Leopold von Schroeder

"The Indians are the nation of romanticists of antiquity. The Germans are the romantics of modem times. SentImentality and feelings for Nature are common to both German and Indian poetry."

"Nearly all the philosophical and mathematical doctrines attributed to Pythagoras are derived from India."

"If we consider the results obtained together, we will not be able to doubt the conclusion to be drawn from them. The ancient priestly geometry of the Indians not only knew the Pythagorean theorem, but it even played the main role in their calculations; with its help, they constructed elements that the Greeks found in a completely different way; with its help, they also found the irrational quantities. And it was precisely these two things that Pythagoras introduced into the Greek-Italian world; these two things, according to the Greeks, he invented. Indeed, even more! The way in which Pythagoras proved his theorem was also, in all likelihood, the same as that which we find in the Vedic Shulba Sutras. After examining the Shulba Sutras, we could have said: If Pythagoras really was in India, as we previously suggested, and initiated himself into the priestly wisdom of the Brahmins, then he could have brought precisely these theorems of geometric science to Greece; — and history has been telling us for several millennia now that this was indeed the case!"

"Schroeder wrote in 1887, responding to the conventional philhellenist insistence that the Greeks were able to form everything in their own image: “But the whole cultural evolution of the Indians can be said to be unique and autonomous to a higher degree than that of the Greeks, who were, already very early on, influenced by the Egypt, Phoenicia and other countries.’’"

"Hereafter, we will have to reckon again and again with Japan, indeed, with the Orient as a whole. Orientalistik will become a practical field of study, no longer what it was previously, a scrupulously avoided domain of dry as dust pedants. A chair for Japanology will soon be created [actually, the first came in 1914]. But chairs are not the only thing — and they are not the most important thing in the world. In hundreds and thousands of canals the life blood of the peoples is flowing back and forth. From now on will it circulate in a totally different, powerful way, between the Orient and Occident ... and not only will the Occident act on the Orient, but the Orient will also act on the Occident."

"Leopold von Schroeder's interest in the problem of the Aryan came from completely different sources than that of Heinrich Zimmer and would be worth a more detailed presentation. ... In his lectures on "India's Literature and Culture in Historical Development" (1887) he presents Indian culture from this perspective. However, he is far removed from the German-ethnic view of history that was increasingly practiced in the capital of the German Empire at the time, and initially leans much more towards its antipodes in Basel. He took his cue from Jakob Burckhardt and Friedrich Nietzsche, who do not focus on the national community but on the individual, the new Dionysian human being, and deny the state, as well as traditional church education, the ability to form this new human being and perfect him for his task in history. However, what is meant in a generally philosophical sense by Burckhardt and Nietzsche becomes very consciously German in Schroeder's implementation...."