IS THERE at all or is there still a secret of the Veda?
According to current conceptions the heart of that ancient
mystery has been plucked out and revealed to the gaze
of all, or rather no real secret ever existed. The hymns of the
Veda are the sacrificial compositions of a primitive and still
barbarous race written around a system of ceremonial and propitiatory
rites, addressed to personified Powers of Nature and
replete with a confused mass of half-formed myth and crude astronomical
allegories yet in the making. Only in the later hymns
do we perceive the first appearance of deeper psychological and
moral ideas—borrowed, some think, from the hostile Dravidians,
the “robbers” and “Veda-haters” freely cursed in the hymns
themselves,—and, however acquired, the first seed of the later
Vedantic speculations. This modern theory is in accord with the
received idea of a rapid human evolution from the quite recent
savage; it is supported by an imposing apparatus of critical research
and upheld by a number of Sciences, unhappily still young
and still largely conjectural in their methods and shifting in their
results,—Comparative Philology, Comparative Mythology and
the Science of Comparative Religion.
It is my object in these to suggest a new view of
the ancient problem. I do not propose to use a negative and
destructive method directed against the received solutions, but
simply to present, positively and constructively, a larger and,
in some sort, a complementary hypothesis built upon broader
foundations,—a hypothesis which, in addition, may shed light
on one or two important problems in the history of ancient
thought and cult left very insufficiently solved by the ordinary
theories.
