Page:A Collection of Esoteric Writings.djvu/155

141 will be convenient to enumerate some of the assumptions above referred to before proceeding to examine their opinions concerning the date of Shankaracharya.

I.Many of these writers are not altogether free from the prejudices engendered by the pernicious doctrine, deduced from the Bible, whether rightly or wrongly, that this world is only six thousand years old. We do not mean to say that any one of these writers would now seriously think of defending the said doctrine. Nevertheless it had exercised a considerable influence on the minds of Christian writers when they began to investigate the claims of Asiatic Chronology. If an antiquity of 5 or 6 thousand years are assigned to any particular event connected with the Ancient history of Egypt, India or China, it is certain to be rejected at once by these writers without any inquiry whatever regarding the truth of the statement.

II.They are extremely unwilling to admit that any portion of the Veda can be traced to a period anterior to the date of the Pentateuch, even when the arguments brought forward to establish the priority of the Vedas are such as would be convincing to the mind of an impartial investigator untainted by Christian prejudices. The maximum limit of Indian antiquity is, therefore, fixed for them by the Old Testament, and it is virtually assumed by them that a period between the date of the Old Testament on the one side and the present time on the other, should necessarily be assigned to every book in the whole range of Vedic and Sanskrit literature, and to almost every event of Indian History.

III.It is often assumed without reason that every passage in the Vedas containing philosophical or metaphysical ideas must be looked upon as a subsequent interpolation and that every book treating of a philosophical subject must be considered as having been written after the time of Buddha or after the commencement of the Christian Era. Civilization, philosophy and scientific investigation had their origin, in the opinion of these writers, within the six or seven centuries