English
Whatever the age of the Veda may be, in one sense it is the oldest book in existence. If this col- lection had been written but fifty years ago, in some distant part of the world untouched by the general stream of civilisation, we should still call it more ancient than the Homeric poems, because it represents an earlier phase of human thought and feeling. Names^ which in Homer have become petrified and mytholo- gical, are to be found in the Veda as it were in a 1 See Essai de Mythologie Compar6e, traduit de TAnglais de Max Miiller, Paris, 1859, p. 47. 553 FBILOSOPBICAL HTMNS. Btill fluid state. They next appear as appellatives, not yet as proper names ; they are organic, not yet broken and smoothed down. Nor can we compare that earlier, lower, and more savage phase of thought which we find in the Veda, with what we know of really barbarous tribes, such as the Negroes of Africa or the Indians of America. For, however inferior to the Greeks of Homer and the Jews of Moses, the Aryas of the Seven Rivers are far above those races, and had long crossed the bounds of an un- conscious barbarism, when they worshipped Dyaus and the other bright gods of nature. Let us consider but a single point. We have accustomed ourselves to regard a belief in the unity of God as one of the last stages to which the Greek mind ascended from the depths of a polytheistic faith. The one unknown God was the final result which the pupils of Plato and Aristotle had arrived at when they came to listen to the strange teaching of St. Paul at Athens. But how can we tell that the course of thought was the same in India ? By what right do we mark all hymns as modem in which the idea of one God breaks through the clouds of a polytheistic phraseology ? The belief in a Supreme God, in a God above all gods, may in the abstract seem later than the belief in many gods. Yet let one poet but once perceive how he is drawn towards the Divine by the same feelings that draw him towards his father, let such a poet in his simple prayer but once utter, though it be thoughtlessly, the words, " My father," and the dreary desert through which philosophy marches step by step, is crossed at a single bound. We must not compare the Aryan and the Semitic races. Whereas the Semitic nations relapsed THE PHILOSOPHY OP CREATION. 559 from time to time into polytheism, the Aryans of India seem to have relapsed into Monotheism. In both cases these changes were not the result of a gradual and regular progress, but of individual impulses and peculiar influences. I do not think, therefore, that the mere occurrence of monotheistic ideas, and of other large philosophical conceptions, is sufficient to stamp any class of hymns as of modem date. A decided preponderance of such ideas, coupled with other indications in the character of the lan- guage, might make us hesitate before we used such as witnesses for the Chhandas period. But there is a monotheism that precedes the polytheism of the Veda, and even in the invocations of their innumer- able gods the remembrance of a God, one and infinite, breaks through the mist of an idolatrous phraseology, like the blue sky that is hidden by passing clouds. There is a hymn of peculiar interest in the tenth Mandala, full of ideas which to many would seem to necessitate the admission of a long antecedent period of philosophical thought. There we find the conception of a beginning of all things, and of a state previous even to all existence. " Nothing that is, was then," the poet says; and he adds, with a boldness matched only by the Eleatic thinkers of Greece, or by Hegel's philosophy, " even what is not (to [ir^ ov), did not exist then." lie then proceeds to deny the existence of the sky and of the firmament, and yet, unable to bear the idea of an unlimited nothing, he exclaims, " What was it that hid or covered the existing ? " Thus driven on, and asking two questions at once, with a rapidity of thought which the Greek and the Sanskrit languages only can follow, he says, "What was the refuge of what ?" After this metaphysical flight, 560 THE PHILOSOrHT OF CBEATIOIT. the poet returns to the more substantive realities of thought, and, throwing out a doubt, he continues, ** Was waXer the deep abyss, the chaos, which swallowed everything?" Then his mind, turning away from na- ture, dwells upon man and the problem of human life. " There was no death," he says, and, with a logic which perhaps has never been equalled, he subjoins, " therefore was there nothing immortal." Death, to his mind, becomes the proof of immortality. One more negation, and he has done. ^^ There was no space, no life, and lastly, there was no time, no difference between day and night, no solar torch by which morning might have been told from evening." All these ideas lie imbedded in the simple words, " Na Tktrjk ahna ksit praketah." Now follows his first assertion ; " That One," he says, and he uses no other epithet or qualification — " That One breathed breath- less by itself: other than it nothing since has been." This expression, " it breathed breathless " seems to me one of the happiest attempts at making lan- guage reflect the colourless abstractions of the mind. *• That One," the poet says, " breathed, and lived; it enjoyed more than mere existence; yet its life was not dependent on anything else, as our life depends on the air which we breathe. It breathed breathless." Language blushes at such expressions, but her blush is a blush of triumph. After this the poet plunges into imagery. " Dark- ness there was, and all at first was veiled in gloom profound, as ocean without light." No one has ever found a truer expression of the Infinite, breathing and heaving within itself, than the ocean in a dark night, without a star, without a torch. It would have been easy to fill out the picture, and a modem THE PHILOSOPHY OP CREATION. 561 writer would have filled it out. The true poet, how- ever, says but a single word, and, at his spellj pictures arise within our o^vn mind, full of a reality beyond the reach of any art. But now this One had to be represented as grow- ing— as entering into reality — and here again nature must supply a similitude to the poet. As yet, the real world existed only as a germ, hidden in a husky shell ; now, the poet represents the one substance as borne into life by its own innate heat. The beginning of the world was conceived like the spring of nature ; one miracle was explained by another. But, even then, this Being, or this nature, as conceived by the poet, was only an unconscious substance, without will and without change. The question how there was generation in nature, was still unanswered. Another miracle had to be appealed to, in order to explain the conscious act of creation : this miracle was Love, as perceived in the heart of men. ** Then first came love upon it," the poet continues, and he defines love, not only as a natural, but as a mental impulse. Though he cannot say what love is, yet he knows that all will recognise what he means by love, — a power which arises from the unsearchable depths of our nature, — making us feel our own incompleteness, and draw- ing us, half-conscious, half-unconscious, towards that far off and desired something, through which alone our life seems to become a reality. This is the analogy which was wanted to explain the life of nature, which he knew was more than mere existence. The One Being which the poet had postulated was neither self-sufficient nor dead: a desire fell upon it, — a spring of life, manifested in growth of every kind. After the manifestation of this desire or will, all o o 562 THE PHILOSOPHY OF CBBATION, previous existence seemed to be unreal, a mere tiothing as compared with the fullness of genuine life. A substance without this life, without that infinite desire of production and reproduction, could hardly be said to exist. It was a bare abstract concep- tion. Here, then, the poet imagines he has discovered the secret of creation, — the transition of the nothing into the something, — the change of the abstract into the concrete. Love was to him the beginning of real reality, and he appeals to the wise of old, who dis- covered in love, "the bond between created things and uncreated." What follows is more difficult to understand. We hardly know into what new sphere of thought the poet enters. The growth of nature has commenced, but where was it ?