vi] ETtNiVOLOGY AND CASTE 347
in all parts of the world, and that their appearance is probably
due to that tendency to vary, and to perpetuate beneficial
variations, which seems to be a law of social no less than of
physical development. However this may be, it is clear that
the growth of the caste instinct must have been greatly
promoted and stimulated by certain characteristic peculiarities
of the Indian intellect-its lax hold of facts, its indifference' to
action, its absorption in dreams, its exaggerated reverence for
tradition, its passion for endless division and subdivision, its
acute sense of minute technical distinctions, its pedantic
tendency to press a principle to its farthest logical conclusion,
and its remarkable capacity for imitating and adapting social
ideas and usages of whatever origin. It is through this
imitative faculty that the myth of the four castes-evolved in
the first instance by some speculative Brahman, and reproduced
in the popular versions of the Ramayana which the educated
Hindu villager studies as diligently as the English rustic used
to read his Bible-has attained its wide currency as the model
to which Hindu society ought to conform. That it bears no
relation to the actual facts of life is, in the view of its adherents,
an irrelevant detail. It descends from remote antiquity, it has
the sanction of the Brahmans, it is an article of faith, and
every one seeks to bring his own caste within one or other of
the traditional classes. Finally, as M. Senart has pointed out,
the whole caste system, with its scale of social merit and
demerit and its endless gradations of status, is in remarkable
accord with the philosophic doctrine of transmigration and
karma. Every Hindu believes that his spiritual status at any
given time is determined by the sum total of his past lives: he
is born to an immutable karma, what more natural than that
he should be born into an equally immutable caste?
The conclusions which this chapter seeks to establish may Summary.
now be summed up. They are these:-
(I) There are seven main physical types in India, of which
the Dravidian alone is, or may be, indigenous. The Indo-
Aryan, the Mongoloid, and the Turko-Iranian types are in the
main of foreign origin. The Aryo-Dravidian, the Mongolo-
Dravidian, and the Scytho-Dravidian are composite types
formed by crossing with the Dravidians.
(2) The dominant influence in the formation of these types
was the physical seclusion of India, involving the consequence
that the various invaders brought few women with them and
took the women of the country to wife.
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