can be none.  The usual practice, however, is to call the Iranian Yima, haoma, etc., to one’s aid if they subserve one’s own view of Yama, soma, and other Hindu parallels, and to discard analogous features as an independent growth if they do not.  This procedure is based as well on the conditions of the problem as on the conditions of human judgment, and must not be criticized too severely; for in fact the two religions here and there touch each other so nearly that to deny a relation between them is impossible, while in detail they diverge so widely that it is always questionable whether a coincidence of ritual or belief be accidental or imply historical connection.

It is scarcely advisable in a concise review of several religions to enter upon detailed criticism of the methods of interpretation that affect for the most part only the earliest of them.  But on one point, the reciprocal relations between the Vedic and Brahmanic periods, it is necessary to say a few words.  Why is it that well-informed Vedic scholars differ so widely in regard to the ritualistic share in the making of the Veda?  Because the extremists on either side in formulating the principles of their system forget a fact that probably no one of them if questioned would fail to acknowledge.  The Rig Veda is not a homogeneous whole.  It is a work which successive generations have produced, and in which are represented different views, of local or sectarian origin; while the hymns from a literary point of view are of varying value.  The latter is a fact which has been ignored frequently, but it is more important than any other.  For one has almost no criteria, with which to discover whether the hymns precede or follow the ritual, other than the linguistic posteriority of the ritualistic literature, and the knowledge that there were priests with a ritual when some of the hymns were composed.  The bare fact that hymns are found rubricated in the later literature is surely no reason for believing that such hymns were made for the ritual.  Now while it can be shown that a large number of hymns are formal, conventional, and mechanical in expression, and while it may be argued with plausibility that these were composed to serve the purpose of an established cult, this is very far from being the case with many which, on other grounds, may be supposed to belong severally to the older and later part of the Rig Veda.  Yet does the new school, in estimating the hymns, never admit this.  The poems always are spoken of as ‘sacerdotal’, ritualistic, without the slightest attempt to see whether this be true of all or of some alone.  We claim that it is not historical, it is not judicious from a literary point of view, to fling indiscriminately together the hymns that are evidently ritualistic and those of other value; for, finally, it is a sober literary judgment that is the court of appeals in regard to whether poetry be poetry or not.  Now let one take a hymn containing, to make it an unexceptionable example, nothing very profound or very beautiful.  It is this well-known