वेदों की प्राचीनता एवं काल-निर्णय / ओरायन (लोकमान्य बाल गंगाधर तिलक - खगोलीय वैदिक शोध)

440 THE ARCTIC HOME IN THE VEDAS.
whether it was of a higher type than the one we can predicate
of them simply on linguistic grounds. We have seen above
that in the case of the mythological deities and their worship
the Polar character of many of the deities at once enables us
to assign them to the primitive period even when their names
are not found in all the Aryan languages; and the results of
Comparative Philology regarding primitive Aryan culture will
have to be checked and revised in the same way. The very
fact that after compulsary dispersion from their mother-land
the surviving Aryans, despite the fragmentary civilisation they
carried with them, were able to establish their supremacy over
the races they came across in their migrations from the original
home at the beginning of the post-Glacial period, and that
they succeeded, by conquest or assimilation, in Aryanising
the latter in language, thought and religion under circumstances
which could not be expected to be favourable to them, is
enough to prove that the original Aryan civilisation must
have been of a type far higher than that of the non-Aryan races,
or than the one found among the Aryan races that migrated
southward after the destruction of their home by the Ice Age.
So long as the Aryan races inhabiting the northern parts of
Europe in the beginning of the Neolithic age were believed
to be 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 home; and it would, there-
fore, 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 results of Comparative Philology
so far as they go, we shall have to be more cautious hereafter