Product Review

Some studies I have been working on in earlier times have had a lasting influence on the direction of my thoughts. On the following pages I have tried to make my efforts fertile, in the hope to encourage others to take up similar studies and to give them some helpful advice along their journey. The layman is the expert of laymanism, as it were, and so he may succeed in ways that are unpermitted to the professional. As soon as the provisional stimulation and explanation has taken place, the neophyte has to entrust himself to the guidance of competent scholars. At the end of this book a short list of literature will provide the necessary grip for further studying. The title „Aryan World-view“ isn't entirely free of objection. „Indo-Aryan“ would have been more precise, or even „ancient Aryan“, if need be. But the composer fears to discourage just the reader he wishes to interest, by using a learned-sounding word. Let be said right here that in this little book „Aryan“ is not meant in the much debated and anyway difficult to limit sense of a problematic primeval race, but in the sensu proprio, meaning, to characterize the people that descended, several millennia ago, from the Central Asian plateau into the valleys of the Indus and the Ganges and who remained pure by obeying strict caste laws for a long period to keep themselves from mingling with strange races. These people called themselves the Aryan, that is to say the noblemen or the lords. Vienna, January 1905 Houston Stewart Chamberlain.