Introduction to the Study of the Hindu Doctrines

in its essence, a Western thought, and that one can already find there, among several other tendencies, the origin and as it were the germ of most of those which developed, long after, among modern Westerners. One should not, therefore, push the use of the analogy we have just pointed out too far; however, maintained within just limits, it can still be of considerable service to those who truly wish to understand antiquity and interpret it in the least hypothetical way possible. Moreover, any danger will be avoided if care is taken to account for everything we know with absolute certainty regarding the special characteristics of the Hellenic Hellenic: relating to ancient Greek culture and civilization. mentality. At its core, the new tendencies encountered in the Greco-Roman world are primarily tendencies toward restriction and limitation. Consequently, the reservations one must make in a comparison with the East must proceed almost exclusively from the fear of attributing more to the ancient Westerners than they actually thought. When we observe that they took something from the East, we should not believe they completely assimilated it, nor should we hasten to conclude that there is an identity of thought. There are many interesting connections to be established—connections that have no equivalent regarding the modern West; but it is nonetheless true that the essential modes of Eastern thought are completely different. By not stepping outside the framework of the Western mentality, even the ancient one, one is inevitably condemned to neglect and misunderstand the aspects of this Eastern thought that are precisely the most important and characteristic. Since it is obvious that the "greater" cannot come from the "lesser" A philosophical principle suggesting that a more complex or profound system cannot originate from a simpler or more limited one; thus, Greece must have borrowed from the more "complete" Eastern traditions., this single difference should suffice, in the absence of any other consideration, to show on which side one finds the civilization that borrowed from the others.

To return to the schema The diagram or conceptual outline of cultural history. we indicated earlier, we must say that its main defect—which is, for that matter, inevitable in any schema—is that it simplifies things a bit too much by representing the divergence as having grown in a continuous fashion from antiquity to the present day. In reality, there were pauses in this divergence, and there were even less distant eras where the West once again received the direct influence of the East: we are referring specifically to the Alexandrian period The era following Alexander the Great's conquests, centered in Alexandria, Egypt, where Greek, Egyptian, and Persian cultures mingled., and also to what the Arabs brought to Europe in the Middle Ages—part of which belonged to them specifically, while the rest was drawn from India. Their influence is well known regarding the development of mathematics, but it was far from being limited to that particular field. The divergence resumed at the Renaissance The cultural movement in Europe (14th-17th centuries) that focused on a "rebirth" of classical antiquity, which the author views as a turning point away from traditional wisdom., when there occurred a