Page:Segnius Irritant or Eight Primitive Folk-lore Stories.pdf/107

 Now, suppose a philosophizing reflective stage of thought reached, as in fact was reached in the north of India some five or six centuries before the birth of Christ, the condition of their mythology would naturally turn thoughtful people’s minds to the curious analogy between the cyclus of the day and that of the year, the evolution of the day and the year, and that of human life: all three beginning with a little fluid or viscid slime, and finishing in darkness, rigidity, and death. And the verification of this fact (more particularly in minds to which the true conditions and relations of the organic and inorganic world world were still a mystery) would lead to a very natural and simple inference. If, it would be said, the day is an epitome of the year, the year will be an epitome of the Kalpa, or œonæon [sic]. Partial floods and deluges and the regular floods of spring would, in fact, be data from which to infer that the Kalpa of which the year was an epitome also began with flood and deluge. And if one Kalpa, then the whole series of Kalpas, so that at last the generalization of Thales would be reached, and in fact was reached that the world began as water. But in those early days of a robust vitality, still unbroken by crowding and the insanitary conditions of city life, and when inorganic nature was so totally inexplicable, organic vitalism was considered to be, in a way not understood, the source of the inorganic activities and superior to them; it was the spring that brought the sun, not the sun that brought the spring, exactly reversing the modern scientific conception. The third parallel series, the organic vital cyclus from generation to the grave, would therefore come in with irresistible force to clinch the previous induction and give it the stamp of certainty. Finally, since all life begins with an egg, the two primitive elements of the ontology would be, and were considered to be, water and an egg (whence our baptism and Easter eggs)—an egg floating on the water, although sometimes, as was indeed logical where organic vitality was supposed to be at the root of the inorganic, the egg itself was held to be the origin of the condition of deluge which succeeded it (cf.: the Serbian chicken legends).

Now, this induction, of 2,500 years before the present day, was considerably in advance of the latest modern thought and discovery which has recognized in the development of the embryo an epitome of the whole development through geologic time of organic beings. What was necessarily wanting to it was verification by observation and the collection of facts; nevertheless, these ancient philosophers in the legend of Purusha, who is developed from an egg, lives a thousand years, producing from the different parts of his body, light, air, fire, etc., and then dies, had in their general induction hit upon the development among the lower animals by alternate generation, and in their ontology are in substantial accord with the conclusions of modern science. Lastly, in those earlier times, not only may several missing links between men and apes have been still lingering upon earth (just as the Moas have only recently become extinct in New Zealand), or at any rate traditions of them have survived, but the creation of an inflexional language