كنت أعرف الناس؛ يظٌنون بأفكارهم لئلا يتلقاها الآخرون ببرود وجفاء، كنت أعلم أنهم يحيون ويتحركون مخدوعين خادعين، متنكرين متسترين، غرباء عن البشر، غرباء … - Friedrich Max Müller

Still the child betrays the passions of the man, and there are hymns, though few in number, in the Veda, so full of thought and speculation that at this early period no poet in any other nation could have conceived them. I give but one specimen, the 129th hymn of the tenth book of the Rig-veda. It is a hymn which long ago attracted the attention of that eminent scholar H. T. Colebrooke, and of which, by the kind assistance of a friend, I am enabled to offer a metrical translation. In judging it we should hear in mind that it was not written by a gnostic or by a pantheistic philosopher, but by a poet who felt all these doubts and problems as his own, without any wish to convince or to startle, only uttering what had been weighing on his mind, just as later poets would sing the doubts and sorrows of their heart.

This . . . shows, better than anything else, how violent a shock was given by the discovery of Sanskrit to prejudices most deeply engrained in the mind of every educated man. The most absurd arguments found favor for a time, if they could only furnish a loophole by which to escape the unpleasant conclusion that Greek and Latin were of the same kith and kin as the language of the black inhabitants of India.

पाँचवीं सदी ईस्वी पूर्व में बौद्ध धर्म का उदय हुआ। यह ऐसा धर्म था जो वैदिक धर्म के अवशेषों पर निर्मित हुआ और इसने परम्परावादी ब्राह्मणों के द्वारा वेदों को जो दैवी सत्ता प्रदान की गई थी उसको अस्वीकार किया।