Let us draw a lesson from the dislike which the Hindu shows to sharing the principles of our "science" on this point. A custom or a belief may be much older than the earliest document attesting its existence. What does this mean, but that the very precautions of criticism may lead us astray, and that we have something to learn from those very peoples which Europe is instructing in historical method? When the Hindu rejects the explanations of the Westerner, he does so in virtue of a knowledge—vague, no doubt, but lively and direct—of the mentality of the people and the local conditions, which Europeans do not sufficiently take into account. Having made this reservation, we can and must attempt to look for changes in the course of the ages; and the less dogmatic we are the less we shall court disaster.