If Hegel compares the discovery of the common origin of Greek and Sanscrit to that of a new world, the same may be said with regard to the common origin of all the mythologies, for already the science of Comparative Mythology has risen to the same importance as Comparative Philology. The supposition that grammatical gender of nouns must necessarily be the cause of personification, and produce myths which had no previous existence at the time when this denotation of sex did not yet exist, has been proved incorrect. But the following fact, which concerns language more than mythology, is not so evident at first sight, viz., that however the various languages may differ externally, and however they may lack gender, yet they have without exception what is analogous to it, and takes its place; this is a system of fundamental classification to which all equally submit, and which each language supplies; the result is that at the foundation of thought common to all humanity, certain forms are found answering the purpose of gender. Each myth and each legend was at first the intelligible expression of an intelligible thought, and as the thought contained in each recital must evidently be the same wherever there were men to repeat it, the science of Comparative Mythology seeks to place its hand on the expression which best renders this one and the selfsame thought, under different aspects. What is commonly called Hindoo mythology is of little or no avail for comparative purposes, because nothing is systematically arranged. Names are used in one hymn of the Rig-Veda as appellatives, in another as names of gods. There are as yet no genealogies, and no recorded marriages between gods and goddesses. As the conception of the poet varied, so varied the nature of these gods; the myths are arranged with little order. Nowhere is the wide distance which separates the ancient poems of India from the most ancient literature of Greece more clearly felt than when we compare the growing myths of the Veda with the full-grown, or already decaying myths on which the poetry of Homer is founded. The Veda is the real theogony of the Aryan races, while that of Hesiod is a copy only of the original image. The Hindoo Rishis differed much amongst themselves in their representation of things; some of them attributed the dispersion of clouds by a solar hero, to the will of some supreme or divine being; others considered the combatants to be the supreme beings themselves, who dispersed the clouds full of lightning and thunder, making the sky serene after the fight. These are the two distinct interpretations of the solar and atmospheric schools; the dualism in nature, which at a later period took the character of light and darkness, even of good and evil, was at the beginning the dualism of day and night, spring and winter, life and death, represented by the two great luminaries of the physical world.