from the human hive which settled on the mountainous slopes of Thibet
between the summits of the Himalaya and the Caucasus.

"The character of the primitive ideas of that horde called by its
lawgiver the people of God, no doubt to secure its unity, and perhaps
also to induce it to maintain his laws and his system of government
--for the Books of Moses are a religious, political, and civil code
--that character bears the authority of terror; convulsions of nature
are interpreted with stupendous power as a vengeance from on high. In
fact, since this wandering tribe knew none of the ease enjoyed by a
community settled in a patriarchal home, their sorrows as pilgrims
inspired them with none but gloomy poems, majestic but blood-stained.
In the Hindoos, on the contrary, the spectacle of the rapid recoveries
of the natural world, and the prodigious effects of sunshine, which
they were the first to recognize, gave rise to happy images of
blissful love, to the worship of Fire and of the endless
personifications of reproductive force. These fine fancies are lacking
in the Book of the Hebrews. A constant need of self-preservation amid
all the dangers and the lands they traversed to reach the Promised
Land engendered their exclusive race-feeling and their hatred of all
other nations.

"These three Scriptures are the archives of an engulfed world. Therein
lies the secret of the extraordinary splendor of those languages and
their myths. A grand human history lies beneath those names of men and
places, and those fables which charm us so irresistibly, we know not
why. Perhaps it is because we find in them the native air of renewed
humanity."

Thus, to him, this threefold literature included all the thoughts of