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.