greater efforts than this little word / am. And all those efforts lie beneath the level of the common Proto-Aryan speech. Many different ways were open, were tried, too, in order to arrive at such a compound as asm, and such a concept as / am. But all were given up, and this one alone remained, and was preserved for ever in all the languages and all the dialects of the Aryan family. In as-nii, as is the root, and in the compound as-mi, the predicative root as, to be, is predicated of mi,L But no language could ever produce at once so empty, or, if you like, so general a root as as, to be. As 1[1] meant originally to breathe, and from it we have asu, breath, spirit, life, also as the mouth, Latin 6s, oris. By constant wear and tear this root as, to breathe, had first to lose all signs of its original material character, before it could convey that purely abstract meaning of existence, without any qualification, which has rendered to the higher operations of thought the same service which the nought, likewise the invention of Indian genius, has to render in arithmetic. Who will say how long the friction lasted which changed as, to breathe, into as, to be ? And even a root as, to breathe, was an Aryan root, not Semitic, not Turanian. It possessed an historical individuality it was the work of our forefathers, and represents a thread which unites us in our thoughts and words with those who first thought for us, with those who first spoke for us, and whose thoughts and words men are still thinking and speaking, though divided from them by thousands, it may be by hundreds of thousands of years.
This is what I call history in the true sense of the word, something really worth knowing, far more so
- ↑ 1 See Hibbert Lectures, On the Origin of Religion, p. 197.
