Page:History of Bengali Language and Literature.djvu/925

 VII. ] BENGALI LANGUAGE & LITERATURE. 881 stories to explain the origin of things. To ex- plain earthquakes, they had fabricated the story of Vasuki, the great serpent who upholds the earth, as shaking his hydra-heads a little. To explain the origin of the universe they had invented the story of the golden egg that burst ; with regard to the sea their idea was, that there were seven seas —one of curd, one of wine, one of salt, one of milk, and so forth; and as to the earth, that it consisted of seven islands and had a triangular shape. [ do not mean to say that the race, who first formulated the principles of Arithmetic, Trigonometry, Geometry and Astronomy, and from whom the world learned these sciences, was so stupid as not to know the simple truths of Physical Geography; a Bhaskaracharyya or a Varqbamihira certainly knew them, and many things more, in advance of their age. But after the revival of Hinduism the spirit of inquiry had been directed from the material to the metaphysical world ; the masses cared not to know the facts or the laws of the external world, and were content with fables regarding them, because the temporal had no longer any attraction for them. ‘They took the same interest in the outer world as a_ globe-trotter takes in what he sees. Their knowledge of their surroundings was as superficial and as full of mistakes as that of one who merely passes through a country, thinking that this is not his true home. The Hindus showed the subtlest knowledge with regard to that’ world which they considered to be the only real one, and their Metaphysics is a mixture of the simple and the complex, in various grades of spiritual thoughts, springing from those 5