Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/186

 Indian hymns, epics, dramas, but because human life in India has been such as to make the social predominate over the individual factors, the Indian village community having always been the most stable institution of Indian life. Indian, like Hebrew, literature is full of the social sentiment of Nature, but knows little of the individualised Nature of Theocritus or Wordsworth

sings the Greek idyllist; but the song of his own heart outsings through the stillness of Nature.

sings the English poet of Nature; but the cloud bears no rainbow of social hope, it is a private sign of personal recollections.

§ 44. In order to reach the point of view from which the clan regards Nature we must remember the one grand characteristic of clan thought which has been previously explained at some length. This is the want of personality in any sense resembling the modern. Just as the responsibility of a child for the deeds of generations buried long before it was born does not appear irrational to men who have no clear notion of personal intention, of personal as distinct from communal life, so in dealing with the phenomena of Nature—wind and cloud, rain and thunder, sun, moon, stars—the names given by such primitive minds and expressing for the most part ideas of human action are not really individual