Indian Philosophy v1.c8.s2.15

v1.c8.s2.15

The process of god-making in the factory of man's mind cannot be seen so clearly anywhere else as in the Rg-Veda. We have in it the freshness and splendour of the morning of man's mind still undulled by past custom or fixed routine. There is no such thing as a beginning in the history of ideas, and we have to start somewhere. We may begin with the identification of the Vedic gods in some of their aspects with certain forces of nature, and point out how they were gradually raised to moral and superhuman beings. The earliest seers of the Vedic hymns delighted in sights of nature in their own simple unconscious way. Being essentially of a poetic temperament, they saw the things of nature with such intensity of feeling and force of imagination that the things became suffused with souls. They knew what it was to love nature, and be lost in the wonders of dawn and sunrise, those mysterious processes which effect a meeting of the soul and nature. To them nature was a living presence with which they could hold communion. Some glorious aspects of nature became the windows of heaven, through which the divine looked down upon the godless earth. The moon and the stars, the sea and the sky, the dawn and the nightfall were regarded as divine. This worship of nature as such is the earliest form of Vedic religion.