We cannot, however, explain the development of the whole of this great literature, if we assume as late a date as round about 1200 or 1500 B.C. as it… - Moriz Winternitz

...We shall probably have to date the beginning of this development to about 2000 or 2500 BC

We cannot explain the development of the whole of this great literature if we assume as late a date as round about 1200 BC or 1500 BC as its starting-point.

Wintemitz refers to A.C. Woolner as rightly commenting on Max Muller's supposition of 1200 B.C. for the Rigveda's beginning: " As far as any philological estimates go , 2000 B.C. remains quite as possible as 1200 B.C. for the earliest mantra."

From the mystical doctrines of the Upanishads, one current of thought may be traced to the mysticism of Persian Sufism, to the mystic, theosophic logos doctrine of the Neo-Platonics and the Alexandrian Christian Mystics, Eckhart and Tauler, and finally to the philosophy of the great German mystic of the nineteenth century, Schopenhauer."

Winternitz (1907), too, felt that since "all the external evidence fails, we are compelled to rely on the evidence out of the history of Indian literature itself, for the age of the Veda. . . . We cannot, however, explain the development of the whole of this great literature, if we assume as late a date as round about 1200 or 1500 B.C. as its starting point. We shall probably have to date the beginning of this development about 2000 or 2500 B.C." (310).