The Religion of the Veda: The Ancient Religion of India (from Rig-Veda to Upanishads) c8.121

c8.121

I am mindful of the relative insecurity of prehistoric reconstructions: they must, in the nature of the case, to some extent be prehistoric guesses. Nevertheless, in handling these specimens, and remembering others which time forbids me to treat here, my own faith at least in the reality of these very old fossils of human thought has grown and not shrunk. When I say human I mean, too, that they are so very human. They are of the logic of mental events. The effect upon the higher grade of primitive mind which the facts and events of the visible world may naturally be expected to have—that is the effect which we have traced. We must, of course, not imagine either Indo-Europeans or Indo-Iranians as town folk, but rather as semi-barbarous nomad and agricultural tribes, accustomed to look hard, and to be strongly interested in the sights that nature offers. Certainly if our analyses are not true they are well found: Father Sky and Mother Earth; next, the inevitable children of Father Sky, namely, the visible bodies and luminous phenomena on the sky, the *deivōs*, “or shiners,” as the most persistent idea of the early gods; their destruction of hostile darkness; their character as overseers and guardians of cosmic and moral order; thunder, the commanding voice of another little less obvious god in heaven:—they appear treated with simplicity and directness, we may say with inevitable logic. The perplexed search after a first man, a first pair; the propagation of man; and man's destiny after death is more subjective, yet carried out with clever realism. There is no better way until we come to the clarified, yet intrinsically no less impotent philosophies of a much later time. Because all these myths, fancies, poems, and chains of logic are founded on the outer universe and on human consciousness, therefore we are reasonably sure that they are real. This is an even more valuable guaranty than philological exactness and historical sense which, of course, should strengthen the hands of the trained investigator in every detail. In my opinion the mental sanity of Comparative Mythology is its brief to practise the profession of a true science; and it is permissible to say with renewed emphasis that the religion of the Veda is the child in direct succession of the prehistoric ideas which this science calls out from the dim past.