Henry Thomas Colebrooke Quotes

In progress of such researches, it is not perhaps too much to expect that something may yet be gleaned for the advancement of knowledge and improvement of arts at home [in Britain]. In many recent instances, inventive faculties have been tasked to devise anew, what might have been as readily copied from an Oriental type; or unacknowledged imitation has reproduced in Europe, with an air of novelty, what had been for ages familiar to the East. Nor is that source to be considered as already exhausted. In beauty of fabric, in simplicity of process, there pos sibly yet remains something to be learnt from China, from Japan, from India, which the refinement of Europe need not disdain.

Colebrooke also expressed the familiar argument of the eighteenth century in behalf of a liberal spirit between cultures. The West, he stated, “owes a debt of gratitude” to the civilizations of Asia for their contributions in the arts and sciences. In fact, “civilization had its origin in Asia.”

It appears that Aryabhatta affirmed the diurnal revolution of the earth on its axis, and that he accounted for it by a wind or current of aerial fluid, the extent of which, according to the orbit assigned to it by him, corresponds to an elevation of little more than a hundred miles from the surface of the earth : that he possessed the true theory of the causes of lunar and solar eclipses, and disregarded the imaginary dark planets of the mycologists and astrologers, affirming the moon and primary planets (and even the stars) to be essentially dark, and only illumined by the sun: that he noticed the motion of the solstitial and equinoctial points, but restricted it to a regular oscillation, of which he assigned the limit and the period : that he ascribed to the epicycles, by which the motion of a planet is represented, a form varying from the circle and nearly elliptic : that he recognized a motion of the nodes and apsides of all the primary planets, as well as of the moon j though in this instance, as in some others, his censurer imputes to him variance of doctrine.

Connected as those highly polished and refined languages [Sanskrit and Arabic] are with other tongues, they deserve to be studied for the sake of the particular dialects and idioms to which they bear relation; for their own sake, that is, for the literature which appertains to them; and for the analysis of language in general, which has been unsuccessfully attempted on too narrow ground, but may be prosecuted, with effect, upon wider induction.

The more we study ancient Indian philosophy, "the more intimate will the relation be found between the philosophy of Greece and that of India. Whichever is the type or the copy, whichever has borrowed or has lent, certain it is that the one will serve to elucidate the other. The philosophy of India may be employed for a commentary on that of Greece; and conversely, Grecian philosophy will help to explain Indian. That of Arabia, too, avowedly copied from the Grecian model, has preserved much which else might have been lost. A part has been restored through the medium of translation, and more yet [may] be retrieved from Arabic stores.""

The course of inquiry into the arts, as into the sciences, of Asia, cannot fail of leading to much which is curious and instructive. The inquiry extends over regions, the most anciently and the most numerously peopled on the globe. The range of research is as wide as those regions are vast; and as various as the people who inhabit them are diversified. It embraces their ancient and modern history; their civil polity; their long-enduring institutions; their manners and their customs; their languages and their literature; their sciences, speculative and practical: in short, the progress of knowledge among them; the pitch which it has attained; and last, but most important, the means of its extension.... [I]t is in Asia that recorded and authentic history of mankind commences.

"The ancient language of India, the polished Sanskrit, not unallied to Greek and various other languages of Europe, may yet contribute something to their elucidation, and still more to the not unimportant subject of general grammar."'

H. T. Colebrooke (1803) also used this method to calculate the degree of difference between the constellation in which Spring, and hence the vernal equinox, began in the Veda and the constellation in which it began in his own time. He concluded that the Vedas "were not arranged in their present form earlier than the fourteenth century before the Christian era" (284).