The Secret Of The Veda Aurobindo - HolyBooks.com

The Philological Method of the Veda 51
the surface of phenomena conceals, into that past development
of which the finished forms present only secret and dispersed
indications or into the possibilities from which the actualities
we see are only a narrow selection. A similar method applied
to the earlier forms of human speech can alone give us a real
Science of Language.
It is not in a short chapter of a treatise itself brief and
devoted to another subject that it is at all possible to present the
results of the work that I have attempted on these lines. 1 Ican
only briefly indicate the one or two features which bear directly
on the subject of Vedic interpretation. And I mention them here
solely to avoid any supposition in the minds of my readers that in
departing from the received senses of certain Vedic words I have
simply taken advantage of that freedom of ingenious conjecture
which is at once one of the great attractions and one of the most
serious weaknesses of modern Philology.
My researches first convinced me that words, like plants, like
animals, are in no sense artificial products, but growths, — living
growths of sound with certain seed-sounds as their basis. Out
of these seed-sounds develop a small number of primitive rootwords
with an immense progeny which have their successive
generations and arrange themselves in tribes, clans, families,
selective groups each having a common stock and a common
psychological history. For the factor which presided over the development
of language was the association, by the nervous mind
of primitive man, of certain general significances or rather of
certain general utilities and sense-values with articulate sounds.
The process of this association was also in no sense artificial but
natural, governed by simple and definite psychological laws.
In their beginnings language-sounds were not used to express
what we should call ideas; they were rather the vocal
equivalents of certain general sensations and emotion-values. It
was the nerves and not the intellect which created speech. To
1 I propose to deal with them in a separate work on “The Origins of Aryan Speech”.
[See Vedic Studies with Writings on Philology, volume 14 of THE COMPLETE WORKS
OF SRI AUROBINDO.]