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Florida (30° to 25°) roughly shows the southern progress from the seat of old Brahmanism to the cradle of young Buddhism. These are the extreme limits of Vedism, Brahmanism and proto-Buddhism. South of this the country was known to Brahmanism only to be called savage, and not before the late S[=u]tras (c. 300 B.C.) is one brought as far south as Bombay in the West. The (=Alitareya Br[ra]hmana, which represents the old centre of Brahmanism around Delhi, knows of the [=A]ndhras, south of the God[=a]var[=i) river in the southeast (about the latitude of Bombay and Hayti), only as outer 'Barbarians.' It is quite conceivable that a race of hardy mountaineers, in shifting their home through generations from the hills of Georgia and Tennessee to the subtropical region of Key West (to Cuba), in the course of many centuries might become morally affected. But it seems to us, although the miasmatic plains of Bengal may perhaps present even a sharper contrast to the Vedic region than do Key West and Cuba to Georgia, that the climate in effecting a moral degradation (if pessimism be immoral) must have produced also the effect of mental debility. Now to our mind there is not the slightest proof for the asseveration, which has been repeated so often that it is accepted by many nowadays as a truism, that Buddhism or even post-Buddhistic literature shows any trace of mental decay.[25] There certainly is mental weakness in the Br[=a]hmanas, but these cannot all be accredited to the miasms of Bengal. They are the bones of a religion already dead, kept for instruction in a cabinet; dry, dusty, lifeless, but awful to the beholder and useful to the owner. Again, does Buddhism lose in the comparison from an intellectual point of view when set beside the mazy gropings of the Upanishads? We have shown that dogma was the base of primal pantheism; of real logic there is not a whit. We admire the spirit of the teachers in the Upanishads, but we have very little respect for the logical ability of any early Hindu teachers; that is to say, there is very little of it to admire. The doctors of the Upanishad philosophy were poets, not dialecticians. Poetry indeed waned in the extreme south, and no spirited or powerful literature ever was produced there, unless it was due to foreign influence, such as the religious poetry of Ramaism and the Tamil Sittars. But in secondary subtlety and in the marking of distinctions, in classifying and analyzing on dogmatic premises, as well as in the acceptance of hearsay truths as ultimate verities—we do not see any fundamental
