Page:Footfalls of Indian History.djvu/39

22 FOOTFALLS OF INDIAN HISTORY sophy of the Upanishads. Cities would have crumbled into dust, temples and carvings would have succumbed in a few aeons to the ravages of time. Human thought, written on the least permanent and most ephemeral of all materials, is nevertheless the most enduring of all the proofs of our antiquity. Who shall say that we have not chosen the better part? Every generation destroys the parchment of our record, and yet a million generations only make its truth the more assured. We can hardly dig so deep into the past as to come upon the time when in Egypt, or Greece, or Crete, or Babylon, the name of India had not already a definite sound and association. At the very dawn of history in Europe, her thought and scholarship were already held in that respect which is akin to awe. His old tutor in the fourth century before Christ begs Alexander to bring him an Indian scholar! There is no n&ed for discontent in the Indian mind, if those activities of which the historic muse can take account, activities intertribal, international, political, began for her comparatively late. India, alone of all the nations of antiquity, is still young, still growing, still keeping a firm hold upon her past, still reverently striving of it to weave her future. Are not these things enough for any single people?

At the same time, when these conditions are loyally recognised and accepted, we cannot doubt that the result will be a continual snatching of new morsels out of the night of the prehistoric to be