My Library

HISTORY OF THE SIKHS
30
Ramanand
establishes
a comprehensive
sect at Benares,
about
A.D. 1400;
CHAP. II
The first result of the conflict was the institution,
about the end of the fourteenth century, of a comprehensive sect by Ramanand of Benares, a follower of
the tenets of Ramanuj. Unity of faith or of worship
had already been destroyed, and the conquest of the
country by foreigners diminished unity of action among
Learning had likewise
the ministers of religion.
declined, and poetic fancy and family tradition were
allowed to modify the ancient legends of the Turans'
or chronicles, and to usurp the authority of the Vedas.^
to the mixture of the Eastern and Western superstitions, which
took place after the conquests of Alexander, and during the
supremacy of Rome.
Similarly, the influence of Muhammadan learning and civilization in moulding the European mind seems to be underrated
in the present day, although Hallam (Literature of Europe, i.
90, 91, 149, 150, 157, 158, 189, 190) admits our obligations in
physical and even in mental science; and a representative of
Oxford, the critical jet fanciful William Gray (Sketch of English
Prose Literature, pp. 22, 37), not only admires the fictions of the
East, but confesses their beneficial effect on the Gothic genius.
The Arabs, indeed, were the preservers and diffusers of that
science or knowledge which was brought forth in Egypt or
India, which was reduced to order in Greece and Rome, and
which has been so greatly extended in particular directions by
the moderns of the West. The pre-eminence of the Muhammadan over the Christian mind was long conspicuous in the metaphysics of the schoolmen, and it is still apparent in the administrative system of Spain, in the common terms of astronomical
and medicinal science, and in the popular songs of feudal
Europe, which ever refer to the Arabian prophet and to Turks
and Saracens, or expatiate on the actions of the Cid, a Christian
hero with a Musalman title.
Whewell (History of Inductive Science, i. 22, 276), in
demonstrating that the Arabs did very little, if aught, to
advance exact science, physical or metaphysical, and in likening them to the servant who had the talent but put it not to use,
might yet have excused them on the plea that the genius of the
people was directed to the propagation of religious truth to
—
subjecting the Evil Principle to the Good in Persia, to restoring
Monotheism in India, and to the subversion of gross idolatry
regions of Africa still untrodden by Europeans. With this view
of the English Professor jnay be contrasted the opinion of Humboldt, who emphatically says that the Arabs are to be regarded
sense
as the proper founders of the physical sciences, in the
which we are now accustomed to attach to the term. (Kosmos,
Sabine's trans., ii. 212.)
1
Modern criticism is not disposed to allow an ancient date
are both numerto the Purans, and doubtless the interpolations
of
ous and recent, just as the ordinary copies of the rhapsodies
to dynasties
the Rajput Bhat, or Bard, Chand, contain allusions
and events subsequent to Pirthi Raj and Mahmud. The difficulty
and perhaps also oblies in separating the old from the new,
circumstance that the
jectors have too much lost sight of the
Mahabharata are
criticized and less corrupted Ramayana and
mclmed to
only the chief of the Purans. They seem needlessly
conventional
entirely the authority or authenticity of the
m
reject