Who knows it truly? who can here declare it? Whence was it born? whence issued this creation? And did the gods appear with its production? But then who knows from whence it has arisen? This world-creation, whence it has arisen. Or whether it has been produced or has not. He who surveys it in the highest heaven, He only knows, or ev'n he does not know it. Apart from its high literary merit, this poem is most noteworthy for the daring speculations which find utterance in so remote an age. But even here may be traced some of the main defects of Indian philosophy--lack of clearness and consistency, with a tendency to make reasoning depend on mere words. Being the only piece of sustained speculation in the Rigveda, it is the starting-point of the natural philosophy which assumed shape in the evolutionary Sankhya system. It will, moreover, always retain a general interest as the earliest specimen of Aryan philosophic thought. With the theory of the Song of Creation, that after the non-existent had developed into the existent, water came first, and then intelligence was evolved from it by heat, the cosmogonic accounts of the Brahmanas substantially agree. Here, too, the non-existent becomes the existent, of which the first form is the waters. On these floats Hiranyagarbha, the cosmic golden egg, whence is produced the spirit that desires and creates the universe. Always requiring the agency of the creator Prajapati at an earlier or a later stage, the Brahmanas in some of their accounts place him first, in others the waters. This fundamental contradiction, due to mixing up the theory of creation with that of evolution, is removed in the Sankhya system by causing Purusha, or soul, to play the part of a passive spectator, while Prakriti, or primordial matter, undergoes successive stages of development. The cosmogonic hymns of the Rigveda are not only thus the precursors of Indian philosophy, but also of the Puranas, one of the main objects of which is to describe the origin of the world. CHAPTER VI THE RIGVEDIC AGE The survey of the poetry of the Rigveda presented in the foregoing pages will perhaps suffice to show that this unique monument of a long-vanished age contains, apart from its historical interest, much of æsthetic value, and well deserves to be read, at least in selections, by every lover of literature. The completeness of the picture it supplies of early religious thought has no parallel. Moreover, though its purely secular poems are so few, the incidental references contained in the whole collection are sufficiently numerous to afford material for a tolerably detailed description of the social condition of the earliest Aryans in India. Here, then, we have an additional reason for attaching great importance to the Rigveda in the history of civilisation.