The first germ of the concept of law and order appears in the minds of the poets, and to this they give the name of _Rita_. This word has no equivalent in our languages, and translators are uncertain as to the meaning attached to it by the rishis. Pliant and full of capability, there seems no word more fitted to reflect new shades of thought; and in our efforts to understand it conjecture is much called into play, from the fact that we have to transfuse ancient thought into modern forms; in that process some violence is inevitable. Max Müller supposes, from etymological reasons, that Rita originally was used to express the regular movement of the heavenly bodies, and the path which they followed daily, from the one point of the heavens to the other, and he translates _Rita_ by the “right path.” “If we remember how many of the ancient sacrifices in India depended on the course of the sun, how there were daily sacrifices, at the rising of the sun, at noon, and at the setting of the sun; how there were offerings for the full moon and the new moon, we may well understand how the sacrifice itself came in time to be called the path of Rita.”[73] Rita expresses all that is right, good, and true, and Anrita was used for whatever is false, evil, and untrue; thus the Hindoos laid it down as an axiom that there was an universal law in the world equally binding on the physical phenomena and on conscious beings, such as themselves; and it was this law which ruled the times of the sacrifices to be offered to the divine powers; and this intuitive perception of law and order, which is the foundation of the ancient faith of the Asiatic Aryans, is far more important than all the histories of Savitar, Mitra, Rudra, and Indra, which are recounted at a later period of the gods of India. This belief in Rita, in law and order, as revealed in the unvarying movement of the stars, or manifested in the unvarying number of the petals, and stamens, and pistils of the smallest plant, was a grand thing; it was all the difference between a chaos and a cosmos, between the blind play of chance and a well defined plan. We have become so familiarised with the idea of a fundamental law, that it now often occupies us less than many of the secondary laws or causes; and yet our philosophers often find themselves at fault when they endeavour to give an exact idea of this primary law; but to the ancient prophets it must have been infinitely more perplexing, though also infinitely more important in their gropings after _terra firma_ on which to plant their feet. The rishis are indefatigable in pointing to the straight path, or Rita, followed by the day and night; and because the gods have themselves followed this path, they have the strength to triumph over the powers of darkness, and to those who ask for it they grant the grace to walk in the same road. “O Indra, lead us on the path of Rita, on the right path over all evils.”[74]