"No nation on earth can vie with the Hindus in respect of the antiquity oftheir civilization and the antiquity of their religion." ... "In a metaphysical point of view we fmd among the Hindus all the fundamental ideas of those vast systems which, regarded merely as the offspring offantasy, nevertheless inspire admiration on account of the boldness of flight and of the faculty of human mind to elevate itself to such remote ethereal regions. We find among them all the principles of Pantheism, Spinozism and Hegelianism, of God as being one with the universe; spiritual life of mankind; and of the return of the emanative sparks after death to their divine origin; of the uninterrupted alternation between life and death, which is nothing else but a transition between different modes of existence. All this we find among the philosophies of the Hindus exhibited as clearly as by our modem philosophers more than three thousand years since."