Page:The Religion of the Veda.djvu/4

. iv Preface myth and ceremony. The reader of these pages will, I hope, learn to his satisfaction how the religion of the Veda rests upon a prehistoric foundation which is largely nature myth; how it continues in the Rig-Veda hymns as hieratic ritual worship of polytheistic gods; how this religion grew more and more formal and mechanical in the Yajur Vedas and Brahmanas, until it was practically abandoned; how and when arose the germs of higher religious thought; and, finally, how the motives and prin- ciples that underlic this entire chain of mental events landed Hindu thought, at a comparatively early period, in the pantheistic and pessimistic re- ligion of the Upanishads which it has never again abandoned. JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY, BALTIMORE, April, 1907. MAURICE BLOOMFIELD. 1