Depending on linguistics, it has recently been maintained that, among the Aryans at least, the imagination created at first only momentary gods (_Augenblicksgoetter_).[88] Every time that primitive man, in the presence of a phenomenon, experienced a perceptible emotion, he translated it by a name, the manifestation of what was imagined the divine part in the emotion felt. "Every religious emotion gives rise to a new name--i.e., a new divinity. But the religious imagination is never identical with itself; though produced by the same phenomenon, it translates itself, at two different moments, by two different words." As a consequence, "during the early periods of the human race, religious names must have been applied not to _classes_ of beings or events but to _individual_ beings or events. Before worshipping the comet or the fig-tree, men must have worshiped each one of the comets they beheld crossing the sky, every one of the fig-trees that their eyes saw." Later, with advancing capacity for generalization, these "instantaneous" divinities would be condensed into more consistent gods. If this hypothesis, which has aroused many criticisms, be sound--if this state were met with--it would be the ideal type of imaginative instability in the religious order. Nearer to us, authentic evidence shows that certain peoples, at given stages of their history, have created such vague, fluid myths, that we cannot succeed in delimiting them. Every god can change himself into another, different, or even opposite, one. The Semitic religions might furnish examples of this. There has been established the identity of Istar, Astarte, Tanit, Baalath, Derketo, Mylitta, Aschera, and still others. But it is in the early religion of the Hindoos that we perceive best this kaleidoscopic process applied to divine beings. In the vedic hymns not only are the clouds now serpents, now cows and later fortresses (the retreats of dark Asuras), but we see Agni (fire) becoming Kama (desire or love), and Indra becoming Varuna, and so on. "We cannot imagine," says Taine, "such a great clearness. The myth here is not a disguise, but an expression; no language is more true and more supple. It permits a glimpse of, or rather, it causes us to discern the forms of clouds, movements of the air, changes of seasons, all the happenings of sky, fire, storm: external nature has never met a mind so impressionable and pliant in which to mirror itself in all the inexhaustible variety of its appearances. However changeable nature may be, this imagination corresponds to it. It has no fixed gods; they are changeable like the things themselves; they blend one into another. Everyone of them is in turn the supreme deity; no one of them is a distinct personality; everyone is only a moment of nature, able, according to the apperception of the moment, to include its neighbor or be included by it. In this fashion they swarm and teem. Every moment of