The Origin of Thought and Speech

by M. Moncalm

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]