Chapter (অধ্যায়): HISTORICAL EVOLUTION OF INDIA PAGE-158Page: 158 of 519
the science of mathematics the largest of any race, ancient or modern, and to their knowledge of chemistry, of metallic compounds in medicine, their scale of musical notes, their invention of the bow-instruments-(all) of great service in the building of modern European civilisation. It led them to invent the science of building up the child-mind through shining fables, of which every child in every civilised country learns in a nursery or a school and carries an impress through life.
Behind and before this analytical keenness, covering it as in a velvet sheath, was the other great mental peculiarity of the race-poetic insight. Its religion, its philosophy, its history, its ethics, its politics were all inlaid in a flower-bed of poetic imagery-the miracle of language which was called Sanskrit or "perfected", lending itself to expressing and manipulating them better than any other tongue. The aid of melodious numbers was invoked even to express the hard facts of mathematics.
This analytical power and the boldness of poetical visions which urged it onward are the two great internal causes in the make-up of the Hindu race. They together formed, as it were, the keynote to the national character. This combination is what is always making the race press onwards beyond the senses-the secret of those speculations which are like the steel blades the artisans used to manufacture-cutting through bars of iron, yet pliable enough to be easily bent into a circle.
They wrought poetry in silver and gold; the symphony of jewels, the maze of marble wonders, the music of colours, the fine fabrics which belong more to the fairyland of dreams than to the real-have back of them thousands of years of working of this national trait.
Arts and sciences, even the realities of domestic life, are covered with a mass of poetical conceptions, which are pressed forward till the sensuous touches the supersenuous, and the real gets the rose-hue of the unreal.