India: What can it teach us?: A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of CambridgeMüller, F. Max (Friedrich Max)
Philosophy
India: What can it teach us?: A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge
Müller, F. Max (Friedrich Max)
India; Sanskrit literature -- History and criticism; Vedas
This seems to me, if not the more primitive, yet the more natural form
of the story--showing a deeper knowledge of human nature and more
wisdom than even the wisdom of Solomon.[10]
Many of you may have studied not only languages, but also the Science
of Language, and is there any country in which some of the most
important problems of that science, say only the growth and decay of
dialects, or the possible mixture of languages, with regard not only
to words, but to grammatical elements also, can be studied to greater
advantage than among the Aryan, the Dravidian, and the Mu_n_da
inhabitants of India, when brought in contact with their various
invaders and conquerors, the Greeks, the Yue-tchi, the Arabs, the
Persians, the Moguls, and lastly the English?
Again, if you are a student of Jurisprudence, there is a history of
law to be explored in India, very different from what is known of the
history of law in Greece, in Rome, and in Germany, yet both by its
contrasts and by its similarities full of suggestions to the student
of Comparative Jurisprudence. New materials are being discovered every
year, as, for instance, the so-called Dharma or Samayâ_k_ârika Sûtras,
which have supplied the materials for the later metrical law-books,
such as the famous Laws of Manu. What was once called "The Code of
Laws of Manu," and confidently referred to 1200, or at least 500 B.C.,
is now hesitatingly referred to perhaps the fourth century A.D., and
called neither a Code, nor a Code of Laws, least of all, the Code of
Laws of Manu.
If you have learned to appreciate the value of recent researches into
the antecedents of all law, namely the foundation and growth of the
simplest political communities--and nowhere could you have had better
opportunities for it than here at Cambridge--you will find a field of
observation opened before you in the still-existing village estates in
India that will amply repay careful research.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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