Whatever sphere of the human mind you may select for your special study, whether it be language, or religion, or mythology, or philosophy, whether it… - Friedrich Max Müller

There is no Aryan race in blood, but whoever, through the imposition of hands, whether of his parents or his foreign masters, has received the Aryan blessing, belongs to that unbroken spiritual succession which began with the first apostles of that noble speech, and continues to the present day in every part of the globe. Aryan, in scientific language, is utterly inapplicable to race. It means language and nothing but language ; and if we speak of Aryan race at all, we should know that it means no more than Aryan speech.

The hostile spirit of a party, which has been working for the last years, particularly in this country, to attack all the theories of the Sanscrit antiquarians, has chosen the modern languages of India as a weak point, in order to prove that, as they have no connexion by their grammatical system with the pretended old language of India, the Sanscrit, this sacred language itself has never exercised any real influence upon the people, just as they have tried to prove that the literature, the religion, morals and philosophy of the Brahmins have never historically existed but in the hands of some foreign intriguing priests.

Muller may have well felt the need to stress that "an ethnologist who speaks of an Aryan race, Aryan eyes and hair, and Aryan blood is as great a sinner as a linguist who speaks of a dolicocephalic dictionary or a brachycephalic grammar"; after all, it was he who had been a principal cause in such misconceptions through his earlier remarks on the common blood that the "English soldier" shared with the "dark Bengali".