Chips from a German Workshop, Volume 4: Essays Chiefly on the Science of LanguageMüller, F. Max (Friedrich Max)
Religion
Chips from a German Workshop, Volume 4: Essays Chiefly on the Science of Language
Müller, F. Max (Friedrich Max)
Comparative linguistics; Folklore; Literature -- History and criticism; Mythology; Religions
Although, as we shall see, the career of Mr. Colebrooke, as a servant of
the East India Company, was highly distinguished, and in its
vicissitudes, as here told by his son, both interesting and instructive,
yet his most lasting fame will not be that of the able administrator,
the learned lawyer, the thoughtful financier and politician, but that of
the founder and father of true Sanskrit scholarship in Europe. In that
character Colebrooke has secured his place in the history of the world,
a place which neither envy nor ignorance can ever take from him. Had he
lived in Germany, we should long ago have seen his statue in his native
place, his name written in letters of gold on the walls of academies; we
should have heard of Colebrooke jubilees and Colebrooke scholarships. In
England, if any notice is taken of the discovery of Sanskrit--a
discovery in many respects equally important, in some even more
important, than the revival of Greek scholarship in the fifteenth
century--we may possibly hear the popular name of Sir William Jones and
his classical translation of Sakuntala; but of the infinitely more
important achievements of Colebrooke, not one word. The fact is, the
time has not yet come when the full importance of the Sanskrit philology
can be appreciated by the public at large. It was the same with Greek
philology. When Greek began to be studied by some of the leading spirits
in Europe, the subject seemed at first one of purely literary curiosity.
When its claims were pressed on the public, they were met by opposition,
and even ridicule; and those who knew least of Greek were most eloquent
in their denunciations. Even when its study had become more general, and
been introduced at universities and schools, it remained in the eyes of
many a mere accomplishment--its true value for higher than scholastic
purposes being scarcely suspected. At present we know that the revival
of Greek scholarship affected the deepest interests of humanity, that it
was in reality a revival of that consciousness which links large
portions of mankind together, connects the living with the dead, and
thus secures to each generation the full intellectual inheritance of our
race. Without that historical consciousness the life of man would be
ephemeral and vain. The more we can see backward, and place ourselves in
real sympathy with the past, the more truly do we make the life of
former generations our own, and are able to fulfill our own appointed
duty in carrying on the work which was begun centuries ago in Athens and
at Rome. But while the unbroken traditions of the Roman world, and the
revival of Greek culture among us, restored to us the intellectual
patrimony of Greece and Rome only, and made the Teutonic race in a
certain sense Greek and Roman, the discovery of Sanskrit will have a
much larger influence. Like a new intellectual spring, it is meant to
revive the broken fibres that once united the Southeastern with the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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