7rcTIX1xP

The First Lesson: The Land of the Ganges.1117
conception that the Western mind has since evolved. This is no mere boast
of the Hindu—an examination of the authorities will satisfy the most rigid
proof on this point, as the best authorities freely admit.
Victor Cousin, the French writer upon philosophical history, has said:
“When we read the poetical and philosophical monuments of the East—
above all, those of India, which are beginning to spread in Europe—we
discover there many a truth, and truths so profound, and which make such
a contrast with the meanness of the results at which European genius has
sometimes stopped, that we are constrained to bend the knee before
the philosophy of the East, and to see in this cradle of the human race the
native land of the highest philosophy. …India contains the whole history of
philosophy in a nutshell.” Sir Monier Williams, in his great work on the Hindu
Religions, said: “Indeed, if I may be allowed the anachronism, the Hindus
were Spinozites more than two thousand years before the existence of
Spinoza; and Darwinians many centuries before Darwin; and Evolutionists
many centuries before the doctrine of Evolution had been accepted by the
scientists of our time, and before any word like ‘Evolution’ existed in any
language of the world.” Many writers have held that the great Grecian thinker
and philosopher, Pythagoras, received his instruction from Hindu teachers
upon his sojourn in India, and some of the legends hold that upon his return
to his native land he brought a company of Hindu philosophers with him, in
order that the Greeks might receive the benefit of their instruction. Whether
or not this latter statement may be true, it is undoubtedly true that the
vitality of Grecian philosophical thought was due to Hindu influences. Prof.
E. W. Hopkins has said: “Plato was full of Sankhyan thought, worked out by
him, but taken from Pythagoras. Before the sixth century b.c. all the religiousphilosophical
ideas of Pythagoras were current in India. If there were but one
or two of these cases, they might be set aside as accidental coincidences,
but such coincidences are too numerous to be the result of chance.…Neo-
Platonism and Christian Gnosticism owe much to India. The Gnostic ideas
in regard to a plurality of heavens and spiritual worlds go back directly