The Secret Of The Veda Aurobindo - HolyBooks.com

50 The Secret of the Veda
connections between Aryan and Dravidian speech, and plunged
into the far more interesting research of the origins and laws of
development of human language itself. It seems to me that this
great inquiry and not the ordinary preoccupations of linguistic
scholars should be the first and central aim of any true science
of Philology.
Owing to the failure of the first hopes which attended the
birth of modern Philology, its meagre results, its crystallisation
into the character of a “petty conjectural science”, the idea of a
Science of Language is now discredited and its very possibility,
on quite insufficient reasoning, entirely denied. It seems to me
impossible to acquiesce in such a final negation. If there is one
thing that Modern Science has triumphantly established, it is
the reign of law and process of evolution in the history of all
earthly things. Whatever may be the deeper nature of Speech, in
its outward manifestation as human language it is an organism,
a growth, a terrestrial evolution. It contains indeed a constant
psychological element and is therefore more free, flexible, consciously
self-adaptive than purely physical organisms; its secret
is more difficult to seize, its constituents yield themselves only
to more subtle and less trenchant methods of analysis. But law
and process exist in mental no less than in material phenomena
in spite of their more volatile and variable appearances. Law
and process must have governed the origins and developments
of language. Given the necessary clue and sufficient data, they
must be discoverable. It seems to me that in the Sanskrit language
the clue can be found, the data lie ready for investigation.
The error of Philology which prevented it from arriving at a
more satisfactory result in this direction, was its preoccupation
in the physical parts of speech with the exterior morphology of
language and in its psychological parts with the equally external
connections of formed vocables and of grammatical inflexions in
kindred languages. But the true method of Science is to go back
to the origins, the embryology, the elements and more obscure
processes of things. From the obvious only the obvious and
superficial results. The profundities of things, their real truth,
can best be discovered by penetration into the hidden things that