through Persia and India.  But Persia was dead, in pralaya; you could expect no splendor, no mark of the Crest-Wave’s passing, there.  So Alexander, rising by his genius and towering ideas to the plane where these great motions are felt, skips you lightly across dead Persia, knocks upon the doors of India to say that it is dawn and she must be up and doing; and subsides.  I doubt he carried her any cultural impulse, in the ordinary sense; it is our Euro-American conceit to imagine the Greek was the highest thing in civilization in the world at that time.  We may take it that Indian civilization was far higher and better in all esentials; certainly the Greeks who went there presently, and left a record, were impressed with that fact.  You shall see; out of their own mouths we will convict them.  It is the very burden of Megasthenes’ song.

Alexander had certain larger than Greek conceptions, which one must admire in him.  Though he overthrew the Persians, he never made the mistake of thinking them an inferior race.  On the contrary, he respected them highly; and proposed to make of them and his Greeks and Mecedoinians one homogeneous people, in which the Persian qualities of aristocracy should supply a need he felt in Europeans.  The Law made use of his intention, partially, and to the furtherance of its own designs.—­His method of treating the conquered was (generally) far more Persian or Asiatic than Greek; that is to say, far more humane and decent than barbarous.  He took a short cut to his broad ends, and married all his captains to Persian ladies, himself setting the example; whereas most Greeks would have dealt with the captive women very differently.  So that it was a kind of enlightenment he set out with, and carried across Persia, through Afghanistan, and into the Punjab,—­which, we may note, was but the outskirts of the real India, into which he never penetrated; and it may yet be found that he went by no means so far as is supposed; but let that be.  So now, at any rate, enough of him; he has brought us where we are to spend this evening.

For a student of history, there is something mysterious and even —­to use a very vile drudge of a word—­’unique’ about India.  Go else where you will, and so long as you can posit certainly a high civilization, and know anything of its events, you can make some shift to arrange the history.  None need boggle really at any Chinese date after about 2350 B.C.; Babylon is fairly settled back to about 4000; and if you cannot depend on assigned Egyptian dates, at least there is a reasonably know sequence of dynasties back through four or five millennia.  But come to India, and alas, where are you?  All out of it, chronologically speaking; enough; very likely, the flotsam and jetsam of several hundred thousand years.  I have no doubt the Puranas are crowded with history; but how much of what is related is to be taken as plain fact; how much as ‘blinds’; how much as symbolism—­only the Adepts know.