Page:The Religion of the Veda.djvu/164

I am mindful of the relative insecurity of prehistoric reconstructions: they must, in the nature of the case, to some extent be prehistoric guesses. Nevertheless, in handling these specimens, and remembering others which time forbids me to treat here, my own faith at least in the reality of these very old fossils of human thought has grown and not shrunk. When I say human I mean, too, that they are so very human. They are of the logic of mental events. The effect upon the higher grade of primitive mind which the facts and events of the visible world may naturally be expected to have – that is the effect which we have traced. We must, of course, not imagine either Indo-Europeans or Indo-Iranians as town folk, but rather as semi-barbarous nomad and agricultural tribes, accustomed to look hard, and to be strongly interested in the sights that nature offers. Certainly if our analyses are not true they are well found: Father Sky and Mother Earth; next, the inevitable children of Father Sky, namely, the visible bodies and luminous phenomena on the sky, the deivōs, "or shiners," as the most persistent idea of the early gods; their destruction of hostile darkness; their character as overseers and guardians of cosmic and moral order; thunder, the commanding voice of another little less obvious god in heaven; – they appear treated with simplicity and directness, we