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LECTURE IV.
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Each name could express one side only of whatever had to be named, and, not satisfied with one partial name, the early framers of language produced one name after the other, and after a time retained those which seemed most useful for special purposes. Thus, the sky might be called not only the brilliant, but the dark, the covering, the thundering, the rain-giving. This is the polyonomy of language, and it is what we are accustomed to call polytheism in religion. The same mental yearning which found its first satisfaction in using the name of the brilliant sky as an indication of the Divine, would soon grasp at other names of the sky, not expressive of brilliancy, and therefore more appropriate to a religious mood in which the Divine was conceived as dark, awful, all-powerful. Thus we find by the side of Dyaus, another name of the covering sky, Varuna, originally only another attempt at naming the Divine, but which, like the name of Dyaus, soon assumed a separate and independent existence.
And this is not all. The very imperfection of all the names that had been chosen, their very inadequacy to express the fulness and infinity of the Divine, would keep up the search for new names, till at last every part of nature in which an approach to the Divine could be discovered was chosen as a name of the Omnipresent. If the presence of the Divine was perceived in the strong wind, the strong wind became its name; if its presence was perceived in the earthquake and the fire, the earthquake and the fire became its names.
Do you still wonder at polytheism or at mythology? Why, they are inevitable. They are, if you
