Page:The Religion of the Veda.djvu/98

 The Religion of the Veda of comparative mythology. There was plenty of time for all nature-worship to have stiffened into mere admiration, fear, and adulation of personal gods, accompanied inevitably by a more or less com- plete forgetfulness of the forces in nature from which sprang the gods. That this was not so is due, în my opinion, to the vast impressiveness of India's nature. Its fiercely glowing sun, its terrible yet life- giving monsoons, the snow-mountain giants of the north, and its bewilderingly profuse vegetation could hardly fail to keep obtruding themselves as a reve- lation of the powers of the already existing gods. What is still more important, it could hardly fail to stimulate the creation of new nature-gods to a de- gree unknown elsewhere. It is this unforgetting adherence to nature that has made the Vedic hymns the training-school of the Science of Mythology, and to a large extent also of the Science of Religion. Deprived of the hymns of the Rig-Veda, we should hardly know to this day that mythology is the first and fundamental adjustment of the individual hu- man life to the outer active, interfering, dynamic world, which surrounds and influences man from the moment when he opens his eyes upon the wonders of its unexplained phenomena. In this sense Vedic mythology is in its day what empirical science is in our day. 82 1