The Origin of Thought and Speech

by M. Moncalm

Metaphysics.

The name of Kant will always be intimately connected with the word metaphysics, not because he buried himself in it, as some have supposed who only know his system of philosophy by hearsay; but because his labours consisted in forbidding reason to approach this science which is constantly threatening to invade it, and to get the upper hand by putting itself in its place.

Kant was the first to trace with decision the line of demarcation between the knowledge of which our reason is capable, and that of which it is incapable. No one has drawn so sharp a line between the knowable and the unknowable; this was to explain metaphysics. Alfred Fouillée has defined them as “the critical study of problems which the mind seeks to unravel from a necessity of its nature, although another necessity of its nature renders it incapable of solving them”—such is metaphysics.

This definition is excellent, but for those who make no preparatory studies in philosophy it would present itself rather in this form. If certain questions are of necessity presented to the mind which it finds it impossible to solve, it follows that the mind would necessarily contradict itself. Thus this succinct definition of Fouillée requires to be itself defined.

Noiré, whilst giving more details, is also more exact. “Metaphysics is only explained on the condition that we understand the nature of our power of understanding, in so far as, on the one part, this power is actively manifested in experience, and secondly, in so far as it possesses anteriorly to any experience, and to anything observed, certain ideas without which there could not possibly or even conceivably, be any impression made in the human mind.” I am afraid that this explanation of Noiré will also be lost upon those who are not experienced in the subject.

The explanation of Schopenhauer is not less definite, and is more concise than the two preceding. The foundation upon which all our knowledge and all our science rests, is the incomprehensible—I fancy that the uninitiated will be equally unable to understand this.

It is not surprising. Philosophers speak a language of their own, which must be learnt before it can be understood, which is the case with all languages.

Kant develops this thesis with greater simplicity and clearness. “As long as the human intellect moves in the sphere of the senses and of experience it is safe; this sphere is very vast; it is there that all phenomena may be known which appears in space and time, that is to say, all belonging to the phenomenal world in which we live. But if the intellect rebels against the gaoler which holds it captive in the magic circle, breaks its chains and enters into the region of ideals, it will err.”

Kant relates the following anecdote: “A dove, which found great pleasure in spreading its wings, was troubled because this pleasure was of short duration; the simple bird was ignorant of the fact that its structure did not admit of its taking flights such as the swallow enjoys; not divining the real cause of its inability, it blamed the fluid ether whose resisting power it had felt, and thought how much better it would fly ‘in vacuo.’” The dove was mistaken.

Kant’s crowning merit is having discovered the object of metaphysics not only in the categories of the understanding, without which, as Noiré says, no impression on the human mind would be possible, or even conceivable, but chiefly in the power, inherent in our nature, of resisting or yielding to impressions. It is this power, according to Kant, which constitutes the transcendental side of our knowledge.

The empirical school of philosophers is tried by Kant’s recognition of the transcendental principle in man. Its members accuse the spiritualists of seeking to raise human nature beyond its proper level, and of wishing at the same time to open an inlet for other truths which claim a mysterious character and a superhuman authority. But Kant is the very last person to encourage the thought; on the contrary, through the whole of his philosophy he insists that these à priori forms, or antecedent conditions of knowledge, have no authority whatever “except in and for experience,” and to use the category of causality, for instance, in order to establish the existence of God is, according to Kant, a philosophical blunder.

“If only we could always remember the first intentions of our words, many philosophical difficulties would vanish.” In Greek οἰδα meant originally, I have seen, and therefore I know. In a court of justice the witness who says, “I saw” can hardly say anything more convincing. To apply such a word to our knowledge of causes, forces, and faculties would be a solecism—to apply it to God would be self-contradictory.

Each of the abstract definitions of metaphysics given by Alfred Fouillée, Noiré, and Schopenhauer contains the leading conception of the subject; if presented in more simple language it would be within the comprehension of all; our understanding is blind to all with which it is not made acquainted by intuition derived from experience. Those things for which we have a strong desire, of which we have a certain conviction, but which are outside the sphere of our actual life, “for these,” as Max Müller says in this connection, “we want another word which should mean—I have not seen and yet I know, and that is—faith.”[64] Our senses may not always authorise us to affirm their reality. God and the future life are not made the subjects of phenomena.

All that I have said as to what distinguishes knowledge acquired by the senses from that which is anterior to all experience (Kant was the first to make this distinction), might seem simple to those heedless minds which are surprised at nothing, but complicated and confused to minds however little attentive, and quite useless to the rest of us. There may be something of truth in each of these primitive and superficial estimations, but the whole truth is that all this is very scientific, so scientific as to require a Kant to enable those who reflect to give a lucid account of it.

It was by the help of this learned science that Kant broke the serried ranks of his antagonists. Confronted by two philosophical opinions, both of which he considered erroneous, he proved to the materialists Condillac, Hume, and Locke, that there is something within us which could never have been supplied from without, which therefore belongs to our ego, that is to say to the subject thinking and not to the object thought of, or matter; then turning against the Idealists of the time of Berkeley, he shows that there is something without us which could never have been supplied from within; and when he proved that intellect and matter are correlative, that they exist for each other, depend on each other, form together a whole that should never have been torn asunder, two streams of philosophic thought, which had been running in separate beds, met for the first time.

The existence of the phenomenal world being proved by the irrefragable testimony of the senses, is admitted also by reason, and, as a necessary consequence, another, not only in appearance, but which will be, assuredly; as sound is independent of our hearing, as material objects are independent of our sight; for though Kant declares our inability to know objects as they are in themselves, he does not deny their existence, since he says, “We should be capable, if not of knowing things as they are in themselves, at least of knowing them as they are to us, otherwise we should arrive at the irrational conclusion, that there may be appearances without something that appears.”

Kant undertook to make an exact science of the necessary and universal ideas of the human mind, such as logic and mathematics, which are parts of human knowledge; to this end he wrote Critique of Pure Reason, afterwards he composed another work, the Critique of Practical Reason. Practical reason may also be called pure, in as much as it does not allow itself to be influenced by anything but what proceeds from itself, and reason becomes practical when it seeks an independent principle which determines the will. This principle is formulated by Kant in the following terms: “Let each individual follow commands which may be considered as a universal law imposed alike on all human beings.”

This law, which man possesses in his conscience, does not stop half way in its exactions from man since it aims at perfection, it commands man to love his neighbour, and to do good even to his enemy. To love and to do acts of kindness when pleasant to oneself is natural, and requires no command, but, otherwise, a law is required to coerce the will, the man who submits is free, since he can choose to infringe or to obey it; obedience to the moral law constitutes duty, which must be accomplished because it is our duty, and embodies the satisfaction felt in its performance.

Man is under an obligation to be moral and to do his duty, but not necessarily to be happy, yet he demands happiness. The union of virtue and happiness being the summum bonum, we must acknowledge the existence of a power external to ourselves, endowed with intellect and will, which makes this union possible; this power is known to us by the name of God. The perfect good is holiness; this life is too short to enable us to attain to it in its perfection, it is therefore a necessity that our life should be prolonged beyond the term of years spent on this earth, thus we are assured of the survival of the soul after what we term death.

Thus Kant speaks in his Critique of Practical Reason.

I may now be permitted to speak and give my own opinion. I hear the Positivist perhaps say: “This result might be considered conceivable if all that has been previously said were true; but to infer from the desire for happiness that a supernatural power must infallibly satisfy it might be a hallucination, or at least a hypothesis.” If this were so we need not deride hypotheses; in the domain of human knowledge reason would not be itself if it never made ventures in scientific discoveries; its path starts from the possible in making excursions from the known to the unknown, in going from darkness to light—hence then hypothesis.

There is also this fact to notice, some of the most important of our acts are not guided by reason, it acts as a spectator; for instance, reason is not active when we have perception of an object, and intuitions occur in us without the intervention of reason.

This was well understood by certain men who have come forward from time to time from the multitude, the bearers of inspired messages to the world; they have spoken of those things which “eye hath not seen nor ear heard,” and they were hard to be understood of the people; but each one alike said: “I give no proof of the truth of what I assert; do as I say, and you will know the truth of my words.”

There remains little more to be said on the subject of Kant. There is a serious omission in the system of this profound thinker.

Nothing has so stopped the progress of Darwin’s great conception as the injudicious efforts of his so-called disciples to bring it to perfection. Instead of correcting their chief, they should have weighed thoughtfully all Kant’s arguments against the materialism of his adversaries, and have sought to refute them; if they had succeeded in proving that Kant makes a mistake when he admits that there is in man a principle quite distinct from his body, they would have been authorised in replacing Darwin’s theory by their own; if they had not succeeded, Darwin and his theory would have remained unshaken, but they would be annihilated.

Max Müller examines the question from another point of view. “We admit that as we know nothing, except by analogy, of the mind of animals, we could not with the weapons that Kant has placed in our hands, make head against the assertion that they might possess, for all we know, the same forms of sensuous intuition and the same categories of the understanding which we possess. Nothing, therefore, could have been said from a purely philosophical point of view, against treating man as a mere variety of some other genus of animals.”[65] But as the origin of language was to Kant less than a secondary question—it might almost be said to have no existence for him—it belongs to the science of language to show, what Kant had never shown, that for all human knowledge not only were percepts and concepts necessary, but also names. How was it that it did not occur to Kant since he perceived that there were mathematics of the forms or manifestations of sensation, namely, time or duration and space? He said well: Each object of which we think is attached in time or space to another; this can only be done by the use of such indications as now, then, here, there; and he saw in this gradation of perception, the first step towards the act of counting, that is to say of reasoning, and consequently of speaking; all of which was comprehended by the Greeks in their word Logos. As an instance the word cent exists in every language, but cent in French consists only of four letters placed side by side one after the other, and would never be anything else to us if we could not count; but to count is to add and to take away, that is to say, addition and subtraction, thus to conceive and name; in order to possess a hundred objects, it does not suffice to see them only, it is necessary to count them up to the hundred.

These two works of Kant’s, the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason appear to emanate from two different pens; in the first, whatever is asserted is proved. The second work is dictated by a personal experience; Kant affirms that thus it is and that it cannot be otherwise. But here again I perceive a lack, a want, if not from the believer’s point of view, yet from that of those people who ask what could be the religion of our primitive ancestors; personal experience is not expressed as Kant expresses it, unless it is the result of a long series of meditations and examinations of conscience; in a word, experiences which have been transmitted from generation to generation. This is a religion that has achieved much, it is not that form of it which would be found amongst the generality of men, and still less would it spring to life in the heart of primitive man.

But here are two positivist philosophers who undertake to solve this great problem: they consider reason as ready with a reply to those who seek to know the meaning of God and of religion, two concepts which are inseparable, the one from the other; and even ready to explain how these two concepts have penetrated into the consciousness of all human beings. These philosophers speak no doubt from experience, for having questioned their reason it has replied to them: God and religion form one conception.

The first explanation is—man is conscious of his condition; he is possessed with the desire of happiness, and is unable to realise it; but his imagination represents to him another state in which the desire of happiness will exist and in which there will be no obstacle to its realisation; the first of these states is real, the other visible to the mind’s eye; they are therefore not identical; to will and not to have the power is to be man; to will and to be omnipotent is to be God. Little by little man understands that these two states of conditions having been conceived by the same mind, have the same origin; the notion fixes itself firmly in his mind that the two states seem gradually to approach each other, and are not always distinguishable; the union of desire and power is the Divine essence; the growing consciousness of this union is religion, which dawns and increases in man.

Man does not desire immortality because he believes in it, nor because it is demonstrable; but he believes in it and demonstrates its existence because he desires it. The sentence, “God sees all,” does not mean, so we are told, what it appears to mean; it expresses the feeling God knows all of which man is ignorant, but which he fain would know; and the sentence, “God is beneficence,” is the cry of man who desires happiness. All the predicates applied by man to the Deity in the course of history and humanity have never, in the opinion of philosophers, had any other origin than the representation of our wishes.

But the inner combat, which has been long and unhappy, with no truce, has exhausted man’s powers, and when the despondency checks, and at times almost paralyses his flight after happiness, the instinct of self-preservation leads him towards religion; as this instinct with the incapacity of satisfying it is inseparable in man, motives of religion are renewed continually in each individual and consequently in the multitude.

God and religion, i.e. the outward sign of our union with God, yet emanates from ourselves. This system, of which Feuerbach is the exponent, has many followers amongst the Positivists.

The second explanation comes from a learned member of the extreme Positivist school in Germany; but, as Max Müller says, it would be impossible to represent religion in a worse light ... “and it would be difficult to take a lower view of it.”[66] According to Dr Gruppe, religion exists simply because it satisfies certain selfish instincts of man. He notices two. The first instinct is common to all organic beings; it tends towards the preservation of the individual, and consequently to that of the race; it is elementary, and acts from within outwards. The second instinct belongs only to man taken collectively, and has vitality only in numbers; it belongs to a more advanced stage, and acts from without inwardly. Man instinctively grasps the greatest amount of happiness possible; he therefore seeks that which he considers his greatest good, not after the fashion of the beasts, but in his own way.

“We call religious belief,” says Dr Gruppe, “a belief in an indefinable state or being which we strive to bring into our sphere, and to render permanent by means of sacrificial ceremonies, prayers, penances, and self-denial.”[67]

This indefinable something, the professor considers, would never have appeared in the world without an impulsion, however light; an accidental movement, a casual combination of a disordered brain, and a personality endowed with a certain amount of energy, would have sufficed to make a single individual the author of an idea totally opposed to man’s good possession common sense, and the originator of a movement which must find in the surroundings in which it came to life, all facilities for its indefinite perpetuation. It is of no consequence whether this mental phenomenon has been produced in one individual or in more; figures are of little account in the matter. If this disease called hallucination[68] had remained confined in the circumscribed sphere of one individual or a few, a personal intelligent effort might have overcome it, but being contagious and spreading amongst the people it became impossible to conquer it. The natural laws of reason once violated, the perturbed mind created a succession of sophistical arguments which appeared to satisfy the ineradicable desire for happiness in man; and an incredibly tenacious opposition on the side of error assumed menacing proportions. If the belief that the sun, instead of disappearing each night below the horizon, would continue to shine during the night could in any way contribute to the happiness of mankind, men would slowly but surely have accepted it.

The man who isolates himself from his fellow men and becomes self-absorbed is peculiarly apt to create for himself mental pictures which give him pleasure; if, then, joy is indispensable to man’s existence, the religion which gives it, or the illusion of it, enables him to forget the tangible world, and substitute an imaginary one peopled with phantoms. But the solitary man is a rare phenomenon, and we judge favourably those men who live in the midst of their social surroundings, and whose community of ideas and sentiments has made a homogeneous whole, during many centuries. Each one will find means to develop his personal faculties, and to strengthen his power of resistance in the struggle of all against all, and the good which is illusive in the solitary man becomes a benefit to the members of the society.

Religion might possibly cease to exist, in Gruppe’s opinion, were it not for the inequalities of man’s condition, and for the troubles which follow him; but the action of religion is helpful to society.[69] It tells the poor not to hanker after riches which are not lasting. It mirrors for them images of future compensations, thus the rich and the noble here are enabled to enjoy their pleasures on earth in safety. In its name bright hopes are built up for the wretched, and it takes its stand in front of the palaces of the rich; sedatives are prescribed for incurables, and rich foods for those who can pay for them. Charity is preached to the compassionate, and persecutions to the fanatics: at times it encourages the use of arts and sciences; at times it warns its followers not to love overmuch the beautiful in art, nor to seek too earnestly the truth in science. But the outcome of this religion, whether good or the reverse, is of small importance compared with the benefits it renders to society. It is the support of the civil and moral law, and in lighting the hymeneal torch it adds to the sanctity of families.

Without attributing selfish motives, in the lowest sense, to the founders of the various religions and sects which flourish in our midst, Gruppe considers all of them unconscious egoists; he thinks that had they been calm psychologists, which sincere prophets are not, they would have recognised in themselves the attraction that glory had for them; but in that case they would not have remained faithful unto the death, and the power of communicating their own spirit and force to their adherents would have failed them. Gruppe distinguishes with great keenness the reflex action of our desire for happiness, which is no other than the instinct of self-preservation, from the motives which are sufficient to inspire certain enthusiasts to found new religions; these two things are in reality quite distinct, although they may act in concert; the desire for universal and permanent happiness paves the way for the manifestation of individual enthusiasm; he asserts that religions, while professing to found a new kingdom of heaven, only succeed in inheriting the kingdom of this world.

The struggle between an extreme positivism and a true idealism is a sight that energises earnest men. Evidently impressed by the exposition of the spiritualist doctrine, the learned doctor remarks: “The first perception of the infinite, of law and order in nature, communicated an impulse to the mind of man; but this force, when once in movement, did not slacken before having called forth in our ancestors the conviction that all is right and good, and the hope—even more than hope—that all would be right and good. Such is the celebrated system of Max Müller. It is not only the great personal worth of the author that obliges us to give it close consideration, but also the fact that this system is the most eloquent exposition of an idea which has also been expressed by other writers in some remarkable works on the history of religions. The position in which Max Müller has placed himself for a starting-point is, from a positivist point of view, impregnable.”

This commendation, which is particularly striking, coming as it does from one of Max Müller’s fiercest adversaries, I have quoted word for word.

Gruppe is not only a positivist philosopher, but also learned in Eastern languages and literature, and a clever mythologist; it would have been better had he confined himself to fields of labour with which he was acquainted. But as he admits that there is psychological and spontaneous thought in man, side by side with the rational, he cannot but acknowledge the right of humanity to say what it thinks. There are certain literary documents which show us what the human mind has thought in all ages and in all places, and we are of opinion that these sentiments have not varied.

It is said that an universal belief in any fact is not a proof of the existence of this fact, and that consequently the conception of super-sensible things need have no real basis; the observation is just; I shall reply to it by a question. Is it possible to demonstrate that this belief in things that cannot be proved is not only universal but even inevitable? If it were possible much would be gained. In geometrical calculations it is sufficient to know that three dimensions only exist,—at least in this world—that the straight line is the shortest, that two parallel lines never meet; it should suffice to know that in this world belief, whether rational or illusory, in one or more divinities, is inevitable for men constituted as we are.

Our first fathers no doubt pictured a large space situated on the further side of all that they could see, and we know how their imagination peopled it with confused images, either hidden, or seen in the visible phenomena.

These flights of fancy, which may have lasted thousands of centuries, became crystallised at last in the mythologies of all peoples, and it is these mythologies by which we gain access to this initial stage in the life of humanity, and which preserves for us the traces of this eternal truth amidst many extravagances of the fancy misled by language, which guided their first steps. There is a petrified philosophy in mythology.

Since history and legend, in one form or another, have voiced the feelings called religion, these feelings, variously interpreted, have changed their aspect from age to age, and from country to country; as long as we have not traced the stream to its source, the question, as to the manner in which the conception of God had birth in the human mind, will always be before us.

We take man at the time when he had recently appeared on the earth, his sole possession being his five senses, which place him in contact with the external world. We must distinguish between two classes of senses; those of touch, scent, and taste being more evident; from the evolutionist’s point of view the sense of touch has the largest share in the building up of the human edifice which arose later; its use is chiefly connected with the hands, and has thus given us the word manifest; that which we call certainty hardly exists for us apart from what is manifest. The two other senses, sight and hearing, are less sure, and have frequently to be verified by those first named.

The objects of which we obtain knowledge by means of our senses can be divided into tangible, semi-tangible and intangible. The first are, for instance, a stone, a bone, a fruit, the skin of an animal, these can be touched as it were all round, and we are able to assert their reality. The second, the semi-tangible, might be a river, a mountain, the earth, a tree. We stand by the banks of a river and dip our hand in the small volume of water passing away before our eyes; we can also touch the ground on which we are standing, also the trunk of the tree beneath which we are sitting; but it is only an insignificant part of which we assert the reality by touching it, all the other parts remain unknown to us; for the river itself consists of a large mass of waters springing from a source which is not seen and flowing towards a spot which we may never see; we are told that the earth is in the shape of a globe, and that this globe is suspended in air, which fact it would be difficult to verify; the tree is small in comparison with the river and the earth, and yet how little we know of it, whence come its buds, and its leaves, and the sap which rises each spring in the branches? We say of a beam that it is dead wood, but of the tree we say that it grows and lives; what is this life of the tree? We are in the presence of the unknown. These are samples of semi-tangible objects. The sense of touch has no place with regard to the sky, the stars, the clouds, the winds; those are intangible objects, which we see and feel without knowing them by personal grasp; the proof of their existence is also in the fact that years of work are required to know astronomy and meteorology.

We now have primitive man provided with fine senses, in presence of these natural phenomena, and the problem to be solved is this: How is it that this man is able to think and to speak of things which are not finite, finite things being the only ones of which his senses make him cognisant?

“I have before me,” says Max Müller, “a school of philosophy adverse to my views; I am warned that nothing I say will be accepted, unless I submit to the conditions imposed on me. I am told: ‘You pretend to prove that man can know that God exists; whereas we affirm that the great triumph of our age is that we have proved that religion is an illusion. All knowledge must pass through two gates, the gate of the senses and the gate of reason, consequently religious knowledge even can enter by no other gate.’ In this way does positivism bar the entrance which Kant left open, who in his definition of religion considered morality the basis of it, which with him presupposed the existence of God. Positivism refuses to hear a psychological and historical explanation of one of the greatest psychological and religious facts—namely, religion; it stops its ears when we say Nihil est in fide quod non ante fuerit in sensu; but we are not discouraged by the absurdity of imagining that by shutting our eyes, we can annihilate facts; we accept the struggle on the common ground on which the positivist and we have decided to fight; we also agree to use the weapons chosen for us. Let us inspect the battlefield and measure the ground. Both sides seem in accord that all consciousness begins with sensuous perception, with what we feel, and hear, and see; what is likewise granted is that out of this we construct what may be called conceptual knowledge, consisting of collective and abstract concepts. The conditions of the combat are fixed; at the two gates of the senses and reason we take our stand; whatever claims to have entered in by any other gate, whether that gate be called primeval revelation, or religious instinct,[70] must be rejected as contraband of thought; and whatever claims to have entered in by the gate of reason without having first passed through the gate of the senses, will equally be rejected, as without sufficient warrant.”[71]

CHAPTER X
THE VEDIC HYMNS

It has been possible to ascertain that the first words pronounced by the most ancient members of the Aryan family are connected by a thread of continuity to those which we use to-day in all languages, whether living or dead; our family would not be a portion of the entire human race, if this continuity of thought did not form a constituent part of the mental equipment of all the other families; but as no others possess in an equal degree with ourselves the archives sufficiently extensive to contain indication of the gradual development of human speech, such as the Veda furnishes, that is the authority to which Max Müller appeals in all his works. And it is precisely because there has been no cessation in the continuity of human thought, that the historical method is the only one capable of linking us with the primitive Aryans; our work will consist in collecting tokens of the long pilgrimage undertaken by our ancestors, and with which we desire to be associated, and which those who come after us must also undertake.

“No doubt, between the first daybreak of human thought and the first hymns of praise of the Rig-Veda, composed in the most perfect metre and the most polished language, there may be, nay, there must be a gap that can only be measured by generations, by hundreds, aye, by thousands of years.”[72] The exodus and separation of the Aryan family, belonging as it does to a prehistoric epoch and therefore unchronicled, and the Vedic Hymns—the work of many centuries—having been completed and collected together some hundreds of years before our present era, thus at a time relatively recent, that which constitutes their chief claim to great antiquity in our eyes is that the Hindoo poets or rishis incorporated certain thoughts and words in them whose roots threw out shoots in the primitive Aryan soil before the dispersion of its members.

The period of the life of humanity into which the hymns enable us to penetrate, is the most ancient of which mention is made. The rishis sing in Sanscrit of thoughts conceived in the hidden recesses of souls before they awoke to the consciousness of that concept to which the name of God alone can be applied, before these same people pictured in their imagination those whom they named gods, before the appearance of myths and mythological fables, and before the Sanscrit language existed.

Our Aryan ancestors had not left the cradle of their race when their language, whatever it may have been, possessed the root dyu and div, two cognate words meaning to shine. The Veda shows that many things were bright to the Vedic poets, the heaven, dawn, the stars and several other things, such as the rivers, spring, the fields, the eyes of man, all that would have the effect on us of being smiling, flourishing, and rejoicing in life; and from this root the word deva was formed. Neither in Greek nor in Latin, nor in any living language can a word be found which exactly expresses deva; Greek dictionaries translate it by Theos, in the same way as we translate Theos by God; but if—dictionary in hand—we put the word God in certain passages in the hymns where this word is found, we should sometimes commit a mental anachronism of a thousand years. At the time of the first Aryans, gods, in one sense of the word, did not exist; they were slowly struggling into being; it was therefore impossible for man to form any conception of them even in dreams. As this word deva changes its signification so frequently, not only in the most ancient Brahmanic poems, but also in works of a later date, we can only obtain even an approximate idea of its meaning by writing its history, beginning from its etymology and ending with its latest definition; but it is not necessary to undertake this philological labour, and I shall content myself by showing that originally deva denoted a quality common to many natural phenomena, that of light, and therefore deva was a general term.

Man at first received this impression passively, as animals would, but by his nature he could not rest there; all the phenomena surrounding him were animated, the most marvellous and those of peculiar intensity moved in the upper regions of the firmament; in the midst of these general movements the mind of man could not alone be inactive, and thought and speech—that is reason—inevitably vindicated their right to activity; names were given to all things. The Aryan root svar or sval, which signified to shine, to sparkle, and to heat, produced a Sanscrit substantive meaning sometimes sun and sometimes the sky.

The Hindoo poets, the authors of these hymns, gave various names to the sun, according to the task it accomplished; and each name reproduced the salient feature of the task. The sun when rising was Mitra = friend; as it advances on its journey, giving new life, it is Savitar = bringing forth, or leading day; the vivifying sun; when it collects the clouds and sends rain on the earth, it is Indra, from ind-u = drops; and it continues to be Indra when its rays attain their zenith and reach their greatest splendour; for no plant flourishes without the combined action of light and humidity; the sun is Vishnu when it makes “its three strides” in the vault of heaven, its position in the morning, at noon, and in the evening; it is Varuna—the all embracing—when it envelops itself in clouds as in a shroud, and the sky darkens. Some phenomena descended on man from above, such as thunder-bolts, winds, storms; the storms that came unexpectedly, dealing destruction as they passed received the name of Maruts—from the root Mar—and with the meaning of those who strike or beat to death; the thunder was called Rudra = he who roars; the wind was Vayu = he who blows.

All these names indicated that which could be seen and that which could be heard; the invisible things remained unnamed; how was it possible for man to name that of which he was ignorant (except that they had a real existence), he who could only conceive a name after having seen a certain feature or quality in the object? They made use therefore of the names they already knew, and they rang the changes on the storm, the fire, and the firmament, which names they borrowed. Jacob’s prayer, which arose in the darkness when he was wrestling with a great Unknown, “Tell me, I pray thee, thy name,” must have been, in the early ages, the question of all humanity; but uttered under a thousand varying forms, and as, at the beginning, each name was imperfect, since it expressed only one side of the object, every additional name denoted a step forward, and every fresh check experienced by the mind in its search after accurate names only stimulated it to look elsewhere.

The first germ of the concept of law and order appears in the minds of the poets, and to this they give the name of Rita. This word has no equivalent in our languages, and translators are uncertain as to the meaning attached to it by the rishis. Pliant and full of capability, there seems no word more fitted to reflect new shades of thought; and in our efforts to understand it conjecture is much called into play, from the fact that we have to transfuse ancient thought into modern forms; in that process some violence is inevitable. Max Müller supposes, from etymological reasons, that Rita originally was used to express the regular movement of the heavenly bodies, and the path which they followed daily, from the one point of the heavens to the other, and he translates Rita by the “right path.” “If we remember how many of the ancient sacrifices in India depended on the course of the sun, how there were daily sacrifices, at the rising of the sun, at noon, and at the setting of the sun; how there were offerings for the full moon and the new moon, we may well understand how the sacrifice itself came in time to be called the path of Rita.”[73] Rita expresses all that is right, good, and true, and Anrita was used for whatever is false, evil, and untrue; thus the Hindoos laid it down as an axiom that there was an universal law in the world equally binding on the physical phenomena and on conscious beings, such as themselves; and it was this law which ruled the times of the sacrifices to be offered to the divine powers; and this intuitive perception of law and order, which is the foundation of the ancient faith of the Asiatic Aryans, is far more important than all the histories of Savitar, Mitra, Rudra, and Indra, which are recounted at a later period of the gods of India. This belief in Rita, in law and order, as revealed in the unvarying movement of the stars, or manifested in the unvarying number of the petals, and stamens, and pistils of the smallest plant, was a grand thing; it was all the difference between a chaos and a cosmos, between the blind play of chance and a well defined plan. We have become so familiarised with the idea of a fundamental law, that it now often occupies us less than many of the secondary laws or causes; and yet our philosophers often find themselves at fault when they endeavour to give an exact idea of this primary law; but to the ancient prophets it must have been infinitely more perplexing, though also infinitely more important in their gropings after terra firma on which to plant their feet. The rishis are indefatigable in pointing to the straight path, or Rita, followed by the day and night; and because the gods have themselves followed this path, they have the strength to triumph over the powers of darkness, and to those who ask for it they grant the grace to walk in the same road.

“O Indra, lead us on the path of Rita, on the right path over all evils.”[74]

To walk with regularity in the path of duty, imitating the example of the astral bodies, or following step by step the sun which never deviates from its orbit, cannot be an idea foreign to humanity since it is equally familiar to the primitive races and the most elevated minds. Cicero said of himself that he was born not only to contemplate the order of the heavenly bodies, but to imitate this order in his own conduct; this great orator, although he was ignorant of the existence of the Vedic hymns, spoke after the same manner as the rishis; and the Maoris are inspired neither by Cicero nor the Hindoo poets, when they send forth their energetic cry, “Wait, wait, O sun, we will go with thee.”

To our first ancestors nothing in nature could have been indifferent; all that they perceived must have come upon them as a continual surprise; the Vedic hymns show that our surmise is correct. An irresistible force led them continually to investigate and interrogate those apparitions which, by their strangeness and grandeur, were so striking, and to which they gave the names of the thunderers, the rainers, the pounders or storm gods; no voice replied to their questions; absolute silence reigned around them; the limits of the known confronted them. Gradually a different perception forced itself upon them, whether consciously or unconsciously; all limits have two sides, the one towards ourselves, the other towards the beyond; they were ignorant of what existed beyond, but they believed it to be there, since the further boundaries came in contact with it. They wished to draw near to it in order to examine it close at hand, but in what direction should they advance?

The sentiments which the sun and its forerunners awoke in our ancestors must remain for ever beyond our powers of imagination; the rising of this luminary is to us the result of a physical law, and is not considered more extraordinary than the birth of a child in a large family; we know that the dawn is the reflection of the sun’s rays in the matutinal vapours; we have even learnt to calculate the time of its duration in different climates; but the assurance with which we say, “The sun will rise to-morrow, the day after to-morrow, every day,” our ancestors never possessed, and it was this vast unknown domain, behind the known, that from the very first supplied the human mind with the impetus required to cause it to seek, to discover, what there could be beyond the visible world.

As nothing seems to be so far apart as the two points of the horizon where the light of day appears and where he sets, it is there that the rishis look for a solution of the problem of the beyond.[75]

“That whence the sun rises, and that where he sets, that I believe is the oldest, and no one goes beyond.”[76]

The poets gave the name Aditi to the dawn. Aditi is derived from diti, binding and bond, with the negative particle a; thus at first Aditi meant that which is without bonds, not chained, not enclosed, infinite. But their imagination soon carried the poets beyond the dawn itself, that came and went, but there remained always behind the dawn that heaving sea of light or fire from which she springs; thus Aditi herself could not be grasped by the senses. Was not this the visible infinite?

At this point the mind of the rishis conceived an original and striking idea, at the sight of the sun following his path and touching two opposite points of the horizon; they said that arrived at the centre of its course at the zenith, Indra from thence could see at the same time Diti and Aditi—“That is what is yonder and what is here, what is infinite and what is finite, what is mortal and what is immortal.”[77]

Whilst searching increasingly for what he had not yet found, man had mastered two ideas, those of law, and the beyond or the infinite, though not understanding the accurate meaning of these words; on these two points his mind was at rest. These two possessions once acquired could not be taken from him; in Aditi—which is limitless—could be found a home for things which had no bounds, and it could furnish an answer to all questions; and Rita, the order which rules the movements of the celestial bodies, is at the same time an incentive and a promise. A violent convulsion of nature may have alarmed the hearts of men, but the thought occurs to them, “This cannot last always.”[78]

“Sun and moon move in regular succession—that we may see, Indra, and believe.”[79]

Without fear there could have been no hope, without hope there could have been no faith.

[Śraddhâ], an ancient Aryan word used before the dispersion of the various members of the family, is the same as the Latin Credo. Where the Romans said credidi the Brahmans said [śraddadhau]; where the Romans said creditum, the Brahmans said [śraddhitam]. The germ of the faculty of faith, therefore, must have existed in the earliest strata of thought and language, since without the first glimpses of faith in the soul, there could have been no word for “to believe.”

As auxiliary verbs were lacking at first, the early Aryans found it very difficult to say of a thing that it is or is not; but they possessed the root as, which originally meant to breathe, and its simplest derivation was as-u—breath. Man having discovered in all the natural phenomena an activity resembling his own, said of the moon that it measures, of the river that it runs, of the sun that it rises and sets; thus each of these had certain activities peculiar to itself. Was there nothing common to all? Doubtless, since an action can be found which is shared equally by man and all animals, the act of breathing is common to all, so that our fathers when wishing to affirm that something existed said that it breathed.

Man turns his gaze from the things that surround him to himself; he feels superior to the physical phenomena, to the rivers, to the mountains. He possesses another nature to that of the sun, of the stars. He has discovered something in himself that is more than his body. What is it? how is he to name it? He saw his father or his mother, who had formerly been in every respect like himself, prostrate, without motion, without speech. What had happened? What was it that had left them? Knowing the root as, and its derivative as-u, he called it from the first breath, then spirit, which originally meant nothing more than the air absorbed by the lungs, from which it is exhaled as breath. Nothing constrained our ancestors to believe that because they had seen their parents die and their bodies decay, it must follow that what had hitherto animated them was now annihilated. This notion may have entered the brain of a philosopher, but man in his primitive simplicity, though doubtless terrified at the sight of death, would naturally incline to the belief that what he had known and loved, and had called by the names of father and mother, must still exist somewhere, although not in the body. The breath had not been seen to decay. What had become of it? Various answers were given to this question, at divers times and in divers countries. They were all equally probable; no objections could be made to them, but neither was there proof; they are beyond the reach of proof. “The best answer was perhaps that contained in the most ancient Greek language and mythology, that the souls had gone to the house of the Invisible, of Aides. No one has ever said anything truer.”

From the depths of the eastern sky Aditi arises each morning. To the eyes of the ancient seers the dawn seemed to open the gates of another world into which they begged to enter—into the abode of the gods. We can understand that as the sun and all the solar deities rise from the east, Aditi was said to be the mother of Mitra, Vishnu, Savitar, and Varuna. Another conception also arose, that the east being the abode of the bright gods, would also become the home of those parents and friends who died, “the blessed departed who would join the company of the gods that they might be transferred to the east.”[80] Aditi thus embodied the mystery of life and death; and was the “Mot de l’Énigme” of our existence. All the theogony and primitive philosophy of the Aryan were concentrated in the dawn. Those souls who participate with Aditi in the “birthplace of the Immortals” sometimes share the worship offered by their children who are still on the earth. One off-shoot of this ancient worship still survives, and the popularity of the festival of the 1st of November in certain countries testifies that the homage rendered to the memory of the dead is a necessity of the human heart. And certainly those whom we are accustomed to speak of as dead are most surely living. The rishis desired to contemplate their faces, and one of them, speaking for all, cried: “Who will give us back to the great Aditi, that I may see father and mother?”[81]

All peoples have desired to know which part of the human body is the seat of the soul and of life; the dictionaries of all languages, whether spoken by civilised or uncivilised people, show that the words blood, heart, chest, reins and breath have all been used to indicate the seat of life, soul, thought, and the affections. Amongst the Maoris, the words used for the internal organs mean at the same time the heart, and the centre of joy and sorrow; the seat of conscience and of desires and the will; it is strange that the brain, which we often look upon as the cradle of thought, is not found in the psychological nomenclature of the ancient world. The expression which we find in the Bible, “The blood is the life,” and in other languages besides Hebrew, inspired many religious and superstitious acts. It is singular that in one of the dialects spoken in the south of India, Tamil, the word used for soul has the sense of leaper or dancer; these are efforts to express that which moves within us. We are here not amongst learned metaphysicians, but concerned with simple children of nature; but the greatest philosophers have at no time more clearly defined the soul than by describing it as that which moves of itself, but is not moved.

Our language is so rich in abstract terms, derived from a small number of concrete words, that we are not aware how often we use the old material words to express purely mental states or conditions; for instance we speak of taking things to heart, or learning verses by heart, without thinking of the heart that beats within our breasts.

Fire has always occupied a prominent position in the imagination of all people, of all nations; but with the exception of the Hindoos none have left traditions which enable us to transport ourselves to the simplest beginnings of the fire upon the hearth, and nothing more. Heracleitus already mentions fire as everlasting or immortal, and the “origin of all things, a higher conception than that of the gods of the populace whom Heracleitus tolerated, though he did not believe in them. ‘Neither one of the gods,’ he declares, ‘nor of men has made this world, ... it always was and will be, ever-living fire, catching forms and consuming them.’”[82] Heracleitus imagined that he knew what was fire; but the rishis speak with less assurance; at first they express their astonishment at the appearance of fire, it is one of the physical apparitions which impressed them the most, although of all the devas fire seemed the one most readily known, since it had its dwelling with men, it was within reach of the hand, could be touched, but as it burnt the fingers the experiment was only made once. Although seen so near at hand fire remained a great enigma; our ancestors could not understand how it could unite in itself at the same time such good and such destructive qualities. It warmed the members numbed by cold, at night it lighted the hut as if the sun were in it, yet at times it destroyed suddenly whole forests; it seemed everywhere; when the thunder rolled, fire escaped from a dark cloud like a flash; it appeared as a spark when two flints were struck or two branches of wood rubbed together; but its chief characteristic was its excessive mobility, nothing in nature could compare with the velocity of its movements.

The Aryans at that time possessed a root ag, which meant going, marching, leading, running, forcing, pushing, chasing, and jumping, and gives generally an idea of quick movement, and as fire moved perpetually, our ancestors made use of this root ag, and called fire agni; this Sanscrit word—which amongst many others was the most popular—still survives in the Latin, as ignis, in Lithuania as ugni, in old Slavonic, as ogni; another Sanscrit name for fire is vah-ni, coming from the same root which we have in veho and vehemens, and it meant originally what moves about quickly.

I have collected a few of the characteristic traits attributed by the rishis to the deva Agni.

“How did he come—living—from pieces of dead wood? How is he produced from two stones? His mother does not nourish him, how does he grow so rapidly, and proceed at once to do his work? He whom nothing resists—like the heavenly thunderbolt—like a hurled weapon. Agni, in a moment, does violence to the trees of the forest; he prostrates them—all that moves—that which stands, trembles before him—making the herbs his food—he licks the garment of the earth—he nourishes himself. Turning about with his tongues of fire, Agni flares up in the forests. Roused by the wind, he moves about among the tall trees, and eats them with his sharpened teeth; he never tires; coming again and again; turning about on all sides; resounding with his sickle; laughing with his light.”

“Professor Tyndal asks quite rightly: ‘Is it in the human mind to imagine motion, without at the same time imagining something moved? Certainly not. The very conception of motion includes that of a moving body. What then is the thing moved in the case of sunlight? The undulatory theory replies that it is a substance of determinate mechanical properties, a body which may or may not be a form of ordinary matter, but to which, whether it is or not, we give the name of Ether.’ May not the ancient Aryas say with the same right (had he been wise enough to put the question), ‘Is it in the human mind to imagine motion without at the same time imagining some one that moves?’ Certainly not. The very conception of motion includes that of a mover, and, in the end, of a prime mover.”[83] And if, in the presence of fire, the early Aryas had asked who then is the mover, he would have been told (if any had been there wise enough to answer the question) that it is a subject of determinate properties, a person who may or may not be like ordinary persons, but to whom, whether he be or not, the name Agni has been given.

Thus the rishis spoke of Agni as of an agent, as well as of Indra, Vayu, Rudra, and the Maruts; but we must always remember that they knew nothing definite of these agents any more than we do when we speak of physical phenomena as elements, or forces of nature, or certain movements.

This striking deva, Agni, manifested at first in the lightning and in the spark, became as time went on, the most popular, and most desired of all the powers; the fire on the hearth rendered winter bearable, cooked herbs and roots, and transformed the devourer of raw flesh into the eater of roast meat; caused the smoke of sacrifices offered to the higher Powers to ascend up to heaven. What precautions were necessary to prevent the capricious and uncertain fire from becoming extinct at an inopportune moment, or in its rage from destroying men and things. Fire was for the rishis a being more and more inexplicable. Becoming increasingly impressed by his beneficence, they seek to call him by some new name which shall express more perfectly this later impression; the name deva—bright, shining—no longer satisfies them; they use words such as invincible, almighty; even these do not suffice them; at last they find the word Amartya—immortal.

“Immortal amongst Mortals.”

This expression may be understood in more ways than one; it is enough for me that the Hindoos made use of it. It is possible to recognise in it the first attempt to bridge over the gulf which human language and human thought had themselves created between the visible and the invisible, between the mortal and the immortal, between the finite and the infinite. For the right appreciation of our intellectual organisation, it is important to discover and distinguish the coarse threads that form the woof of our most abstract thoughts.

It must be noticed that the use of the word immortal in this passage does not imply that Agni is considered otherwise than as natural fire. The Rig-Veda does not seem to acknowledge the presence of supernatural beings; all the names given to the striking aspects of nature, even those used to designate the unknown powers in general, such as Asura—a living thing; Deva-asura—the living gods; Amartya—the immortal, still retain physical elements in the most ancient hymns.

Beings without definite attributes did not occur to the imagination of those who supplied these names, and believed in the existence of those which these names represented.

That which has often been called the adoration of fire was at first its application to the necessities of domestic life, and afterwards its use in all mechanical and artistic pursuits. If we transfer ourselves to that early stage of life, and picture the difficulties there were in primitive times of procuring fire at a moment’s notice, and the dangers which would menace a whole community deprived of fire in the midst of winter, and plunged suddenly in darkness, we require no far-fetched explanation for a number of time-hallowed customs throughout the world connected with the lighting, and still more with the guarding of the fire. The natural desire for possessing so useful an object, and the no less natural terror of being deprived of it, would lead men to adopt the practices for maintaining it, afterwards called superstitions, but which during the infancy of humanity, were perfectly natural, and which developed into a sacred rite; at a later period vestal virgins were appointed to guard it in the temples; and the fires of St John, which are still lighted annually on the tops of certain mountains, are the last remains of these ancient customs.

The Vedic hymns give us the many different channels whence the phenomenon of fire proceeds, at one time coming in one way and then in another, to attract man’s attention and to awaken his drowsy faculties. Fire comes from the skies where it shines as the sun, from the waters, since it comes as lightning, from the moist and rain-laden clouds, from the stones, and from wood, in the shape of sparks, from dried leaves and herbs placed on the altar to receive and nourish the sacrificial flame. Ceaselessly fire applied at the door of each habitation. Apparently it said to man, whose slowness of comprehension it seemed to understand, “To you men, I come, that I may awake you from sleep, and cause you to know what I am.”

At last man understood, and the rishis reply to the fire.

“Thou, O Agni, art born from the skies—thou from the waters—thou from the stone—thou from the wood—thou from the herbs—thou, king of men, the bright one.”[84]

At the same time the mind of the poet seems illuminated with a new thought.

“If we have committed any sin against thee through human weakness, through thoughtlessness, make us sinless before Aditi, O Agni, loosen our misdeeds from us on every side.”[85]

Of Agni, the fire, there would seem to be nothing left in that supreme god whose laws must be obeyed, and who can forgive those who have broken his laws. Between this transformed Being of whom the Aryans implore mercy, and Him whom we call God, we can perceive no difference, and yet, so mysterious are human speech and thought, the Hindoos, who thought in ancient Sanscrit, declare that Agni has not yet thrown off his physical characteristics, that he is not yet, and cannot be God; they add that it is impossible to give the true Vedic impression in its fulness, since no modern language possesses phrases in which to express it.

I read in another hymn addressed to Agni a curious verse.

“O Heaven and Earth, I proclaim this truthful fact, that the child, as soon as born, eats his parents. I, a mortal, do not understand this fact of a god; Agni indeed understands, for he is wise.”[86]

Are the rishis who utter this exclamation ignorant of the fact that the parents of fire are two dry sticks? Or is it that the act of a god in eating its father and mother is abhorrent to them?

“If we, O gods—ignorant among the wise—transgress your commandments, whatever of the sacrifice weak mortals with their feeble intellect do not comprehend, Agni, the priest, who knows all rights, comprehends it, makes it all good.”[87]

The whole question of sacrifices is still hotly discussed; whether they preceded or followed prayer. Did the Vedic poets wait till the ceremonial was fully developed before they invoked the Powers, or did their prayers suggest the performance of sacrificial acts?

“Agni, accept this branch that I offer. Accept this my service—listen well to these my songs. Whosoever sacrifices to Agni with a stick of wood, with a libation, with a bundle of herbs, or with an inclination of his head, he will be blessed.”[88]

We nowhere hear of a mute sacrifice. That which we call a sacrifice the ancients called simply karma, an act; a simple prayer, preceded by a washing of the hands, or accompanied by an inclination of the head, may constitute a karma, an act; to light the fire on the hearth, to bow the head and utter the name of Agni with some kind epithet, might also be termed an act. At first the sacrifice may only have been a prayer accompanied by a gift. They may originally have been inseparable, but in all this there is nothing opposed to the idea that it would be in accordance with human nature that prayer should come first. In time the act of sacrifice assumed a sacred and solemn character. In the earlier vocabularies of the Aryan tongues the word sacrifice does not occur; the Sanscrit and Zend root of the word are almost identical, and these languages furnish many words indicative of minute detail of ancient ceremonial. From this may be inferred that a hymn full of allusions to the celebrations of sacrifices must date from a period posterior to the separation of the families.

“Agni, drive away from us the enemies—tribes who keep no fire came to attack us.”[89]

When the Aryans of Asia abandoned their first habitation, and advanced southwards plundering as they went, they encountered some of the aborigines of the country, whose territory they coveted. They were wild tribes; the descriptions given by the rishis evidently refer to the aborigines of India, whose descendants survive to the present day, speaking non-Aryan dialects. The epithets of devil and demon are freely used concerning them in the hymns. But apparently in their encounters Agni, who opposes these hostile foes, by appearing under the form of flaming torches, is not successful in overcoming them, since the Aryans implore the aid of other allies. They invoke the help of the two chief warlike powers, Indra and Soma, to destroy those “who worship other gods, who do not speak the truth, and who eat raw meat.”[90]

“O Indra and Soma, burn the devils, throw them down—they who grow in darkness—tear them off, the madmen, kill them, slay the gluttons. O Indra and Soma, up against the cursing demon—may he burn like an oblation in the fire. Pour your everlasting hatred upon the villain who hates the Brahman, who eats raw flesh, and who looks abominable.”[91]

Of Soma, who lends such capable aid to Agni when repulsing the enemies of the Aryans, the Hindoos have four different conceptions. Soma is sometimes the moon, the abode of the fathers. Soma is also the lord of the moon. Soma is the bowl containing the drink of the gods, ambrosia. Soma is sometimes ambrosia itself. The etymology of the word indicates homonymy; originally it meant rain and the moon. Ambrosia was a type of the rain fertilising the earth, yet being at the same time a strengthening draught. It is sometimes quite impossible to decide of which Soma the rishis are speaking, especially as they seem to find pleasure in confounding the terms. This play upon words fills almost the whole of one book of the Rig-Veda.

“Meditate on the wisdom of Soma (moon) in all its greatness—yesterday it was dead, to-day it is living.”

“The poet has swallowed Soma (the juice), he has felt an overpowering inspiration—he has found his hymn.”

The exalted virtues of Soma have raised it to the rank of those divinities who dispense immortality.

“Where there is eternal light, in the world where the sun is placed, in that immortal, imperishable world place me, O Soma, where life is free, in the third heaven of heavens, there make me immortal.”[92]

What is the third heaven? It is an expression with which we are familiar, but what does it mean? The Aryans also call the children of Rudra to their help; they are allied to Indra and are called Maruts. They fill the air with alarming sounds; these noise-producing beings are the representatives of storms and tempests, they never appear alone in the Veda, they traverse space in groups of from twenty-five to eighty in number, and they make the earth tremble.

“Where are you going? towards whom do you go when you descend from on high like a blast of fire? May power be with thee and thy race, O Rudra. Come to us, Maruts, come and help us as quickly as lightning before the rain! Let loose, O devourer, your anger like an arrow against the proud enemy of the poets.”[93]

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A deep problem now presents itself. What was there before anything existed? Two contradictory ideas appear in the hymns, and the conflict must have been trying.

“Sages have said: In the beginning the world was—a single world—there was not a second. Others have said: In the beginning this world had no existence, and out of nothing, what now is, came.”

Much confusion of thought reigned in the human mind. The world must surely have been made from something, and by certain agents; but then, how were the agents themselves formed? and what material served them for the making of the world?

Other questions followed. “Who has seen the firstborn? Where was the life, the blood, the soul of the world? Who went to ask this from any that knew it? What was the forest? what was the tree out of which they shaped heaven and earth? Ye wise, seek in your mind on what he stood when he held the world.”[94]

Our ancestors would not have been human if they had not yielded to the temptation of representing the invisible makers of the world by some personality. They therefore speak of carpenters and workmen “who have cunning hands; clever artificers who forge the lightning.” Is it those who have made all that is visible? They know not. It is certain that in speaking of carpenters, workmen, thunderers, tearers, rainers, men approached, perhaps unconsciously, the domain of causes, which from the beginning has been the ancient foundation of all that is transcendental in our knowledge. It could not be otherwise, since our reason is so constituted that it admits nothing but what is either cause or effect.

There are thoughts to be found in the Veda which are excessively infantine, but again there are others of astonishing subtlety; perhaps they date from different epochs; but individualities are apparent in these hymns, and they anticipated by many centuries the greater number of contemporary writers who followed at a slower pace. The rishis who said, “There is one Being only, although the poets call him by a thousand names,” perfectly expressed this truth; and the Hindoos for centuries have invoked Indra, Mitra, Agni, and Savitar, though the more profound thinkers have protested against the traditional use of these names, just as Heracleitus 500 years before our era objected to the thousand names, the thousand temples, and the thousand legends of the Greek mythology.

The rishis in asking themselves how all things began were not content with representing the world as coming from the hands of clever workmen, were they even invisible; it was no great labour to discover that; but at times they had profounder thoughts. The sacred literatures of many ancient peoples have reached us, in fragments more or less complete; but the meditations which can equal those in the hymn 129 are rare.

“The One in the form of the Un-born was not—the luminous firmament existed not—nor the great vault of heaven—where was he hidden? Was it in the bottomless abyss? Death existed not—nor immortality. There was no distinction between day and night. The One breathed breathless by itself. Other than it there nothing since has been. There was darkness then; everything in the beginning was hidden in gloom—all was like the ocean, without a light. Then that germ which was covered by the husk—the One—was brought forth by the power of heat. On this germ was love—the springtime of the spirit—yes. And the poets whilst meditating upon it, discovered in their soul the link between created things and things not created. This spark, comes it from the earth—piercing all—penetrating through all—or comes it from the sky? There seeds were scattered, and powerful forces came into being; nature beneath, will and power above. Who knows the secret—who proclaimed whence this manifold creation sprang? The gods themselves came later into being; who knows whence this great creation sprang? He from whom all this great creation came—whether his will created or was mute. He, the most high seer, that is in highest heaven, he knows it—or perchance even he knows not.”

“Who knows whence this great creation sprang?” the Hindoos asked themselves, thousands of years before our era; and again, “What was the forest, what was the tree, from which they cut out heaven and earth? What was there before anything existed?” These questions, differently expressed, are found in many places in the Veda; every kind of problem is presented to us under the form of enigmas. The Hindoos seem to have had an idea that the visible world was preceded by something invisible, yet much more real than the world of phenomena in which we live; and that before apparitions existed, there was that which appeared afterwards in time and space.

These same questions will constantly be repeated in changing terms, through the coming centuries, whilst a heaven and earth remain.

The problem which occupied the powerful intellects of Hume and Kant, and which these philosophers named the principle of causality, was already exercising the brains of our fathers when they gave names for the first time to the sky, the sun, the dawn, and the other physical phenomena, by means of roots indicating activity; for the principle of causality manifested itself in the beginning, not in the direct search for a cause, but in the assertion of the existence of an agent. This mental labour, commenced and accomplished thousands of centuries ago by millions of human beings, deserves at least as much attention from us as the learned speculations of two modern philosophers, be they Hume or Kant.

So striking an object as the sun, even before possessing a definite name, must have been designated in some special way; perhaps as a simple circle, such as we find in the Egyptian hieroglyphics, in the Chinese writing, and in our astronomical almanacs; this symbol would give little opportunities to the mythologists; but when the idea arose that the sun was a ball, and that an analogy was found between a ball and an eye, man began to speak of the sun as the eye of the sky. We say readily in all languages, “God is omniscient,” but Hesiod, to express the same truth said, “The sun is the eye of Zeus who sees and knows all.” If the language appears childish to us, we must remember that it was the expression of a poet who lived long before the philosophers of Greece, we shall then be less struck by its harshness than by the happy and pure thought which has been expressed.

The sun has been an object of adoration with many of the primitive nations; it seems uncertain whether as the divinity himself or as his representative; most of the mythologists assure us that the ancient Egyptians worshipped the sun’s disc itself. The first step is invariably followed by a second, and a good example of development in religious belief is afforded by a Mexican legend. The story is told of the Inca Tupac Yupanqui, who, though reputed a son of the sun, began to doubt the divine omnipotence of his divine ancestor. At a great religious council, held at the consecration of the newly built temple of the sun at Cuzco, he rose before the assembled multitude to deny the divinity of the sun. “Many say,” he began, “that the sun is the maker of all things. But he who makes should abide by what he has made. Now many things happen when the sun is absent; therefore he cannot be the universal Creator. And that he is alive at all, is doubtful, for his journeys do not tire him. He is like a tethered beast who makes a daily round; he is like an arrow which must go whither it is sent, not whither it wishes. I tell you that he, our father and maker—the sun—must have a lord and master more powerful than himself, who constrains him to his daily circuit without pause or rest.”[95]

We can follow in the Vedic hymns the gradual development which changes the sun from a simple luminary, and the giver of daily light and life, to the preserver and ruler of the world. He who brings life and light to-day, is the same who brought life and light on the first of days; as he drives away the darkness of night, and as “the stars flee before the all-seeing sun, like thieves,” the eye fixed on men—the sun—sees the right and wrong and knows their thoughts.

Almost all peoples have raised their eyes to the sky, the abode of the invisible Powers; and our ancestors, who addressed such fervent prayers to all the phenomena of nature could not fail to invoke it. But the sky shows itself under very varying aspects, it is sometimes the sky dazzling with light, then there is the lowering sky, or the sky that thunders, that rains; each time that it varies it changes its name; and these names must be known to man since it is always invoked under the special denomination of the power he is about to address. Varuna is one of the names of the sky, his physical characteristic reflects it, it is the vast vault or covering which protects the whole earth and its inhabitants; it is also the sky which is itself obscured when the sun disappears. In the Veda, Varuna is associated with Mitra, the light, thus giving rise to a concept of correlative gods representing night and day, morning and evening, heaven and earth.

“He who should flee far beyond the sky—even he would not be rid of Varuna, the king. King Varuna sees all this, what is between heaven and earth, and what is beyond. This earth, too, belongs to Varuna, the king, and this wide sky with its ends far apart. The two seas are Varuna’s loins; he is also contained in this small drop of water.”

“The great lord of these worlds sees as if he were near: if a man stands or walks, if he goes to lie down or to get up, if he thinks he is walking by stealth, the god Varuna knows it all. What two people sitting together whisper, King Varuna knows it, he is there as the third.”[96]

The prayers of the rishis overflow with the acknowledgment of their sins, and their belief that the gods have the power to deliver them from the burden of their faults.

“Let me not yet, O Varuna, enter into the house of clay (earth). Have mercy, Almighty, have mercy. If I move along trembling, like a cloud driven by the wind, have mercy. Through want of strength, have I gone astray, thou strong and bright god, have mercy. Thirst came upon the worshipper, though he stood in the midst of the waters—have mercy, Almighty, have mercy.”[97]

It is noticeable that in the Hindoo mind the sun, in its many manifestations, is sometimes synonymous with the firmament: Indra, as the illuminator of the zenith; Savitar, as the bestower of life; Mitra, as the friend of humanity; the indefatigable Agni, so modest but so active, in cooking the food and smelting iron, so powerful when it bears the smoke of the sacrifices heavenwards, and so exalted when it takes its place in the sun and descends in the form of lightning; and the spacious firmament which holds them all in its bosom; they are all one to the adorer of the divine powers; all are equally marvellous, it is a galaxy of brilliance. What innumerable gods, and not one to whom it could be said, “Deliver us from evil.”

Urged on by an irresistible curiosity the rishis ceaselessly probe into the unknown and the distant.

“Beyond the sky, beyond the earth, beyond the Devas and the Asuras, what was the first germ which the waters bore, wherein all gods were seen? The waters bore that first germ in which all the gods came together. That one thing in which all creatures rested was placed in the lap of the unborn. You will never know him who created these things, something else stands between you and Him. Enveloped in mist and with faltering voices, the poets walk along rejoicing in life.”[98]

How was it that in the midst of the magnificence of their immense Pantheon, the poets succeeded in obtaining glimpses of the One. Who was He? The mists surround Him and prevent Him being clearly discerned.

If there was one thing in nature more adapted than another to satisfy the desire of bridging over the limits of the visible world, it was certainly the vault of heaven; above the storms and clouds which are temporary, beyond all that is changeable; amongst all the changing objects which meet the eyes, surely the firmament was the most exalted, the most extended, and immovable. We know the genealogy of the name of the sky, Dyaus, which enables us to trace the transformations and subsequent applications; and as we advance we shall glean some particulars of that science which at a later date was called grammar.

It is known that in the Aryan languages some of the oldest words are without gender; speaking grammatically, pater is not a masculine, nor mater a feminine; nor do the oldest words for river, mountain, tree, or sky, disclose any outward sign of grammatical gender. But though without any signs of gender, all ancient nouns expressed activity. The distinction of gender began, not with the introduction of masculine nouns, but with the setting apart of certain derivative suffixes for feminine words; thus when bona was introduced, bonus became masculine; when puella could be applied to a girl, puer, which formerly meant both boy and girl, became restricted to the meaning of boy. Therefore, whenever it happens that we have a female representative of a natural phenomenon by the side of a male, the female may almost always be taken as the later form. This rule, which has been strictly applied to the name of Dyaus, dates from so remote a time that its origin is lost in the mists of ages.

Dyaus, like deva, shining, comes from the root div or dyu, but this root bifurcates at once. In the Rig-Veda forms derived from the base div are masculine or feminine as the case may be, whilst those which are derived from dyu are always masculine; thus dyaus from div, is the firmament, the expanse above our heads, and is the later feminine form; whereas dyaus from dyu, is the sky considered as a power, an active force, and is masculine, and consequently is the earlier conception. These two words, dyaus, nominative singular, and its base, dyu, being almost synonymous may be used indifferently.

All vegetable cells are destined to become plants, though sometimes different plants, this, observation of nature teaches us. All verbal cells are destined to become words, though differing, that is, with different meanings; the small amount of philological study to which we have already devoted ourselves in these pages shows us this. All cells, whatever their nature, possess a transitive movement; the French word éclater has the meaning of to disperse in brilliancy; if we imagine scintillations of light escaping from a central luminary we obtain the idea of a transitive luminous movement. Whilst a cell preserves its primary condition it is not possible to predict its future; no human intelligence could have foretold that the root div and dyu would produce the Sanscrit word deva, which means to shine, and deva would in time develop into deus, which now no longer means to shine, but God. It is a curious characteristic of Vedic Sanscrit that this uncertainty of meaning of such words as deva, which expresses equally the half physical and half spiritual intention, is an evidence of its rays having proceeded from the same source of light and heat.

Human reason, in finding its way amongst crooked paths, often wanders; the representations it makes of things are coloured by rays projected by mythological or dogmatic mirages. We may recognise in the manner in which our ancestors have viewed the supernatural powers the prototype of our own errors of judgment. From the time that Dyaus became the warming, life-giving sky and thus active, the rishis were authorised to call him pitar, father, and to place by his side Prithvi, the earth, who is the mother, and they then spoke of Dyaus as the father of the dawn, and of day and night. These were thus considered as the first attributes of the sky in Aryan mythology.

We are inclined to ascribe these excursions of thought to the flights of poetic fancy, but they are rather the results of the poverty of language, which make it impossible not only to express abstract ideas, but even to describe accurately the phenomena of the physical world. Religion and language in those days were so closely allied that it is possible to say of a religious idea in its infancy that it was a fragment of ancient language; for in order to describe his impressions the Aryan depended entirely on the words with which it furnished him. For this reason many of the hymns, incoherent though they may appear, are of inestimable value. Every one of their words weighs and tells, but for the translator who endeavours to present the Vedic thought in modern idioms, the results are so discouraging that he is tempted to give up in despair.

When at a later date the name of Dyaus became the centre of fabulous tales, it still remained in the Sanscrit language of that time one of the many traditional and unmeaning words for sky; but we must understand clearly that in the most ancient hymns of the Rig-Veda this name is the incarnation of the Power which is beyond and above conception, whose existence had been obscurely indicated from the beginning, and who remained unnamed long after the beasts of the forests and the birds of the air had received their appellations.

From the time of their exodus the Aryan family, going in different directions, were naturally divided into branches; vast distances separated them, and they forgot that the same cradle, the same hearth, had sheltered them at birth. But the ties which connected them originally were not snapped at all points, since they brought away with them words belonging to their mother-tongue, and certain intuitions were the common property of all. Before the Greek, Latin, Sanscrit, and German languages became separated, the name of a sovereign Power was implied in those of the divinity which at a much later time occupied so large a space in the history of Greece, Rome, India, and of Germany.

Coupled with the word pitar the name Dyaus appears in the most ancient Aryan prayers as Dyaush-pitar, Zeus-pater, and Ju-piter. These composite names are no invention of the poets; they are the results of certain laws of language to which our minds—if they would not turn from the right path—must submit. The initial dy in Dyaus is represented in Latin by j; Ju in Jupiter corresponds exactly with Dyaus. The name of the Teutonic god Tyr, genitive Tys, also corresponds, and as exactly, with Dyaus; in Gothic it would be Tius, and in Anglo-Saxon Tiw, preserved in Tiwsdæg, the day of the god Tyr, and Zio in Old High-German, where we find Ziestac for the modern Dienstag, the day of the god Mars. Tius, Tiw, Tyr, and Zio are forms that exist side by side, all of which of course proceed from that wonderful root div, and represent the bright sky, day, and god. No etymological interpretation would be satisfying which did not embrace all these forms, since they are all dialectic variations of Dyaus, the same name in different languages. All names truly related have but one root, in the same way as living beings who are brothers have but one mother.

If another proof were needed of the uninterrupted continuity of speech and thought amongst the chief of the Aryan people, the following fact will afford it:—

At the time when the schools flourished in Athens, and when the Greeks were hardly conscious of the existence of India, it would have been possible, I suppose, to see young pupils seated before tables on which the master had written the declensions which composed the task for the day. There might be read:—

Nom. Zeús
Gen. Dios
Dat. Dii
Acc. Dia
Voc. Zeû

Thus the young Athenians wrote the name of Zeus with an acute accent in the nominative, and a circumflex in the vocative.

At the same time the pupils of the Brahmans at Benares, when declining the name of their supreme deity, accented the syllables exactly in the same way as the Greeks, and they wrote:—

Nom. Dyaús
Gen. Dyvas
Dat. Divi
Acc. Divam
Voc. Dyaûs

But there was this difference between the Grecian pupils and the Hindoos, that the former were ignorant of the reason of these changes of accent, since the explanation was lacking in the Greek grammar, whereas the Sanscrit grammar explained to the latter the general principles of accentuation on which the changes rested.

The name of Dyaus was the source from which sprang an unique name, coined once and for ever, adopted by our entire family; the Greeks have no more borrowed it from the Hindoos, than the Romans and the Teutons from the Greeks; for it was pronounced before the separation of our ancestors with regard to language or religion; its meaning was Heaven-Father.

Our missionaries who go from one end of the earth to the other, reciting the Lord’s Prayer in all the dialects of the world, do not doubt the historical fact that this prayer was said one day at Jerusalem for the first time; we also may feel as profoundly convinced that under the name of Heaven-Father, the Supreme Being has been worshipped on the Himalayan mountains, under the oaks of Dodona, on the Capitol, and in the forests of Germany. It has required millions of men to fashion this name alone, which is the most ancient prayer of the Aryan race.

“Five thousand years have passed, perhaps more, since the Asiatic Aryans, speaking as yet neither Sanscrit, Greek, nor Latin, called upon the All-Father as Dyu-patar, Heaven-Father. Four thousand years ago, or it may be earlier, the Aryans who had travelled southwards to the rivers of the Punjaub called him Dyaush-pita, the Heaven-Father. Three thousand years ago, or it may be earlier, the Aryans on the shores of the Hellespont called him Zeus-pater, Heaven-Father. Two thousand years ago the Aryans of Italy looked up to that bright Heaven above and called it Ju-piter, the Heaven-Father. And a thousand years ago the same Heaven-Father was invoked in the dark forests of Germany, since the Teutonic Aryans sacrificed to the same Heaven-Father; and his old name of Tyr, Tiu, or Zio resounded then perhaps for the last time.

“But no thought, no name, has ever been entirely lost.”[99]

Some thousands of years have elapsed since these families have spread abroad on all sides; each branch has formed its own language, its own nationality, its mode of viewing life, and its philosophies; temples have been built and razed to the ground; since then all have aged, all are wiser, perhaps better, but the name which they gave to the Invisible Power who enfolds them is still the same, “Our Father which art in Heaven.”

This name, whose unity has always been perfect, is a magical formula, which brings our ancestors, even the most remote, within touch, and enables us to see them as they were, as they spoke and felt, thousands of years before Homer and the Hindoo poets. Guided by the science of language and following the path in the Vedic hymns taken by the humanity preceding us, we see how the concept of God, in its germ in the name Deva, grew from the idea of light, to active light, the one who wakens, the giver of daily light, of warmth and new life.

It is easy to understand the difference between these two assertions—first of this one—that the early Aryans called the phenomena of nature themselves by the name of God; and the other—that the Aryan mind distilled from the concept of these phenomena the general idea of God.

“If I were asked,” said Max Müller, “which is the most wonderful discovery of the nineteenth century in the history of humanity, I should reply it is that of the etymological equation of the Sanscrit Dyaush-pitar, the Greek Zeus-pater, the Latin Ju-piter, and Tyr, Tiw, and Zio of the Germans.”

That the generality of people should be inconsequent is not a matter of surprise. He may well be pardoned who does not at once, on the word of another, credit a number of facts of which no proofs are forthcoming, and who at the same time shows himself unwilling to accept the deductions of a science of which he knows nothing, that of etymology; but what does seem strange is that learned scholars who are perfectly capable of following the progress made by philology, refuse to recognise the identity of the different names given to the supreme deity of the Aryan race. Certain positivists are in this case; nothing irritates them more than to offer them grammatical proof that all the Aryan families had, before their separation, the same belief; and they try to demonstrate that the name of Dyaus at the first meant nothing more than the sky; and that only at a later period people had changed the name of sky and of firmament—physical phenomena only—into proper names which transformed nomina into numina.

It is worthy of note that this assertion is founded on a fact, but a fact not well understood. In the later literature of India which was known before the Veda became so much studied, the name of Dyaus was only known as a feminine; it was the recognised name for sky and day, and implied nothing divine. The ancient Aryan Dyaus after a time paled before Indra—a god of Indian soil; Indra, formerly the rain-giver—the ally of Rudra—ceased to reside exclusively in the more menacing phenomena of the atmosphere, and it is the pure light in which he is worshipped. He is now supreme.

“Before Indra the divine Dyu bowed, before Indra bowed the great Prithivi.”[100]

In order duly to celebrate Indra, the rishis did not content themselves with the praises they considered fitting for the other gods. They laboured hard to find the right expression and every hymn is a heroic feat.

“The other gods were sent away like shrivelled up old men; thou, O Indra, becamest the king. No one is beyond thee, no one is better than thou art, no one is like unto thee. Keep silence well! we offer our praises to the great Indra in the house of the sacrificer. Does he find treasure for those who are like sleepers? Mean praise is not valued among the munificent.”[101]

It is strange that it is in connection with the great Indra, the most popular of all the gods of India, that indications of a struggle between faith and doubt are apparent in the praises addressed to him. The existence of the other divinities was as firmly established as the splendour of the sun and stars, as the appearances of fire, the movements of the winds, the impressions made by heat and cold; and the confidence they inspired was too firmly established to require stimulating; and then suddenly we find the rishis discoursing on and enumerating the reasons that exist for man’s belief in Indra.

“When the fiery Indra hurls down the thunder-bolt, then people put faith in him. Look at this his great and mighty work, and believe in his great power.”

Whence came this insistence to recall the great power of Indra? It almost suggests the thought that the rishis felt the approach of a change in their conception of the omnipotence of some of the gods of nature.

“Offer praise to Indra, if you desire booty; true praise, if he truly exists. One and the other says, There is no Indra, who has seen him? Whom shall we praise? The terrible one of whom they ask where he is.”[102]

But the poet at once introduces Indra on the scene, and makes him say:—

“Here I am, O worshipper! behold me here.

In might I overcome all creatures.”—Id.

In reading the Rig-Veda attentively, in spite of these efforts to revive the ancient faith, here and there can be discovered slight traces of scepticism, so slight as to be scarcely perceptible, and these apart from the incredulity exhibited concerning the powerful Indra. The Hindoo was by nature profoundly believing, but his intellect was subtle and scrutinising, and he considered it due to himself to give exact explanations of all; the rishis make the following true remarks.

“Fire is quenched by water, a cloud hides the sun, the sun also disappears behind the sea;” and from these observations they draw the following conclusions.

“Water must not be worshipped, since a cloud can carry it away; nor the cloud, since the wind can disperse it.”

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The positivists have made too much of the fact that Dyaus, at one time in India, meant simply the sky and day; a rock is not more immovable than grammar, and it is moreover quite indifferent to all blows aimed at truths other than it holds.

Certain scholars in their researches after the origin of Aryan divinities, were surprised and somewhat disconcerted at a gap which confronted them and prevented further progress; nowhere in the later literature of India could any trace be found of Dyaus as a god who could correspond to the supreme divinity of the other branches of the family. However, the very rational conviction that this deity must have existed gradually strengthened in the minds of the learned. They were thus at a standstill, when the Veda appeared under the strong light of modern investigation and brought to view the name of Dyaus totally different from the feminine dyaus, a Dyaus presenting in itself, not merely the masculine substantive, but joined with pita—father. Amongst the Hindoos it had paled before Indra, who was a god of later date, but the other Aryan races had been uninfluenced by this. Dyaus, the chief god, had accompanied them in their migrations, and Zeus-pater, Ju-piter, Tyr, Tiw, and Zio, became the exact representative of him, each in a different country; this discovery of Dyaush-pita, was like finding at last a star in the very place of the heavens which had been fixed before by calculation, but where previously there had been a void.

This was not the only discovery due to the study of the Veda. No one could ignore the fact, that amongst the Hindoos dyaus was the name of the sky, since it bears in itself the root which attests this; but it would have been impossible to discover the radical or predicative meaning of Zeus by the help of Greek alone; it possesses no certificate of birth, and the Greeks had no traditions connected with it that could have taught us. With the help of comparative philology all is made plain; Zeus was born when Dyaus was recognised as masculine and called father, Dyaush-pitar, Ju-piter, Zeus-pater, and from the moment that we are made acquainted with the origin of Zeus, the rest of his career unrolls before us.

Our ancestors, however, had still a long time to wander in the wilderness of error, and lost themselves many times.

The Hindoos thought for a time that they had found in Dyaus the object of their search; but the supernatural light and the light of day became confounded; when the word Dyaus was pronounced, the many natural bright objects it might signify all vibrated in response and melted into one; they became—as a double star does—one object, and Dyu, the god of light, was eclipsed behind dyu the sky.

When the question was asked for the first time whence came the rain, the lightning, and the thunder, those who inhabited Italy replied that rain came from Jupiter Pluvius, the lightning from Jupiter fulminator and fulgurator, the thunder from Jupiter tonans. In Greece all that concerned the higher regions of the atmosphere was attributed to Zeus; it was Zeus who rained, who snowed, thundered, gathered the clouds, let loose the tempests, held the rainbow in his hand; many legends were grouped around these divine names; the more incomprehensible they were, the more eagerly were they heard, until it is very doubtful whether any trace remains of that Being who at the first gave to the name of the sky its highest signification.

A characteristic trait of the Hindoos, which is noticeable in the hymns, is a tendency to praise all by which they are surrounded. Not satisfied with celebrating the virtues of the invisible beings, which they imagine to be behind the semi-tangible and intangible objects such as mountains, rivers, trees, fire, the sun, storms, etc., the rishis, carried away by the ardour of their feelings, glorify objects which are perfectly tangible, even those which they may have made with their own hands, or those which at least have nothing mysterious in them; these are termed devatas, and the commentator explains that by this word is meant the person or thing addressed; thus the victims to be offered, or a sacrificial vessel, or a battle-axe or shield, all these are called devatas; in some dialogues found in the hymns whoever speaks is called the rishi, whoever is spoken to is the devata.

“The late Herbert Spencer relates that even in our days the Hindoo offers prayers to the objects which he uses; a woman adores the basket which she takes to the market and offers sacrifices to it, as well as to the other implements which assist her in her household labours. A carpenter pays the like homage to his hatchet, the mason to his trowel, and the Brahman to the style with which he is going to write. The question is, in what sense did the author of Principles of Sociology use the word adore?”[103]

The desire to have an exact account of what is happening alternates with the prayers and adoration; the questions and praises interlace like the threads of a web.

“Unsupported, not fastened, how does he (the sun) rising up, not fall down?”

The poet is also anxious to know how the dawn and the sun appear each morning; how there is so much rain, also such an abundance of rivers and streams.

“How many fires are there, how many dawns, how many suns, and how many waters? I do not say this, O fathers, to worry you; I ask you, O seers, that I may know.”

The explanation also is desired by these enquirers how it is that a red or brown cow can give white milk.[104] The rishis are rigorous logicians, and consider that the powerful divinities who made the world such as it is might have done better; and they do not scruple to communicate their opinion to whom it concerns. “If we were as rich as you we should not allow our worshippers to beg their bread.”

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It has been asked whether humanity commenced by having a monotheistic or a polytheistic religion. This is not the first time that this question has been propounded; it has as an antecedent a very ancient opinion, developed in the schools of theology in the Middle Ages; the Fathers of the Church gave it as their opinion that a faith in one God, from the days of the greatest antiquity, had been the glorious heritage of the Semitic family, coming in a direct line from the first man. But these same theologians considered Hebrew to be the primitive language of the human race, an assertion now known to be erroneous.[105] We may therefore subject the first assertion to an examination.

The learned writers who dispute on the original form of religious thought forget that the ancient Aryans could not have been either monotheistic or polytheistic. The Vedic hymns show us that though there were many gods, and that they were equal, yet whilst the worshipper was addressing one, the rest were excluded from his mind, and were as though they did not exist; each god became in turn the Supreme Power, and received the highest praise; the rishis, who had represented the sun under the names of Vishnu, Varuna, Mitra, Savitar as the creator of the world, spoke of it immediately afterwards as the child of the waters, born of the dawn, a god among other gods, neither better nor worse; it is this characteristic of the Aryan religion, this worship offered alternately to different divinities to which Max Müller has given the name of Henotheism.

“Among you, O gods, there is none that is great, and none that is little—none old or young—you are all great indeed.”

The religion of humanity in its entirety at the beginning was this intuition of the divine, whose formula is that article of faith, at once the simplest and the most important—God is God—the want of definiteness in it making it the more applicable to the dawn of thought. This primitive intuition of God was in itself neither monotheistic nor polytheistic, though it might become either according to the expression which it took in the language of man; in no language does the plural exist before the singular; no human mind could have conceived the idea of gods without having previously conceived the idea of one God. “It would be, however, quite as great a mistake to imagine, because the idea of a god must exist previously to that of gods, that therefore a belief in one God preceded everywhere the belief in many gods. A belief in God, as exclusively One, involves a distinct negation of more than one God, and that negation is possible only after the conception, whether real or imaginary, of many gods.”[106] If therefore an expression had been given to this primitive intuition of the Deity, which is the mainspring of all later religion, it would have been, “There is a God,” but certainly not yet, “There is but one God.”

These fine distinctions require close attention to grasp them; the fact that in our modern tongues we have derived the singular Theos from the Greek plural Theoi has caused confusion; from a historical point of view, no doubt Theos has come from Theoi; but putting this aside, the meaning of the word has gone through as complete a transformation as that of the acorn to the oak; the evidence of this change has been so deeply impressed even on our outward senses that as soon as our intellect has attained some measure of development the sound of the word God used in the plural jars on our ears as if we heard of two universes or one twin.

The Hindoo mind, however, oscillated between the representation of many gods and of one only God; and the rishis appear to have attempted to establish a sort of priority amongst their numerous deities.

“That which is one, the seers call in many ways; they speak of Indra, Mitra, Agni, and Varuna—they call it by various names—that which is, and is one.”

“In the evening Agni becomes Varuna—he becomes Mitra when rising in the mornings; having become Savitri, he passes through the sky—having become Indra he warms the heaven in the centre.”[107]

This attempt, which might have led to monotheism, came to nothing; on this point the Hindoos were behind the Greeks and Romans, who with their polytheism had a presiding deity, viz., Zeus and Jupiter.

“When we thus see the god Dyaus antiquated by Indra, and Indra himself almost denied, we might expect in India the same catastrophe which in Iceland the poets of the Edda always predicted—the twilight of the gods preceding the destruction of the world. We seem to have reached the stage when henotheism, after trying in vain to grow into an organised polytheism on the one side, or into an exclusive monotheism on the other, would by necessity end in atheism; yet atheism is not the last word of the Indian religion.”[108]

What is atheism?

CHAPTER XI
MAN’S CONCEPTIONS OF RELIGION

“No one sufficiently recognises the power of reason.”
—St Thomas Aquinas.

“De nos jours, nous mouquons encore plus de raison que de religion.”
—Fenelon.

This question: “What is atheism?” has aroused me with a start. Led aside as I had been by many beautiful, true, and striking thoughts, which I noted as they presented themselves to me; being also very preoccupied by depressing observations that I had made on my chronic inability to turn them to account, I lost sight of the fact that it is not sufficient to write and think at will merely, without definite plan, not keeping the goal in sight. This is my eleventh chapter, and I see with dismay that it is likely to exceed the two which precede it in length, and that it follows one concerned more with the repetition of words often spoken and seldom understood. I fear that I lack method.

During our own time we have seen a school arise, the Historical School; it was heralded in Germany by such men as Niebuhr, the two Humboldts, Bopp—the author of the first Comparative Grammar—Grimm, and many others. This School shows that an uninterrupted continuity connects what has been thought of old with what is being thought at present; that there is no break between the present and the past; and that the difficulties which are presented to us by the study of the present philosophical problems, would in a great measure disappear, if we knew under what form these same problems presented themselves to man for the first time.

The Historical School advances step by step with the study of comparative philology; this latter has shown that at the beginning the number of words was very small; they lay, as it were, side by side, before man’s eyes, as evenly and as regularly as the threads on a weaver’s loom. But gradually, on account of our neglect, and our many misunderstandings, the idea contained in these words became entangled, and we have ceased to follow the course of the thread; the words have remained in our memory, but the meaning has changed; they may even have several meanings which contradict each other; the result is that we are ignorant of many things it would be well for us to know with certainty.

All problems whether of philosophy or of philology, are best solved by the historical method; let us bravely face each obscure question to which we have no key; each doubtful term the meaning of which is lost, and bid all retrace their steps in the path by which they arrived at us; avoiding the peril of the idle worker who has a theory, and a remedy ready for everything; and the walks in the country of dreams which have no chart to direct travellers.

For us who are not learned linguists there is more than one method of gaining information concerning words; the easiest is to note the use made of them at various times in the past; another way which is more important and more certain is to study their biographies, we should find them in ancient documents; a third method that exacts neither a knowledge of their history, nor their genealogy, consists simply in reflection; this process, which should be within the reach of all, is seldom used.

As I am constrained to follow the development of the Vedic religion at the commencement of what was neither polytheism nor monotheism; I recur to the [last word of the preceding chapter] in order to find its historical antecedents.

History tells us that much in the same way as a wild beast pursues its prey, this epithet of atheist is hurled at men who in truth have little in common. “In the eyes of his Athenian judges Socrates was an atheist; yet he did not even deny the gods of Greece, but he reserved to himself the right to believe in something higher and more truly divine than Hephaistos and Aphrodite.”[109] Spinoza was called an atheist by the Jews, his co-religionists, because his conception of Jahveh or Jehovah was wider than theirs. The early Christians were called átheoi by the Jews and Greeks because they believed not as the Jews and Christians believed. Were the Hindoos atheists when they said, “What is Indra? it is the sun, the rain only.” Were they atheists when they ceased to believe in their Devas, the brilliant objects, the stars, the fields, the rivers, the eyes of man? If the history of the word atheist had only taught us one thing, e.g. that those who think differently from ourselves do not deserve the reproach of atheism, it would have extinguished the fires of many an auto da fé.

But are there real atheists? Do those persons exist who are convinced that the word God represents nothing? There may be; if you have succeeded in convincing human reason that there can be an act without a cause, a boundary without a beyond, a finite without an infinite; then you will have proved without doubt that there is no God. “God is a great word,” said a German theologian, lately deceased, whose honesty and piety have never been questioned, “he who feels and understands that, will judge more mildly and more justly of those who confess that they dare not say that they believe in God.”[110]

We ought never to call a man an atheist till we know what kind of God it is that he has been brought up to believe in, and what kind of God it is that he rejects, it may be, from the best and highest motives. If we can respect the childlike faith of a charcoal-burner, let us also respect philosophical doubt; it may well indicate a turning-point in the life of a man, in which he is perhaps abandoning a belief of which he has seen the error, or is perhaps seeking to replace the less worthy faith, however dear it may be to him, by one more perfect, however its novelty may distress him; without such “atheism” as this our religion would long ago have only been a congealed hypocrisy.

In the life of an individual, as in the life of a nation, there comes a moment when opinion becomes modified; the old theory of the world being fashioned by a workman as a potter moulds his vessels of clay, has gradually disappeared. These ideas were so repugnant to the enlightened mind of Sakya-muni, the Hindoo Prince—universally known as Buddha—that he considered it irreverent to enquire how the world was made, and still more audacious to attempt to answer the enquiry.

That which took the place of henotheism amongst the Hindoos might aptly be termed adivism, a denial of the old Devas. Such a denial, however, of what was once believed, but could be honestly believed no longer, so far from being the end of religion, is in reality its vital principle.

Whilst about to deal with ideas which I know are true, it is gratifying to expose at the same time certain false opinions which have been put forth on the subject; it is curious to note how to start with a false opinion brings one to a wrong conclusion. Herodotus, Cæsar, and Quintus Curtius, who have all written on popular religious beliefs, relate that men adored the sun, the earth, the sky, fire, and water; that they worshipped certain rivers, and certain trees, and considered as gods all things that were useful to them. This was the opinion of the ancient writers who knew no better, and modern theorists repeated also: “Primitive men deified the grand natural phenomena of nature, especially the stars, taking them for gods.”

It is not a matter for surprise that primitive man should have formed the opinion that either in the world or out of it there should be a sovereign power which they considered as their gods.

In the eighteenth century the theory of fetishism was held to explain all the intuitions of primitive man; although not pertinent to the subject, this was not perceived until afterwards, and the theory was considered reasonable.

Whilst the Theorists take the predicate of God, when applied even to a fetish, as requiring no explanation, the Historical School sees in it the result of a long continued evolution of thought. It was evident that the human soul was so constituted that it must tend naturally and inevitably towards the Unknown; it was also necessary that man should learn that he possessed a soul.

We recognise that we have one; but are we equally clear as to what it is?

We answer perhaps: “Yes, it is that part of us which is not the body which perishes—the soul is immortal.” It is well to be able to make such a reply, since it is true; our catechisms have sown the seed of which this is the result.

But since all human knowledge, whether abstract or practical, has the same beginning, through the senses, and that neither eye, ear, nor hand has to do with the soul, what can we know of it? Above all, what can we learn of its existence after death, the time when immortality has passed beyond the sphere of the experience of the senses? As man we recognise the spirit inhabiting the body, but with no form, such as it might receive after death; we can hardly clothe these ideas in words.

This belief in a soul, exactly like the belief in gods, and at last in One God, can only be understood as the outcome of constantly renewed observations and long meditations; the annals of language furnish material for this study, those ancient words, which, meaning originally something quite tangible and visible, came in time to mean that which is invisible and infinite.

The last breath of a dying person gave the first conception of the presence in man of a non-corporeal principle; it was recognised that this perceptible breath, at the moment of death, was an accident and transient. Language marks clearly the difference between the act of breathing or breath, and that which breathed, the invisible agent of this act—the living soul, the spirit. This agent received different names, in the different languages; the Greeks named it Psyche, saying that it was the breath which, at the hour of death, passed out through the bars of the teeth; amongst the Hindoos it was called Atman, and Anima amongst the Latins, two words which originally were understood by those using them as meaning something breathing. Cicero spoke of Anima, but he refrained from defining it, and frankly avowed that he did not know whether to call it breath or fire.

The word breath has been used figuratively to express the Power governing the world.[111] A poet in the Veda when speaking of the Supreme Being says, “It breathed without air.”

Although the word breath was most frequently used to denote the principle of life, another expression was employed at a much earlier period; in countries the most remote from each other, the words, the shadow of the dead, were used, in order to express the idea of something intangible yet closely related to the body. The influence of language on thought is so real and so much more powerful than the testimony of our senses, that those who named the soul a shadow, came at last to believe that corpses threw no shadow because it had left them.

It was then considered that the soul was not a homogeneous whole, but composed of parts of which some are ephemeral, destined to disappear with the body; these parts form what the Greek and Latin writers call the Ego, and the Hindoos Aham, what in French would be termed the moi—three words for one thing—an object of contingency, since it depends on circumstances—on the body, on age, and on sex.

All men have endeavoured to solve the riddle of human life; but the Hindoos, who especially excelled in researches dealing with the formation of words, that is to say, with the birth or development of ideas, whilst penetrating deeply into the mysteries of their soul, their Atman, arrived at an abstraction of this Atman, entirely freed from all earthly or physical particles, and this “vehicle of an abstraction” they considered to be incapable of perishing, since it had no connection with breath, it was the pure self, “freed from the fetters and conditions of the human Ego,” hidden in the Aham; not contingent on circumstances—the self-existent One.

This new conception demanded a new name; the word Atman, which at first signified all the concomitant elements of the soul—those which pass, equally with those that remain—the Hindoos retained in their language, and it was used to define the essence itself, the being with no attributes, identical with the Being who vivified nature, the Infinite that supported man’s own being, the Highest Self. Socrates knew this same Self, but he called it Daimonion, the indwelling God, whom the early Christians called the Holy Ghost.

From the Hindoo point of view this idea holds in itself the solution of the world’s great enigma. The commandment indicating the kernel of all philosophy, “Know thyself,” was the Hindoo doctrine. Know thyself as the self, or if we translate it into religious language, “Know that we live and move and have our being in God” (Acts xvii. 28).[112]

In recognising the soul as that which is the self, we see that this fact of existing is more wonderful than the acts of breathing, feeling, thinking, living, since none of these manifestations are possible but on the sole condition of having proceeded from the Being—who is.

After having analysed the human soul, the Hindoos followed it from phase to phase from the moment when the breath which makes man a living being received its first names. They thus traced its history through time, and believed that they could follow it through eternity.

Years were employed in the elaboration of this history, and we only find its completion in a work which is posterior to the Vedic hymns, the Upanishads. The study of the human soul is the central point in Hindoo philosophy, and the Upanishads are the first psychological work which has ever been made.

There are persons who doubt the existence of things, of which others feel certain; but no one ever doubted the existence of his own soul. Why did the theologians who arranged the creeds not include the article, “I believe in my soul.” It would not have found men incredulous.

Reflection enables us to admit that the soul without God could possess no history, since neither the soul without God, nor God without the soul, could constitute religion. For this which is called religion, if under the form only of a soaring towards an unknown but longed-for Being, has always existed since there have been men on the earth.

We often meet the recurring questions “Whence?” “Why?” and the frequent “Because”; and now we are told by a small number of thinkers that all the explanations of speculative philosophy on the first impulses of the human soul towards religion, are only worthless suppositions, unless philosophers—as historians have done—have recognised that there was a revelation at the beginning of time in the true sense of the word; but opinions differ as to “the true sense of the word.”

We are so accustomed to apply the expression “the Word of God” to the sacred canon of Scripture, that we are inapt at seeking for God’s Word elsewhere. But our first fathers read and studied it before the Bible existed.

To reflective minds, primitive man presents a moving spectacle, drawn towards the Unknown—the Unseen—they abandoned themselves unresistingly to the current leading them in certain directions.

I imagine that our Aryan ancestors would not have fixed their attention with such tenacity on the objects in nature which environed them, had the stars and heavenly bodies been immovable. But the sun appearing on the one side, traversing the sky and then disappearing on the opposite side, made the remark of the Incas prince very natural: “There is some power behind the sun causing it to ascend and descend.” It did not occur to him that the sun travelled in accordance with natural laws. Other princes and poets, with their eyes fixed on the moving objects of the firmament, would have made the same reflection and sought the invisible cause.

If the world had been propelled by a moving power within itself, creatures possessing reason would have been vaguely conscious of it from the first. They would have been like the plants which turn regularly and infallibly in one direction, since they are not free to do otherwise.

“You premise a revelation,” may be said to me, “and yet you direct us towards Evolution; choose one of the two since the one contradicts the other.”

That remains to be proved. Apply the theory of the evolutionist to the mollusc; we see it directing itself, and extending its tentacles, towards a crumb of bread that floats on the water. If they touch it the contact calls forth in the mollusc the act of seizing its prey. This is only a movement of semi-consciousness, or perhaps rather it is not entirely involuntary. Under the aspect of immediate cause and effect, we see a principle anterior to the phenomenon; certain perceptions which appear in the sight of many psychologists to be innate, that is to say, impressions received on our mind before we became conscious of ourself, may well be the result of the receptability of our Ego, which enables us, when it is affected in a certain fashion, to represent these affections to ourselves under certain forms.

The presentiment that unknown powers were to be found behind the visible world only showed itself when the Aryans first named them sky, sun, moon, storm, day, night, all terms previously used for various parts of nature.

With the perception of a Beyond, with the desire to know what it contained, a gap made itself felt which separated it from the known world. It must be crossed—a bridge was necessary. This thought spread from one end of the globe to the other, but our ancestors were the first bridge-makers. Scandinavian mythology mentions a bridge built by the gods which was of three colours; it was clearly intended originally for the rainbow. The Milky Way provided the Hindoos with a bridge; and in the Upanishads mention is made of a path having five colours. Here we have the rainbow again probably. The source of these legends is the ineradicable belief in the heart of man, that the here and hereafter, the immortal and the mortal, the divine and the human, cannot remain apart for ever.

Here I will comment on a striking feature of the Rig-Veda. The rishis give accounts of the manner in which the hymns are composed. They say that they worked at them as other workmen do, such as carpenters, weavers, and potters. Sometimes they speak of the verses as coming direct from the heart; another says his hymn moves as a skiff on the river. Sometimes they speak of their hymns as god-given, and that the gods themselves are seers and poets. In no part of the Rig-Veda are there traces of the theories of the verbal inspiration with the meaning which the Greeks attached to the word as a theophany or manifestation of divinity, nor as it was understood afterwards in all religions, beginning with Brahmanism.

It would be useless to seek for a complete exposition of Vedic thought in the Rig-Veda; all the hymns found in it are not ancient; the collection was made by the priests, and if they retained much that was useless for our purpose in their worship, yet we should be very grateful to them, as in this manner much has been preserved to us of the ancient poetry of India, and it is they who recount the pilgrimage undertaken by the Aryans in search of the invisible lodestone which attracted them beyond what they could see and hear. As they advanced they rejoiced, seeming to attain their desire; but cast down under the weight of their sadness, as at times they found themselves misled.

It is said in the Bible, that for God a thousand years is as one day, and as I read the sacred books of India, not as a learned critic, but as a man who is rejoiced to discover his own thoughts in the writings of the Hindoo poets, the three or four thousand years appear to me as one day during which these poets have not ceased to pour themselves out in their hymns, and it would be possible to condense in one page the sentiments expressed in the first hymns and the last Upanishads.

“Simple minded, not comprehending in my mind, I ask for the hidden places of the gods.”[113] “My ears vanish, my eyes vanish, and the light also which dwells in my heart; my mind with its far-off longings leaves me; what shall I say, and what shall I think?”[114]

“There is no likeness of Him whose name is Great Glory. He is not apprehended of the eye, nor by the other senses, nor by speech; not by penance, or good works. We do not know, we do not understand, how anyone can teach it. It is different from the known, it is also above the unknown, thus we have heard from those of old who taught us this.”

“You will not find Him who has created these things; something else stands between you and Him.”[115]

These detached sentences acquire a very special value, when it is remembered that they are not quotations drawn from some modern works, which imitate the writings of another epoch; these exist nowhere but in the Veda, a literary work composed in the silence and shade, by writers who themselves were ignorant of the object of their desire.

One point at last becomes clear in the mist; a thousand years probably before the coming of Christ in Palestine, this verse was pronounced in the north of India, “He who is above the gods alone is God.”[116]

The Grecian, Roman, and German divinities disappeared before other beliefs; but the Hindoos who knew that their gods were nothing more than mere names, had no dawning religion within their reach that they could adopt; therefore they did not abandon their traditions, and they continued to grope, as one of their own poets says, “Enveloped in mist and with faltering voices.”

All the religious thought of the Vedic period can be found in the Upanishads (the literal meaning of this name is, sessions or assemblies of pupils round their master). There is not what could be called a philosophical system in these Upanishads; they are fragments, and are in the true sense of the word, guesses at truth; the spirit of the work is liberal, all shades of opinion are represented in it, the most divers, and sometimes contradictory. Conjectures abound with regard to the creation, all start from the theory that the world we see is not the true world, and that before it appeared there was the true Self—the Self-existent—the One which underlies the whole world, from which has come all that seems to exist and does actually exist. This was the final solution of the search after the Unknown, the Invisible, which had been foretold through a long chain of centuries; an intuition more convincing than all the arguments which were used at a later period to prove the existence of the Causa Causæ.

The difficulties of the Brahmans in making a complete collection of these vague presentiments, confused thoughts, and true intuitions, were increased a hundredfold by the fact that they had to accept every word and every sentence of the Upanishads as supernaturally revealed. However contradictory at first sight, all that was said in the Upanishads had to be accepted and explained. It would seem difficult to construct a well-arranged literary monument out of such heterogeneous materials; but it was harmonised and welded into a system of philosophy that for solidity and unity will bear comparison with any other system of philosophy in the world.[117]

This gigantic work, which commenced with the Vedic hymns and ended in the book called the Vedanta, or End, and was the end or supreme object of the Veda, is also known under the name of Mîmâmsâ-sutras. Mîmâmsâ is a desiderative form of the root man, to think, and a very appropriate name for a philosophical work of this kind; and sûtra means literally a string; but it is here used as the name of short and abstract aphorisms, rendered still more enigmatical by the conciseness of the language. There are several hundreds of these sayings or headings, forming tables of contents, a magic chaplet of immeasurable length, each word containing condensed thought. This work must have required a concentration of mind which it is difficult for us to realise.

The meaning and form of these aphorisms are characteristic—here is one.

“I will declare in a line, that which has required millions of volumes.

“Brahma is true, the world is false; the soul is Brahma and nothing else.”

Those who consider the Supreme Being as the Infinite in nature, and the individual soul as the Infinite in man, must consider God and the soul as one, not two, seeing there cannot be two Infinites; such is the belief of the Hindoos; but this belief does not belong to them exclusively, it existed amongst the Greeks, and it is encountered in other places in our day besides India.

As works of art these sûtras are of course nothing, but for giving a complete and accurate outline of a whole system of philosophy they are admirable. Under these fragmentary forms can be found treatises of grammar, etymology, exegesis, phonetics, ceremonial, and jurisprudence.

The aphorism which I have quoted is the pure quintessence of the Vedanta.

And of Pantheism also, it may be said. This word Pantheism is one of the most difficult to define, and I shall not attempt to explain it. I have a horror of epithets, and I am sorry that it is not always possible to avoid them. I do not examine philosophical systems too minutely, lest I should be drawn into hurling at them such words as pantheism, mysticism, positivism, materialism, naturalism, without being quite clear when it is no longer lawful to express myself in these terms; epithets and labels are very apt to return home to roost. I will therefore confine myself to this remark, with regard to the belief of the Hindoos; if each definite colour can be broken up into a number of tints too numerous to name, may it not be the same with certain shades and meanings in words and thoughts?

The Greeks hardly suspected the existence of the Veda; in more modern times Europe caught glimpses of it; and now, although completely discovered and studied, it is thoroughly known only to a few erudite scholars, which explains the fact that this ancient creation of the Hindoo mind has exercised so small an influence on our philosophy.