Page 581 - Lokmanya Tilak Samagra (khand 2)

362 SAMAGRA TILAK - 2 • THE ARCTIC HOME
autochthonous there was no necessity of going beyond the results
of Comparative Philology to ascertain the degree of civilisation
attained by the undivided Aryans. But now we see that the culture
of the Neolithic Aryans is obviously only a relic, an imperfect
fragment, of the culture attained by the undivided Aryans in
their Arctic horne; and it would, therefore, be unreasonable to
argue that such and such civilisation, or culture cannot be
predicated of the undivided Aryans simply because words indicating
the same are found only in some and not in all the Aryan languages.
In other words, though we may accept the result of Compara-
tive Philology so far as they go, we shall have to be more cautious
hereafter in inferring that such and such a thing was not known
to the primitive Aryans because common etymological equations
for the same cannot be discovered in aH the Aryan languages.
We have, it is true, no means of ascertaining how much of the
original civilisation was lost in the deluge, but we cannot, on that
account, deny that some portion of it must have been irrecoverably
lost in the great cataclysm that destroyed the original home.
Under these circumstances all that we can safely assert is that
the degree of culture disclosed by Comparative Philology is the
lowest or the minimum that can be predicated of the undivided
Aryans. It is important to bear this reservation in mind because
undue importance is sometimes attached to the results of
Comparative Philology by a kind of reasoning which appeared
all right so long the question of the site of the original horne was
unsettled. But now that we know that Aryan race and religion
are both inter-Glacial and their ultimate origin is lost in geological
antiquity, it does not stand to reason to suppose that the inter-
Glacial Aryans were a race of savages. The archreologists, it is
true, have established the succession of the ages of Stone, Bronze
and Iron; and according to this theory the Aryan race must have
once been in the Stone age. But there is nothing in archreology
which requires us to place the Stone age of the Aryan races in
post-Glacial times; and when Comparative Philology has
established the fact that undivided Aryans were acquainted with
the use of metals, it becomes clear that the degree of civilisation
reached by the undivided Aryans in their Arctic home was higher
than the culture of the Stone age or even that of the age of metals.
I have referred in the first chapter of the book to the opinion of
some eminent archreologists that the metal age was introduced