Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/379

Rh had everything to learn and no experience to fall back upon, while the very impressions made upon them by the sights and sounds of the outward world were to be made the means of leading them gradually to correct these impressions and to rise beyond them to facts which they seemed to contradict. Thus side by side were growing up a vast mass of names which attributed a conscious life to the hosts of heaven, to the clouds, trees, streams and flowers, and a multitude of crude and undefined feelings, hopes, and longings which were leading them gradually to the conscious acknowledgment of One Life as the source of all the life which they saw around them.^ The earliest utterances of human thought which have come down to us belong to a period comparatively modern ; but even some of these far from exhibiting this conviction clearly, express the fears and hopes of men who have not yet grasped the notion of any natural order whatever. The return of daylight might depend on the caprice of the arbitrary being whom they had watched through his brilliant but brief journey across the heaven. The sun whose death they had so often witnessed might sink down into the sea to rise again from it no more. The question eagerly asked during the hours of night betray a real anguish, and the exultation which greeted the dawn, if it appear extravagant to us, comes manifestly from men for whom nature afforded but a very slender basis for arguments from analogy.^ But although the feeling of confidence in a permanent order of nature was of long or slow growth, the phenomena of nature suggested other thoughts which produced their fruit more quickly. The dawns as they came round made men old ; but the Dawn herself never lost her freshness, and sprang from the sea-foam as fair as when she first gladdened the eyes of man. Men might sicken and die, but the years which brought death to them could not dim the light of the sun ; and this very contrast supplied the first intimation of beings which do not wither and decay — of immortals, of immortality.^ When from this thought of the immortality of other beings they awoke at length to the consciousness that man himself might be among the number of immortal creatures, the feeling at once linked itself with another which had thus far remained almost dormant. To adopt once more the words of Professor Max Miiller, "by the very act of the creation God had revealed himself;"* but although many words might be used to denote " that idea which the first breath of life, the

> Max ISTviller, "Semitic Mono- theism," Chi/^s, &c., i. 355. « Seep. 21. ^ li. 352.

' Max Miiller, " Comparative Mythology," C/^/>.f, ii. 97.

^d. " Semitic Monotheism," C/ii/^s,