and recognised ascendancy.  However hard the laws that governed the Hindu family might press on individual members, the family itself remained a living organism, united by sacred ties—­indeed more than a mere living organism, for the actually living organism was one with that part of it which had already passed away and that which was still awaiting rebirth.  It is undoubtedly in the often dignified and beautiful relations which bind the Hindu family together that Hinduism is seen at its best, and Hindu literature delights in describing and exalting them.

Traditional usages, or Smriti, were ultimately embodied in codes of law, of which the most famous is that of Manu; and though disfigured by many social servitudes repugnant to the Western mind, they represent a lofty standard of morality based upon a conception of duty, or Dharma, narrowly circumscribed, but solid and practical.  Though these codes of law, and notably that of Manu in the form in which we possess them, are of uncertain but probably much later date, they afford us, in conjunction with the vast body of earlier religious and philosophic literature, and with a certain amount of scientific literature dealing with astronomy and astrology, with mathematics and specially with geometry, and with grammar and prosody, sufficient materials for appraising, with a fair measure of accuracy, the stage of progress which the Aryan Hindus had reached in the sixth century B.C.  When the world was young, and they revelled in their recent conquest of a fair portion in it, they delighted to worship the bright gods who had helped them to possess it, and worship and war were the ties that kept their loose tribal organisation together.  Out of the primitive conditions of nomadic and pastoral life, under the leadership of tribal elders who were both priests and warriors, they gradually passed, after many vicissitudes of peace and war, into more settled forms of agricultural life and developed into distinct and separate polities of varying vitality, but still united by the bond of common religious and social institutions in the face of the indigenous populations whom they drove before them, or reduced into subjection and slowly assimilated as they moved down towards and into the Gangetic plain.  As the conditions of life grew more complex, with increasing prosperity and probably longer intervals of peace, differentiation between classes and professions grew more marked.  There was time and leisure for thinking as well as for fighting, for contemplation as well as for action.  The “bright” gods that Nature had conceived for the early Aryans were fashioned and refashioned by speculations already laden with the gloom of melancholy and awesomeness that pervades India.  Caste, it may be inferred from the Sanskrit word Varna, which means colour, originally discriminated only between the Aryan conquerors of relatively fair complexion and the darker aborigines they had subdued.  It was extended to connote the various stratifications into which Hindu society was settling, and in the stringent rules which governed the constitution of each caste, and the relations between the different castes, the old exclusiveness of tribal customs was perpetuated and intensified.