Some of the studies undertaken and carried on in a tentative groping
fashion, with the purpose of ascertaining the nature of that complex
being man, have been placed before you. I have mentioned the more
or less fantastic suppositions set forth on the subject, and I have
dwelt rather more fully on a recent system, of which the fundamental
portion (a magnificent scientific monument, to which experimental tests
have given a solid basis) is followed by a second part which treats
especially of the descent of man. The time has now come to examine
the studies of a school of philosophy, which, guided by a new theory,
searches in the past, and passes under review all previous conceptions,
suppositions, or even misconceptions of the previous schools.
The science of language, based on the close connection between thought
and speech, only dates back to the beginning of the nineteenth century.
The first problem presented to it is that of origin--the origin of
thought and speech in man--which two united in their essential parts,
make man what he is. The means by which this science works is called
comparative philology; it is by the analysis of languages--living as
well as dead--that it seeks to discover the infancy of human thought.
It is evident that in order to penetrate thus deeply, this analysis
must follow the whole progress of speech since it first sounded; to no
other school of philosophy had this idea occurred; all others ignored
the fact that previous to the commencement of human language, no
vestige of humanity could exist; therefore, probably, another fact had
been ignored; that the only archives in which it is possible to study
the history of humanity and the development of reason are those of
language.
Wherever sacred writings exist, we find in them the most ancient
languages of the people who possess them; this is the case in Persia,
China, Palestine, Arabia, and India; thus it is in these writings which
are looked upon as being divinely inspired, that search must be made
for the genesis of the successive thought of these peoples.
But these ancient writings differ widely the one from the other; for
the most part they contain ideas which are the product of various
ages; often also, as in Greece, and Rome and Persia, we find ourselves
confronted by thoughts or theories which had already arrived at a high
degree of development, or are beginning to lose their first clearness.
Only amongst the Hindoos is it possible to follow step by step the
growth of the conception, and the transformation of the names which
clothe them. The Vedas show us more clearly than any other literary
monument in the world, the uninterrupted course of the evolution of
language and thought from the first word pronounced by our ancestors to
our own most recent reflection.
India does not possess remains of ancient temples nor of ancient
palaces. Edifices of this kind were probably unknown before the
invasion of Alexander. The Hindoos have always felt themselves
strangers in the land, and the constant efforts of the kings of Egypt
and of Babylon to perpetuate their names during thousands of years,
by means of bricks and blocks of stone, did not occur to them until
suggested by foreigners. But on the other hand, from the most remote
times, they have possessed sacred writings, and they still preserve
them in their ancient form. The number of separate works in Sanscrit of
which the manuscripts are still in existence is now estimated at more
than ten thousand. What would Plato and Aristotle have said, had they
been told that there existed in that India which Alexander had just
discovered--if not conquered--an ancient literature, far richer than
anything they possessed at that time in Greece, and dating back so far
that the old Sanscrit which clothed the religious and philosophical
thought of these early inhabitants was a dead language. This literature
has not ceased to increase, and contains the canonical books of the
three principal religions of the ancient world; the Zend-Avesta, the
sacred books of the Magians, written in Zend, the ancient Persian;
the Tripitaka, the sacred books of the Buddhists, which contain moral
treatises, dogmatic philosophy, and metaphysics; and the sacred
writings of the Brahmans called the Vedas.
It would be difficult to say whether the Old Testament, or certain
portions of the Vedas, have existed for the greater number of
centuries; it is certain that the Aryan race had no existence previous
to the Vedas. The name _Veda_ signifies “knowing, or knowledge”; veda,
Greek _οἰδα_, is a verb with the same meaning in Sanscrit as in Greek,
“I know.” The book of the Vedas contains an epitome of the most ancient
Brahmanic science, and is composed of four collections of hymns; that
which is called Rig-Veda (hymns of praise) is the true Veda, and the
other Vedas are to the Rig-Veda what the Talmud is to the Bible.
The Rig-Veda, which for more than three thousand years had laid the
foundations of the moral and religious life of innumerable millions of
human creatures had never been published until Max Müller put forth
a complete edition, accompanied by authorised commentaries on Indian
theology.
The composition of these hymns occupied many centuries, and in 600
B.C. the collection seems to have been complete. Some early treatises
on these hymns tell us that at this date the theological schools had
accomplished a great undertaking, that of counting every verse, every
word, every syllable of the hymns; the number of syllables is 432,000,
the number of words 153,826, and the number of verses as computed in
these treatises varies from 10,402 to 10,622. Until the introduction of
writing, the Vedic hymns were entirely preserved by memory, with such
accuracy and fidelity that the rules contained in the treatise for the
repetitions correspond with great exactness with the actual text, its
accents, metre, and the divinity it praises. The Rig-Veda now forms the
foundation of all philological and mythological studies, as well as
those connected with the science and growth of religion; without it we
should never have obtained any insight into the belief of our ancestors.
* * * * *
We will now transport ourselves to the cradle of the Aryas “Noble,”
according to some writers situated on the Asiatic continent, according
to others more to the north, between the Baltic and the Caspian seas.
This will suffice for the first stage; I shall make few demands on
history, or on grammar.
There was a time when the great mass of the Aryan people was
hesitating on the eve of abandoning their early habitations, previous
to a dispersion in two directions. This people was composed of two
branches, the tribes of the north, and those of the south; the former
went towards the north-west of Asia and Europe; here they established
themselves, and the great historical nations--historical, since most of
them have played noted parts amongst the nations--the Celts, Grecians,
Romans, Germans and Slavs were their descendants. Endowed with every
aptitude for an active life, they fostered these capabilities to the
highest degree; society was founded by them, morals brought to a
greater perfection, the foundation of science and art established, and
the principles of philosophy laid down. Although constantly in conflict
with the Semitic and Turanian races, these Aryans became in their
descendants the masters of the world. Whilst the northern division
followed a north-westerly direction, the southern went to the mountains
lying to the north of India; crossing the passes of the Himalayas, and
following the long watercourses, they descended into the vast fertile
valleys, and from that time India became as their own land. These
pleasant dwelling-places of the Aryan colonists, protected on the one
side by high mountains, and on the other by the ocean from all foreign
invasions, were not disturbed by any of the ancient conquerors of the
world; around them kingdoms rose and fell, dynasties were created and
became extinct, but the inner life of the tribes remained undisturbed
by these events. The ancient Hindoos were calm, contemplative dreamers,
a nation of philosophers, who could only conceive of disputes in
themselves, in their own thoughts; the transcendental nature of the
atmosphere in which his ideas worked, and in which the Hindoo lived,
could not fail to retard the development of practical, social, and
political virtues, and the appreciation of the beautiful and useful.
The Hindoo saw nothing in the past but the mystery of the Creation,
in the future but the mystery of his destiny; the present offered
nothing to him that could awaken physical activity, and apparently had
no reality for him; no people ever existed who believed more firmly
in a future life, or who occupied themselves less with this one; such
as they were in the beginning, such they remained. The only sphere in
which the Indian mind moves freely is the sphere of religion and that
of philosophy. In no other part of the world have metaphysical ideas
taken such deep root as in India; the forms in which these ideas were
clothed, in epochs of varying culture, and in the midst of divers
classes of society, were alternately those of the grossest superstition
and of the most exalted spiritualism.
It has been asserted that in these two Aryan branches must we look for
our ancestors. How shall we verify the truth of this assertion? What
family likeness must we seek in order to recognise the relationship?
How feel certain that the languages we speak have been derived from
them? “If we knew nothing of the existence of Latin--if no historical
documents existed to tell us of the Roman empire--a mere comparison of
the six Romance dialects would enable us to say that at some time there
must have been a language from which all these modern dialects derived
their origin in common.”[23]
Let us conjugate the verb _to be_ in Italian, Spanish, Portuguese,
French, Walachian, and in Rhætian, and we shall see that it is clear:
first, that all are but varieties of one common type: secondly, that
it is impossible to consider any one of these six dialects as the
original from which the others had been borrowed, since no single one
contains the elements composing them. “If we find such forms as _j’ai
aimé_, we can explain them by a mere reference to the grammatical
materials which French has still at its command, and the same may be
said of _j’aimerai_, i.e. _je-aimer-ai_, I have to love, I shall love.
But a change from _je suis_ to _tu es_ is inexplicable by the light of
French grammar; it must have been a part of some language antecedent
to any of the Romance dialects; it is, in fact, the verb _to be_ in
Latin, which solves this difficulty; each of the six paradigms is but a
metamorphosis of the Latin.”[24]
It was known that the roots were the same in all the Aryan languages,
that the same grammatical changes were common in many of the words
in everyday use, such as father, mother, heaven, sun, moon, horse,
and cow, as well as in the principal numbers; but it was the study
of Sanscrit in its primitive form which first led the learned to the
discovery of the reason of the vowel changes in certain words in use
in our day, and which changes the English word _to wit_, to know, into
_I wot_, I know, and the German _ich weise_ into _wir wissen_; these
changes are the result of a general law, the application of which can
nowhere be more clearly appreciated than in the Vedic Sanscrit, and
which was unknown until this language was studied in the Veda. (I
will here note that Sanscrit not being the original from which the
other Aryan dialects have their being, but an elder brother, when Max
Müller makes use of a Sanscrit phrase he does it to give an idea of
the process through which the language has passed which he considers
preceded Sanscrit.)
There is another list of paradigms which, under a less familiar aspect
than the first, presents the same phenomenon. Conjugate the verb _to
be_ in Doric, Latin, old Slav, Sanscrit, Celtic, Lithuanian, Zend,
Gothic, and Armenian, and you will see that the nine are varieties of
one common type, and that it is impossible to consider any one of them
as the original of the others, since, here again, none of the languages
possess the grammatical material out of which these forms could have
been framed. Sanscrit cannot have been the source from which the rest
were derived, since Greek, in several instances, has retained a more
organic form than the Sanscrit. Nor can Greek be considered as the
earliest language from which the others were derived, for not even
Latin could be called the daughter of Greek, since Latin has preserved
certain forms more primitive than the Greek. Hence all these nine
dialects point to some more ancient language, which was to them what
Latin was to the Romance dialects; only at that early period there was
no literature to preserve to us any remnant of that mother-tongue that
died in giving birth to all the modern Aryan dialects.[25]
There is one fact to be noted. If a comparison be made of the verb
_to be_ in these dialects, it will be seen that Sanscrit is no more
distinct from the Greek of Homer, or from the Gothic of Ulfilas,
or from the Anglo-Saxon of Alfred, than the Romance dialects from
each other; that, in fact, the resemblance is more striking between
Sanscrit and Lithuanian, and between Sanscrit and Russian, than between
French and Italian. This circumstance proves that all the essential
grammatical forms of these languages had been fully framed and
established before the first separation of the Aryan family took place,
that is to say, at a time before there were any Grecians to speak
Greek, or any Brahmans to invoke God’s name in Sanscrit.
The science of comparative philology enables us to have glimpses of the
social condition of our Aryan ancestors before they left their first
abode. All historical documents of this period are lacking, for the
simple reason that the time of which we are speaking is anterior to any
historical records; “but comparative philology has placed in our hands
a telescope of such power that where formerly we could see but nebulous
clouds we now discover distinct forms and outlines.”[26]
We see that our ancestors were no savages, but agricultural nomads,
that they laboured, made roads, possessed the art of weaving and
sewing; they built towns, kept domestic animals, lived under a kingly
government, and counted at least up to one hundred. We learn this not
only from the words father, mother, son, daughter, heaven, earth, but
also from house, town, king, dog, cow, hatchet, and many others, which
are found to be the same in the German, Celtic, Slavonic, Greek, Latin,
and Sanscrit. They are the same because they all point to some more
ancient language, the mother-tongue in use before the separation of
the various Aryan tribes. From this period the other words also date,
expressing all the degrees of relationship, even those by alliance,
thus giving clear proof of the early organisation of family life.
At the same time a decimal system of numeration also existed, the
numbers from one to a hundred, “in itself one of the most marvellous
achievements of the human mind, produced from an abstract conception
of quantity, regulated by a spirit of philosophical classification,
and yet conceived, matured and finished before the soil of Europe was
trodden by Greek, Roman, Slav, or Teuton. Such a system could only have
been formed by a very small community, in which by the help of a tacit
agreement, each number could only bear one signification. If we were
suddenly obliged to invent new names for one, two and three we should
quickly feel the great difficulty of the task; to supply new names for
material objects would be comparatively easy, as these have different
attributes which could be used in their designation; we could call the
sea, the salt water; and the rain, the water of heaven; numbers are,
however, such abstract conceptions that it would be foolish to attempt
to find in them palpable attributes, and thus give expression to a
merely quantitative idea.”[27]
Since the names of the Aryan numbers up to one hundred are the same,
it proves that they date from a time when our ancestors lived under
circumscribed conditions united by common ties. This is not so with
the word _thousand_; the names for _thousand_ differ in German and
Slavonic, because they have their rise after the dispersion of the
race. Sanscrit and Zend share the name for thousand, which proves the
union of the ancestors of the Brahmans and Zoroastrians--after their
exodus--by the ties of a common language.
In this way the facts of language--which are so simple that a child
could seize them--enable us to travel from the known to the unknown,
and prove our descent from the once small family of the Aryas.
Man in the abstract has been studied for long years. Max Müller
contemplates this abstraction in the Aryan man; this has not previously
been attempted. Certainly we Aryans of to-day differ greatly from our
first parents, but not _in toto_; the ties which connect us have not
been severed, and he it is--our Aryan ancestor--who will help us to
understand how we are verily the children of our fathers.
FOOTNOTES:
[23] _Chips from a German Workshop_, vol. ii. p. 18.
[24] _Ibid._, vol. ii. p. 19.
[25] _Chips from a German Workshop_, vol. ii. pp. 18-20.
[26] _Chips from, a German Workshop_, vol. ii. p. 17.
[27] _Chips from a German Workshop_, vol. ii. p. 52.