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.