probably dates from the fourth century A.D., we can well understand that no common name for it could have existed when the Aryan nations separated 1[1].
In this way a more or less complete picture of the state of civilization, previous to the Aryan Separation, can be and has been reconstructed, like a mosaic put together with the fragments of ancient stones ; and I doubt whether, in tracing the history of the human mind, we. shall ever reach to a lower stratum than that which is revealed to us by the converging rays of the different Aryan languages.
Nor is that all ; for even that Proto-Aryan language, as it has been reconstructed from the ruins scattered about in India, Greece, Italy, and Germany, is clearly the result of a long, long process of thought. One shrinks from chronological limitations when looking into such distant periods of life. But if we find Sanskrit as a perfect literary language, totally different from Greek and Latin, 1500 B. c., where can those streams of Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin meet, as we trace them back to their common source? And then, when we have followed these mighty national streams back to their common meeting-point, even then that common language looks like a rock washed down and smoothed for ages by the ebb and flow of thought. We find in that language such a compound, for in- stance, as asmi, I am, Greek eoyxi. What would other languages give for such a pure concept as I am ? They may say, 1 stand, or I live, or / grow, or / turn, but it is given to few languages only to be able to say / am. To us nothing seems more natural than the auxiliary verb / am : but, in reality, no work of art has required
- ↑ 1 See note B.
