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LECTURE IV.
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strange to us, but must have been perfectly natural in an earlier stage of religious thought, for we meet ; with the same ideas everywhere, whenever we are able to trace back the growth of religious concepts to their first beginnings, not only among the Aryan nations, but in Africa, in America, and even in Australia, though nowhere with the same clearness and fulness as in the hymns of the Vedic Aryans.
I have often expressed my opinion that we ought to be careful in ascribing the same high antiquity to everything occurring in the Rig-veda. Not that I retract what I tried to prove in'my 'History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature,' that the whole collection of the hymns must have been finished to the last letter before the beginning of the Brâhmana period. Nor am I aware that a single weak joint has been discovered by any of my numerous critics in the chain of arguments on which I relied. But scientific honesty obliges me nevertheless to confess openly that I cannot even now feel quite convinced in my own mind that all the hymns, all the verses, all the words and syllables in our text of the Rig-veda are really of the same high antiquity. No doubt, we should approach all such questions without any preconceived opinions, but we cannot on the other hand forget all we have been taught by a study of post-Vedic literature, or by a study of other ancient literatures. We must wait for further evidence, and be careful not to force these zesearches into a false direction by premature dicta. In order to give a specimen of what I mean, I shall give a translation of the well-known hymn to Visvakarman from the last Mandala, a Mandala which has generally been considered, though, as
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