It must not be forgotten that the ritual, as it is known in the Br[=a]hmanas, without the slightest doubt, from the point of view of language, social conditions, and theology, represents an age that is very different to that illustrated by the mass of the hymns.

Such hymns, therefore, and only such as can be proved to have a ritualistic setting can be referred to a ritualistic age.

There is no convincing reason why one should not take the fully justified view that some of the hymns represent a freer and more natural (less priest-bound) age, as they represent a spirit freer and less mechanical than that of other hymns.

As to the question which hymns, early or late, be due to poetic feeling, and which to ritualistic mechanism or servile imitation, this can indeed be decided by a judgment based only on the literary quality, never on the accident of subsequent rubrication.
We hold, therefore, in this regard, that the new school, valuable and suggestive as its work has been, is gone already farther than is judicious.

The Rig Veda in part is synchronous with an advanced ritualism, subjected to it, and in some cases derived from it; but in part the hymns are "made for their own sake and not for the sake of any sacrificial performance," as said Muller of the whole; going in this too far, but not into greater error than are gone they that confuse the natural with the artificial, the poetical with the mechanical, gold with dross.