The religion of humanity in its entirety at the beginning was this intuition of the divine, whose formula is that article of faith, at once the simplest and the most important--God is God--the want of definiteness in it making it the more applicable to the dawn of thought. This primitive intuition of God was in itself neither monotheistic nor polytheistic, though it might become either according to the expression which it took in the language of man; in no language does the plural exist before the singular; no human mind could have conceived the idea of gods without having previously conceived the idea of one God. “It would be, however, quite as great a mistake to imagine, because the idea of a god must exist previously to that of gods, that therefore a belief in one God preceded everywhere the belief in many gods. A belief in God, as exclusively One, involves a distinct negation of more than one God, and that negation is possible only after the conception, whether real or imaginary, of many gods.”[106] If therefore an expression had been given to this primitive intuition of the Deity, which is the mainspring of all later religion, it would have been, “There is a God,” but certainly not yet, “There is but one God.” These fine distinctions require close attention to grasp them; the fact that in our modern tongues we have derived the singular _Theos_ from the Greek plural _Theoi_ has caused confusion; from a historical point of view, no doubt Theos has come from Theoi; but putting this aside, the meaning of the word has gone through as complete a transformation as that of the acorn to the oak; the evidence of this change has been so deeply impressed even on our outward senses that as soon as our intellect has attained some measure of development the sound of the word God used in the plural jars on our ears as if we heard of two universes or one twin. The Hindoo mind, however, oscillated between the representation of many gods and of one only God; and the rishis appear to have attempted to establish a sort of priority amongst their numerous deities. “That which is one, the seers call in many ways; they speak of Indra, Mitra, Agni, and Varuna--they call it by various names--that which is, and is one.” “In the evening Agni becomes Varuna--he becomes Mitra when rising in the mornings; having become Savitri, he passes through the sky--having become Indra he warms the heaven in the centre.”[107] This attempt, which might have led to monotheism, came to nothing; on this point the Hindoos were behind the Greeks and Romans, who with their polytheism had a presiding deity, viz., Zeus and Jupiter.