For one has almost no criteria, with which to discover whether the hymns precede or follow the ritual, other than the linguistic posteriority of the ritualistic literature, and the knowledge that there were priests with a ritual when some of the hymns were composed.

The bare fact that hymns are found rubricated in the later literature is surely no reason for believing that such hymns were made for the ritual.

Now while it can be shown that a large number of hymns are formal, conventional, and mechanical in expression, and while it may be argued with plausibility that these were composed to serve the purpose of an established cult, this is very far from being the case with many which, on other grounds, may be supposed to belong severally to the older and later part of the Rig Veda.

Yet does the new school, in estimating the hymns, never admit this.

The poems always are spoken of as 'sacerdotal', ritualistic, without the slightest attempt to see whether this be true of all or of some alone.