Thus Indian society was governed, not by civil, but by ceremonially religious law; while, conversely, the nascent Indian religion ("Brahminism") became not ethical but social in character. These things produced the most momentous consequences. As a "colour line," caste worked very imperfectly. Despite its prohibitions, even the Brahmins became more or less impregnated with Dravidian blood.[192] But as a social system caste continued to function in ways peculiar to itself. The three original castes gradually subdivided into hundreds and even thousands of sub-castes. These sub-castes had little or nothing of the original racial significance. But they were all just as exclusive as the primal trio, and the outcome was a shattering of Indian society into a chaos of rigid social atoms, between which co-operation or even understanding was impossible. The results upon Indian history are obvious. Says a British authority: "The effect of this permanent maintenance of human types is that the population is heterogeneous to the last degree. It is no question of rich and poor, of town and country, of employer and employed: the differences lie far deeper. The population of a district or a town is a collection of different nationalities--almost different species--of mankind that will not eat or drink or intermarry with one another, and that are governed in the more important affairs of life by committees of their own. It is hardly too much to say that by the caste system the inhabitants of India are differentiated into over two thousand species, which, in the intimate physical relations of life, have as little in common as the inmates of a zoological garden."[193]