Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/50

18 in the speaker or thinker, would become an article of belief sanctioned by the paramount authority of names, and all descriptions of phenomena would bring before them the actions of conscious things. Man would thus be living in a magic circle, in which words would strengthen an illusion inseparable from the intellectual condition of childhood. Yet we can scarcely fail to see the necessity of his being left to ascertain the truth or falsehood of his impressions by the patient observation of facts, if he was ever to attain to a real know- ledge and a true method for its attainment—if, in other words, he was to have an education, such as the wisest teacher would bestow upon a child. Ages may have been needed to carry him forward a single step in the upward course ; but the question of time can throw no doubt on the source from which the impulse came. The advance made, whether quick or slow, would be as much the work of God as the existence of man in the class of mammalia. Until it can be shown that our powers of sensation and motion are self-originated, the developement of a higher idea from a sensuous conception must be ascribed to the Divine Spirit, as truly as the noblest thought which can be embraced by the human mind. Hence each stage in the growth of language marks the formation of new wants, new ideas, and new relations. "It was an event in the history of man when the ideas of father, mother, brother, sister, husband, wife, were first conceived and first uttered. It was a new era when the numerals from one to ten had been framed, and when words like law, right, duty, generosity, love, had been added to the dictionary of man. It was a revelation, the greatest of all revelations, when the conception of a Creator, a Ruler, a Father of man, when the name of God was for the first time uttered in this world."

In that primæval time, therefore, after he had learnt to express his bodily feelings in articulate sounds, but before he had risen to any definite conception of a Divine Being, man could interpret the world around him only through the medium of his own sensations. It was thus impossible that he could fail to attribute sensations like