Читать книгу The Origin of Thought and Speech онлайн

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Wherever sacred writings exist, we find in them the most ancient languages of the people who possess them; this is the case in Persia, China, Palestine, Arabia, and India; thus it is in these writings which are looked upon as being divinely inspired, that search must be made for the genesis of the successive thought of these peoples.

But these ancient writings differ widely the one from the other; for the most part they contain ideas which are the product of various ages; often also, as in Greece, and Rome and Persia, we find ourselves confronted by thoughts or theories which had already arrived at a high degree of development, or are beginning to lose their first clearness. Only amongst the Hindoos is it possible to follow step by step the growth of the conception, and the transformation of the names which clothe them. The Vedas show us more clearly than any other literary monument in the world, the uninterrupted course of the evolution of language and thought from the first word pronounced by our ancestors to our own most recent reflection.