avoid taking a position of critical superiority, approving and condemning, selecting and rejecting, and comparing all with what appeared to be the simple meaning of the text itself. This would be a very welcome labor, but also an extremely difficult one; and the preparations for it are not yet sufficiently made; it may be looked forward to as one of the results of future study.
A third way, leading in quite another direction, would be this: to approach the text only as a philologist, bent upon making a version of it exactly as it stands, representing just what the words and phrases appear to say, without intrusion of anything that is not there in recognizable form: thus reproducing the scripture itself in Western guise, as nearly as the nature of the case admits, as a basis whereon could afterward be built such fabric of philosophic interpretation as should be called for; and also as a touchstone to which could be brought for due testing anything that claimed to be an interpretation. The maker of such a version would not need to be versed in the subtleties of the later Hindu philosophical systems; he should even carefully avoid working in the spirit of any of them. Nor need he pretend to penetrate to the hidden sense of the dark sayings that pass under his pen, to comprehend it and set it forth; for then there would inevitably mingle itself with his version much that was subjective and doubtful, and that every successor would have to do over again. Working conscientiously as Sanskrit scholar only, he might hope to bring out something of permanent and authoritative character, which should serve both as help and as check to those that came after him. He would carefully observe all identities and parallelisms of phraseology, since in texts like these the word is to no small extent more than the thing, the expression dominating the thought: the more the quantities are unknown, the less will it answer to change their symbols in working out an equation. Of all leading and much-used terms, in case the rendering could not be made uniform, lie would maintain the identity by a liberal quotation of the word itself in parenthesis after its translation, so that the sphere of use of each could be made out in the version somewhat as in the original, by the comparison of parallel passages; and so that the student should not run the risk of having a difference of statement which might turn out important covered from his eyes by an apparent identity of phrase—or the contrary.
