THE RENAISSANCE IN INDIA
detail the first simpler formulation of the Shastra; but none was exclusive, the three elements are always persent.
In this third period the curious ela-boration of all life into a science and an art assumes extraordinary proportions. The mere mass of the intellectual pro-duction during the period from Asoca well into the Mahomedan epoch is some- thing truly prodigious, as can be seen at once if one studies the account which recent scholarship gives of it, and we must remember that that scholarship as yet only deals with a fraction of what is still lying extant and what is extant is only a small percentage of what was once written and known. There is no- historcal parallel for such an intellectual labour and activity before the invention of printing and the facilities of modernscience ; yet all that mass of research and production and cariosity of detail was accomplished without these facilities and with no better record than the memory
16
