General Index to Names and Subject Matter

Author(s): M Winternitz
Publisher: Oxford

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INTRODUCTORY NOTE
the compilation of the Index. By the spring of 1898 I had indeed read, and made extracts from, all the volumes that had been published ; I had written some 70,000 slips, and these had been sorted and arranged alphabetically. But in 1898 I left Oxford to return to my own country and to a new sphere of work, and the preparation of the Index had to be interrupted for nearly two years. When I took it up again in 1900 I soon found that the huge mass of slips before me represented only the raw material from which the building had to be constructed.
From the beginning it had been clear to me--and this was also Professor Max Müller's view that this Index volume could not be made like any other Index, but must resemble a Manual of the History of Eastern Religions. For it would have been of little use to collect, under such headings as Ancestor Worship, Animals, Brahman, Buddha, Fire, Funeral Rites, Future Life, God, Gods, Prayer, Sacrifice, Soul, &c., all the passages bearing on these subjects as they occur in the volumes of the Sacred Books of the East. It was necessary to make sub-divisions in such articles, and to arrange the passages under different sub-headings. It was this work of arranging and condensing the raw material that caused so much delay. Many slips had to be rewritten, and the volumes of the Sacred Books had constantly to be referred to, and numerous passages to be verified.
These sub-divisions and sub-headings required most careful consideration. It was not possible to make them according to one uniform scheme; they had to be chosen in each case differently as seemed most suitable for practical purposes. Sometimes it was advisable to make them according to the different religions, sometimes according to the subject-matter. Consistency could not be aimed at—the chief aim was practical usefulness. Sometimes it seemed more practical to arrange the passages under several sub-headings, sometimes it seemed preferable to collect them under one heading, indicating subdivision by dashes (-). But it is hardly necessary to enumerate all the devices by which the compiler has tried to make the Index as handy as possible. The reader will
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