Note 46 — Chapter III · PROGRESS UNDER ANCIENT RELIGIONS

The most popular basis for rejection of a given system—belief in another—made ultimately possible there the rise of a practically atheistic system capable, wherever embraced, of annulling the burdensome and exclusive system of the Brahmans, which had been obtruded in its worst form,46 though not dominantly, in the new environment. Buddhism, though it cannot have arisen on one man’s initiative in the manner claimed in the legends, even as stripped of their supernaturalist element,47 was in its origin essentially a movement of freethought, such as could have arisen only in the atmosphere of a much mixed society48 where the extreme Brahmanical claims were on various grounds discredited, perhaps even within their own newly-adjusted body. It was stigmatized as “the science of reason,” a term equivalent to “heresy” in the Christian sphere;49 and its definite rejection of the Vedas made it anti-sacerdotal even while it retained the modes of speech of polytheism. The tradition which makes the Buddha50 a prince suggests an upper-class origin for the reaction; and there are traces of a chronic resistance to the Brahmans’ rule among their fellow-Aryans before the Buddhist period.