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8 Works of Pandit Guru Datta Vidyarthi
like all other things that live or are of organised growth, is subject
to constant variations, to variations, depending partly on the laws
of development of phonetic organs, partly on external circumstances
of fusion and introduction of foreign languages, and partly on the
laws of the evolution of human thought itself. Owing to this and
many other causes, all living languages are daily undergoing
changes, which accumulate and appear after a sufficiently long
interval to have created very different, though cognate, languages.
Any thing, thought or philosophic system that is invested with
linguistic garb, therefore, requires for its correct interpretation that
the laws which govern those linguistic variations and the variations
of the sense of words should be carefully studied. Otherwise, our
interpretation would suffer for misconception and anachronism.
To take a concrete example, let us consider the case of the Roman
Republic. In the time of the Roman Republic, when public press
was unknown, news unheard of, locomotive engines undreamt, and
other means that engender or facilitate the communication of
indelible impression of human thought or reason, unthought of,
and when Forum was the only place of resort for all audience, and
oratory had a totally different meaning from that of modern times,
the Senate signified a different institution from what it now is;
Republic or democracy of the people—the people then existing—
was what would be to us something like oligarchy, though very
different from it in many essential features. Now a reader studying
the literature of the period corresponding to the Roman Republic
would find his information of the period incommensurate with
facts, if, on account of his being unguided in his studies, the words
Democracy, Republic, and the like, were to call forth before his mind
what they now signify. Such a knowledge would be inconsistent
with itself, a medley of two epochs, and would be such as, on critical
examination, would be termed sheer nonsense.
Thirdly,
the Contemporarian method. The applications of
this method in the domain of history are, beyond doubt, various
and most important. But not the less important are its applications
in the fixing of the dates, or the succession of periods, of the Puranas,
the Darshanas, the Upanishads, Manu, the Ramayana, the
Mahabharata, and so on. Various professors have fruitlessly tried
to fix dates of these writings by searching in them, in most cases in
vain, for any well-established consistent historical facts. But far