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1074
THE KEY OF KNOWLEDGE.
now is: whether Jainism borrowed from others and perfected their teachings, or whether the fragmentary, incomplete and mythological scriptures of the others are grounded upon the scientific explanation of Jainism ? The answer to this is easily furnished by the fact that the literatüre of mythological sects could not be
would seem--by the modern investigator that all men who lived contemporaneously with or prior to the time of the cave-man of Northern Europe or elsewhere must be as uncultured as he. For the different mythologies that have been examined by us in this book prove--as eloquently and unerringly as the implements left behind by the cave-dwellers of the past - that their authors were familiar with and have bequeathed to us truths which are almost wholly beyond the comprehension of the modern man. This is sufficient to show that the prevalence of gross ignorance in certain parts of the world is not necessarily incompatible with full enlightenment in other places at one and the same time. In India every thing points to the existence, for a very very long time in the past, of full enlightenment and high culture, as in the case of Jainas, side by side with extreme ignorance and savage barbarism characteristic of certain nomadic tribes who led a wandering life in the forests, shunning civilisation, and some of whom even lived by such inhuman practices as thugee. This co-existence of high culture with extreme barbarism, it would seem, is not peculiar to any particular country or age, for we find even to-day unmitigated cannibalism and savagery prevailing simultaneously, and, in some places almost side by side, with what has been claimed to be great enlightenment and culture. Suppose our descendants, some five or ten thousand years hence, were to discover the relics of cannibalistic barbarism in certain caves among the rocks of the Dark Continent and in some way to determine their precise age; would they be entitled to conclude that the whole world in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries of the Christian era was inhabited by men who knew no culture and ate their fellowmen? Our laboured' conclusions about the pri mitive man are exactly of the same type, and are no more valid than the one of our descendants under the above-mentioned circumstances would be.
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