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… - Henry Thomas Colebrooke

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.

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.”