The period of the life of humanity into which the hymns enable us to penetrate, is the most ancient of which mention is made. The rishis sing in Sanscrit of thoughts conceived in the hidden recesses of souls before they awoke to the consciousness of that concept to which the name of God alone can be applied, before these same people pictured in their imagination those whom they named gods, before the appearance of myths and mythological fables, and before the Sanscrit language existed. Our Aryan ancestors had not left the cradle of their race when their language, whatever it may have been, possessed the root _dyu_ and _div_, two cognate words meaning to shine. The Veda shows that many things were bright to the Vedic poets, the heaven, dawn, the stars and several other things, such as the rivers, spring, the fields, the eyes of man, all that would have the effect on us of being smiling, flourishing, and rejoicing in life; and from this root the word _deva_ was formed. Neither in Greek nor in Latin, nor in any living language can a word be found which exactly expresses _deva_; Greek dictionaries translate it by Theos, in the same way as we translate Theos by God; but if--dictionary in hand--we put the word God in certain passages in the hymns where this word is found, we should sometimes commit a mental anachronism of a thousand years. At the time of the first Aryans, gods, in one sense of the word, did not exist; they were slowly struggling into being; it was therefore impossible for man to form any conception of them even in dreams. As this word _deva_ changes its signification so frequently, not only in the most ancient Brahmanic poems, but also in works of a later date, we can only obtain even an approximate idea of its meaning by writing its history, beginning from its etymology and ending with its latest definition; but it is not necessary to undertake this philological labour, and I shall content myself by showing that originally _deva_ denoted a quality common to many natural phenomena, that of light, and therefore _deva_ was a general term. Man at first received this impression passively, as animals would, but by his nature he could not rest there; all the phenomena surrounding him were animated, the most marvellous and those of peculiar intensity moved in the upper regions of the firmament; in the midst of these general movements the mind of man could not alone be inactive, and thought and speech--that is reason--inevitably vindicated their right to activity; names were given to all things. The Aryan root _svar_ or _sval_, which signified to shine, to sparkle, and to heat, produced a Sanscrit substantive meaning sometimes sun and sometimes the sky.