“Where are you going? towards whom do you go when you descend from on high like a blast of fire? May power be with thee and thy race, O Rudra. Come to us, Maruts, come and help us as quickly as lightning before the rain! Let loose, O devourer, your anger like an arrow against the proud enemy of the poets.”[93] * * * * * A deep problem now presents itself. What was there before anything existed? Two contradictory ideas appear in the hymns, and the conflict must have been trying. “Sages have said: In the beginning the world was--a single world--there was not a second. Others have said: In the beginning this world had no existence, and out of nothing, what now is, came.” Much confusion of thought reigned in the human mind. The world must surely have been made from something, and by certain agents; but then, how were the agents themselves formed? and what material served them for the making of the world? Other questions followed. “Who has seen the firstborn? Where was the life, the blood, the soul of the world? Who went to ask this from any that knew it? What was the forest? what was the tree out of which they shaped heaven and earth? Ye wise, seek in your mind on what he stood when he held the world.”[94] Our ancestors would not have been human if they had not yielded to the temptation of representing the invisible makers of the world by some personality. They therefore speak of carpenters and workmen “who have cunning hands; clever artificers who forge the lightning.” Is it those who have made all that is visible? They know not. It is certain that in speaking of carpenters, workmen, thunderers, tearers, rainers, men approached, perhaps unconsciously, the domain of causes, which from the beginning has been the ancient foundation of all that is transcendental in our knowledge. It could not be otherwise, since our reason is so constituted that it admits nothing but what is either cause or effect. There are thoughts to be found in the Veda which are excessively infantine, but again there are others of astonishing subtlety; perhaps they date from different epochs; but individualities are apparent in these hymns, and they anticipated by many centuries the greater number of contemporary writers who followed at a slower pace. The rishis who said, “There is one Being only, although the poets call him by a thousand names,” perfectly expressed this truth; and the Hindoos for centuries have invoked Indra, Mitra, Agni, and Savitar, though the more profound thinkers have protested against the traditional use of these names, just as Heracleitus 500 years before our era objected to the thousand names, the thousand temples, and the thousand legends of the Greek mythology.