Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/33



cannot examine the words by which we express our thoughts and our wants, or compare the stories which English children hear in their nurseries with the folk-talk of Germany and Norway, without speedily becoming aware that the inquiry on which we have entered must carry us back to the very infancy of mankind. We have undertaken the investigation of fact, and we must follow the track into which the search for facts has brought us. If we have been accustomed to think that the race of men started in their great career with matured powers and with a speech capable of expressing high spiritual conceptions, we cannot deny the gravity of the issue, when a science, which professes to resolve this language into its ultimate elements, asserts that for a period of indefinite length human speech expressed mere bodily sensations, and that it was confined to such expressions, because no higher thoughts had yet been awakened in the mind. But unless we choose to take refuge in assumptions, we must regard the question as strictly and simply a matter of fact: and all that we have to do is to examine impartially the conditions of the problem, with the determination of evading no conclusion to which the evidence of fact may lead us.

This problem is sufficiently startling, on whatever portion of the subject we may first fix our minds. The earliest literature, whether of the Hindu or the Greek, points in the direction to which the analysis of language seems to guide us. In both alike we find a