How the Hindu thinker accounted, by his doctrine of _Karma_, for the striking inequalities and apparent injustice inseparable from mundane existence, the reader has learned in sufficient detail already. As to the _moral_ responsibility of man for his actions, the poets of the Epics had thought out the problem in its various aspects and despairingly left it unsolved. For as Sanjaya, the envoy of the Pandavas to their cousins, sadly says, in the true spirit of agnosticism: “In this respect three opinions are entertained; some say that everything is ordained by God;[132] some say that our acts are the results of free will; and others say that our acts are the results of those of our past lives.”[133] The attribution of righteousness to the gods does not seem to be insisted upon; for Krishna, as we have seen, is particularly prone to guileful arts in order to compass his objects, like the Pallas Athene of Homer, at whose suggestion Pandaros treacherously and unjustifiably wounded Menelaus with an arrow. In regard to the political condition of India in those earlier times we may, I think, gather from the Epics that the petty rulers who shared the land amongst themselves were very numerous--thousands,[134] indeed, if the poet’s statements could be relied upon,--and we need not doubt that it was the perpetual endeavour of the more able and ambitious of these kings to get as many as possible of their fellow chiefs to acknowledge their supremacy. No one who studies the narratives attributed to Valmiki and Vyasa will fail to catch glimpses of the simple sagas which formed the ground-work of the great edifices raised by the Indian poets; but, as I have observed in the Introductory Chapter, the value and extent of what is usually considered historical matter to be traced in the “Ramayana” and “Mahabharata” is so small and so doubtful that it fails to command either my interest or my confidence. It may be due to perversity of character, or to want of historical acumen on my part; but when I am expected to believe that the progress of the _Bhojas_ and their allies eastward may be traced in the legend of Karna, given in the “Mahabharata,” with which the reader of the foregoing pages is familiar, I do not feel inclined to acquiesce. And when I am gravely assured that the romantic story of Satyavati, the fisherman’s daughter, her marriage with Santanu and her previous amour with the father of Vyasa, _although absurd in Vyasa’s own poem_, becomes intelligible,--if we will only put the individual fisherman out of court altogether, _forget_ what the poet tells us about Satyavati, and _imagine_ that the young lady in question was a personage of some importance in the family of the _king of the fishing people_,--I feel such efforts towards constructive history are somewhat beyond my abilities.[135]