The Secret Of The Veda Aurobindo - HolyBooks.com

Modern Theories 29
an image of the setting sun or that Paris and Helen are Greek corruptions
of the Vedic Sarama and the Panis make an interesting
diversion for an imaginative mind, but can by themselves lead
to no serious result, even if they should prove to be correct. Nor
is their correctness beyond serious doubt, for it is the vice of the
fragmentary and imaginative method by which the sun and star
myth interpretations are built up that they can be applied with
equal ease and convincingness to any and every human tradition,
belief or even actual event of history. 3 With this method we can
never be sure where we have hit on a truth or where we are
listening to a mere ingenuity.
Comparative Philology can indeed be called to our aid, but,
in the present state of that Science, with very little conclusiveness.
Modern Philology is an immense advance on anything we
have had before the nineteenth century. It has introduced a spirit
of order and method in place of mere phantasy; it has given us
more correct ideas of the morphology of language and of what
is or is not possible in etymology. It has established a few rules
which govern the phenomena of the detrition of language and
guide us in the identification of the same word or of related
words as they appear in the changes of different but kindred
tongues. Here, however, its achievements cease. The high hopes
which attended its birth, have not been fulfilled by its maturity.
It has failed to create a Science of Language and we are still
compelled to apply to it the apologetic description given by a
great philologist after some decades of earnest labour when he
was obliged to speak of his favourite pursuits as “our petty
conjectural sciences”. But a conjectural Science is no Science
at all. Therefore the followers of more exact and scrupulous
forms of knowledge refuse that name altogether to Comparative
Philology and deny even the possibility of a linguistic science.
There is, in fact, no real certainty as yet in the obtained
results of Philology; for beyond one or two laws of a limited
3 E.g. Christ and his twelve apostles are, a great scholar assures us, the sun and the
twelve months. The career of Napoleon is the most perfect Sun-myth in all legend or
history.