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vanished from the mind of the ancient thinkers and poets, but 
always called for new and better names—nay, calls for them 
even now, and will call for them to the very end of man’s 
existence upon earth.” 
I do not quote this because I wish to endorse its every word ; 
for instance, I fail to see that the moral relation of man to 
the Deity is at all sufficiently accounted for. Nor do I see 
that the Beyond was altogether so “ inexpressible”? as Max 
Miiller would seem to imply; for, as we shall see, the Vedic 
poets did express its character in very marked terms. But I 
quote it, because I believe it most graphically describes the 
fact, that the early names of so-called Hindu polytheism were 
originally such attempts to describe the Deity in human 
speech as we use to this day. And how could they describe 
the Deity without previous knowledge of his character ? 
Mere intuitions, or suspicions, from what they: saw and 
experienced in nature are not sufficient explanations. What 
we notice is that the “Divine, omnipresent, omnipotent 
Beyond,”’ whether realised as Aditi, Dyaus, Varuna, or Indra, 
has all the attributes belonging to the highest conception of 
the Deity. 
One very old name for Deity is Aditi, the Infinite. On this 
name Max Miiller has the following note*: ‘ Aditi, an ancient 
god or goddess, is in reality the earliest name invented to 
express the Infinite; not the Infinite as the result of a long 
process of abstract reasoning, but the visible Infinite, visible 
by the naked eye, the endless expanse beyond the earth, 
beyond the clouds, beyond the sky. This was called A-diti, 
the un-bound, the un-bounded; one might almost say, but 
for fear of misunderstandings, the Absolute, for it is derived 
from diti, bond, and the negative particle, and meant, 
therefore, originally what is free from bonds of any kind, 
whether of space or time, free from physical weakness, free 
from moral guilt. Such a conception became of necessity 
[why necessity ?] a being, a person, a god. To us such a 
name and such a conception seems decidedly modern, and to 
find in the Veda Aditi, the Infinite, as the mother of the 
principal gods, is certainly, at first sight, startling.” ‘To 
revert to the doctrine of Mr. Herbert Spencer; of course, a 
man whose intelligence could speculate about dream-ghosts, 
could speculate about space and dimensions; yet, at that 
supposed stage of development at which he could only reach 
the supernatural by attributing existence to the ghosts of 
* Rig-Veda-Sanhita, vol. i. p. 230. 
