The Origin of Thought and Speech

by M. Moncalm

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]