India: What can it Teach Us?

A Course of Lectures

DELIVERED BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

INTRODUCTION

Professor Max Müller has been so long and widely known in the world of letters as to render any formal introduction unnecessary. He has been from his early youth an assiduous student of philology, justly regarding it as an important key to history and an invaluable auxiliary to intellectual progress. A glance at his personal career will show the ground upon which his reputation is established.

Friedrich Maximilian Müller, the son of Wilhelm Müller, the Saxon poet, was born at Dessau, December 6th, 1823. He matriculated at Leipzig in his eighteenth year, giving his principal attention to classical philology, and receiving his degree in 1843. He immediately began a course of Oriental studies, chiefly Sanskrit, under the supervision of Professor Brockhaus, and in 1844 engaged in his translation of the "Hitopadesa." He removed from Leipzig to Berlin, and attended the lectures of Bopp, Rücker, and Schelling. The next year he went to Paris to listen to Eugene Burnouf at the Collége de France. He now began the collecting of material for his great quarto edition of the "Rig-Veda Sanhita" and the "Commentary of Ságanadránja." He visited England for this purpose to examine the manuscripts in the Bodleian Library and at the Indian House. At the recommendation of H. H. Wilson, the Orientalist, he was commissioned by the East India Company to publish this edition in England at their expense. The first volume appeared in 1849, and five others followed during the next few years.

India: What can it Teach Us? by F. Max Müller