The Beginnings of Hindu Theos0phy 211
without breath, by inner power; than it, truly, nothing whatever else existed besides.”
Here are two statements in two Brahmanical hymns, composed in the trie/Ez‘aéfi metro, the same metro in which the Vedic poets love to call upon their fustian god Indra, and yet their intention is unmistakable. They herald monism; they claim that there is but one essence, one true thing: it is but a step from such ideas to the pantheistic, abso- lute, without a second, BrahmamAtman of the Upanishads and the later Vedanta phiIOSOphy.
On the other hand, there are in the earlier religion, whether it be hymn and sacrifice to the gods, or theosophic thought, no clear signs of belief in the transmigration of souls; no pessimistic view of life, and consequently no scheme of salvation, or rather release (matte) from the eternal round of existences, in which birth, old age, decay, and death are the nodal points in the chain of lives. That this phase of the higher religion belongs to a later time, to a different geographical locality, and to an economic and social state different from that of the earliest Vedic time, seems exceedingly likely. So we are led to the conclusion that there was a. period of monistic speculation, tentative in character, yet fairly ad“ vanced at the time of the composition of at least the later hieratic hymns of the Rig-Veda. But: this
