[68] It is not surprising that Max Müller says, “We are not likely to allow ourselves to be persuaded by Dr Gruppe that the only source of religion all over the world was hallucination.”--_Anthropological Religion_, p. 126.--TRANSLATOR’S NOTE. [69] Max Müller remarks: “His (Dr Gruppe’s) definition of religion is at all events too narrow; it might possibly be found to apply to religion, not in its original, but in its most depraved state.”--_Natural Religion_, p. 77.--TRANSLATOR’S NOTE. [70] _Natural Religion_, p. 194. [71] Max Müller does not exclude faith in making this statement, which also occurs in his work _The Origin and Growth of Religion_, as on the next page he says, “What we call sense, reason, and faith are three functions of one and the same perceptive self.”--_Origin and Growth of Religion_, p. 227. CHAPTER X THE VEDIC HYMNS It has been possible to ascertain that the first words pronounced by the most ancient members of the Aryan family are connected by a thread of continuity to those which we use to-day in all languages, whether living or dead; our family would not be a portion of the entire human race, if this continuity of thought did not form a constituent part of the mental equipment of all the other families; but as no others possess in an equal degree with ourselves the archives sufficiently extensive to contain indication of the gradual development of human speech, such as the Veda furnishes, that is the authority to which Max Müller appeals in all his works. And it is precisely because there has been no cessation in the continuity of human thought, that the historical method is the only one capable of linking us with the primitive Aryans; our work will consist in collecting tokens of the long pilgrimage undertaken by our ancestors, and with which we desire to be associated, and which those who come after us must also undertake. “No doubt, between the first daybreak of human thought and the first hymns of praise of the Rig-Veda, composed in the most perfect metre and the most polished language, there may be, nay, there must be a gap that can only be measured by generations, by hundreds, aye, by thousands of years.”[72] The exodus and separation of the Aryan family, belonging as it does to a prehistoric epoch and therefore unchronicled, and the Vedic Hymns--the work of many centuries--having been completed and collected together some hundreds of years before our present era, thus at a time relatively recent, that which constitutes their chief claim to great antiquity in our eyes is that the Hindoo poets or rishis incorporated certain thoughts and words in them whose roots threw out shoots in the primitive Aryan soil before the dispersion of its members.